On July 15, Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon delivered an impassioned response to folks who aren’t taking the coronavirus threat seriously. In a press conference, Gordon said he had received emails from constituents arguing the best plan was to let the disease run its course as quickly as possible.
“I think most people are offended by the notion that people should just get this COVID-19 and get out of the way,” Gordon said, his voice rising. “I’m sick and tired of that. … We need to behave in a way that is conscientious of one another. There is no constitutional right to go infect somebody else.”
Gordon, a mask strung around his neck, pleaded with residents to wear masks and practice social distancing to slow the spread of the coronavirus. In this regard, the Wyoming Republican is in lockstep with many of his Democratic counterparts around the West — to a degree. A day later, Colorado Governor Jared Polis went a step further and required residents to wear masks in public. “We need a coordinated, unambiguous state message with moral clarity and scientific clarity, and we’re providing that today,” Polis, a Democrat, said. Gordon, on the other hand, continues to avoid a mask mandate.
Relative to other nations, the U.S. government has played a passive role in the coronavirus response, which has thrust Western governors into the spotlight. From spiking cases around the region to the debate over when and how to reopen businesses and schools, governors are faced daily with matters of life and death for many residents. As with Polis’ and Gordon’s approaches to masks, most governors have the same intentions but aren’t quite synchronous in execution, even if they share a border.
To better understand governors’ responses to the pandemic, I spoke with Thad Kousser, a University of California San Diego professor who studies the role of governors in our political system. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
Jake Bullinger: First off, what is a governor’s role during the pandemic? What falls under their purview?
Thad Kousser: The pandemic has highlighted that governors can be immensely powerful over the most vital issues of day-to-day life, especially when the federal government leaves a vacuum. We’ve seen this before on slower-moving issues. The federal government doesn’t do protection on climate change — governors hop in. Governors have created health care programs when the federal government wasn’t doing that. Governors have made some rightward policy movements on social issues when the federal government hasn’t stepped in.
This is all part of the push and pull of what, exactly, state power is. There’s not a clear constitutional line of demarcation. But when the federal government doesn’t act to supersede states, it leaves a lot of room for entrepreneurial states to move in, and we’ve seen that happen on a much more dramatic timescale with this pandemic.
At the start of this, it wasn’t quite clear that governors could shut down their states, shut down their economies, and make deals with foreign companies for medical devices. I think, really, governors were forced — or allowed — to do that when there wasn’t clear action at the federal level.
Are there any governors who you feel have handled the pandemic particularly well?
If you’d have asked me this a month ago, I would have said Gavin Newsom [California], Jay Inslee [Washington], Michelle Lujan Grisham [New Mexico], and Gary Herbert [Utah]. They were all pushing the right buttons. They were slowing things down and responding to local conditions. The West, for the first two months of the pandemic, we looked like Germany, and the East Coast looked like Italy.
And I think that inspired overconfidence in many Western governors. Gavin Newsom was one of those who clearly — and I think he’d admit this — opened things like bars, gyms, and hair salons too soon, and we’ve seen the virus spread in response to that.
What actions from governors surprised you?
I was surprised to see that prominent governors from both parties were taking similar actions to deal with it. We didn’t see, early on, a lot of daylight between the two parties when you look at governors. Mike Dewine, the Republican governor of Ohio, shut down his schools before California’s very liberal governor did. Gary Herbert closed schools, and was an advocate of wearing masks early on. He didn’t just follow the lead of the party’s president. So there was a very early moment of bipartisan consensus on how to address the COVID crisis.
The big thing here is governors have moved together. They’ve been looking around at each other, and talking with each other and coordinating policies more regularly than I’ve ever seen. Normally, the story of American democracy is people trying to zig while the other zags in order to steal businesses, or in other areas of competition. We saw a little bit of that emerging in the context of medical supplies, but mostly we’ve seen governors move together. That created a huge amount of political cover for them with quick closures and sheltering in place early in the pandemic. I was surprised to see Republican governors moving just as quickly as Democratic governors.
Then, they all opened up together. There’s this feeling that, if one state opens up, you put your state at a disadvantage if it doesn’t open up. In that sense, I was surprised to see many Democratic governors opening up before they had met health benchmarks they had set themselves.
Yeah, I was struck by the quick reopening in California, even though Newsom had previously laid out these strict standards that weren’t being met.
Exactly. I don’t know what was driving that. I don’t think he was responding to President Trump’s pressure — good politics in California means doing exactly the opposite of what the president wants you to do. I think this was his attempt to follow the canoeing theory of politics: I paddled really hard on the left for a while, now I need to paddle on the right, and also move in the direction that other governors have gone.
What role has messaging played, though? Arizona Governor Doug Ducey, for instance, has been criticized for not taking the coronavirus seriously until Arizona’s recent surge.
There have been so many voices for Americans to listen to during the pandemic — the president, national health officials, governors, state health officials, local leaders, and the cacophony of online voices — that it would be hard to attribute all the credit or blame for how residents of any state have behaved to their governor. Still, governors have had a larger stage than ever during the pandemic, making it reasonable to conclude that their messaging has played some role in how safely people in their states have behaved.
There’s a consensus that universal mask-wearing can curb the spread of the coronavirus. Democrats have been more open to mask mandates, whereas Republican governors have emphasized personal choice, if they push for wearing masks at all. Why have masks become so polarizing?
It maps onto an ideological divide with Republicans favoring personal responsibility and personal liberty, and Democrats favoring collective good and shared sacrifice — well, I’m not even sure “sacrifice” applies to wearing a mask — but it emphasizes a willingness to use government power for the collective good.
You’ve seen this play out with motorcycle helmet laws and seatbelt laws over the years, but — as with everything under the white-hot spotlight of the pandemic — this issue has accelerated and been accentuated.
It wasn’t inevitable that there be this divide. Republican leaders could have chosen that wearing masks was important. You could’ve seen the president and governors in the Republican party saying, this is what we need to do, and everybody needs to follow the rule of law on this. It wasn’t preordained that there be a partisan split on masks.
Is that split because of President Trump?
I think so. Nationally, the White House created a divide that even many Republican leaders say didn’t need to be created.
What are the next big challenges governors face?
The big call is schools. Life doesn’t come back to normal until schools are open, but opening them prematurely could dramatically extend the pandemic. So that makes this the toughest call for any governor. It’s something where ideology gets thrown out the window — all governors are weighing the same pros and cons when it comes to schools.
I think governors are going to give school districts much more latitude and power, both to pass on the responsibility and to align the reopening with the on-the-ground situation. I think statewide moves will be rare, but when you see both a Democratic and a Republican governor delaying the reopening of schools, in California and Arizona, I think you’ll see others follow suit.
Are we going to view governors differently after all this?
I think so. We just went through a presidential primary in which none of the major candidates were governors. Jay Inslee and John Hickenlooper [Colorado’s former governor] just couldn’t get traction. We’ve never gone through a cycle like that. Governors are off the radar because we’ve become such a polarized country that people want to see who’s asking the tough questions in hearings in Washington, and who has far-out ideological stances. It’s much easier for senators and members of the House to do that. So governors were off the radar because they couldn’t play in polarized national politics.
Governors are forced to take a leading role in solving whatever problems befall their states. That has made governors more prominent, and much more popular — in the short term. But it poses a huge political risk as the pandemic drags on, especially if it does move into a phase where America seems to be much worse than the rest of the world. People may blame that not on the president, but on governors.
The only Western governor facing reelection this year is Jay Inslee, and he’s widely expected to win another term in Washington. If more governors were facing voters in November, would they be reacting to the pandemic differently?
No, because governors are all good enough politicians to be looking ahead to their reelection — whether it’s six months or two years or when they want to run for president. They’re guided by their principles, but are always looking over their shoulders at how voters are going to view their decisions.
So Michelle Lujan Grisham has been making decisions based on a potential vice president nod from Joe Biden?
[Laughs] Look, nearly every governor imagines themselves as president at some point. One thing Justin Phillips, my co-author of The Power of American Governors, and I tested and found to be true is that governors that run for president actually make really bad governors. They propose things that are not in the realm of political acceptability in their state, but they’re trying to impress the primary electorate. So, you have Mitt Romney [now Utah’s junior senator] proposing abstinence-only education in Massachusetts; their legislature was never going to go for that. Bill Richardson had a very poor record in New Mexico because he was pushing for his presidential run.
But the pandemic is something where you’re just trying to get through this by balancing the economy and the health of people. Your success or failure is going to look the same for judges in your state, on the campaign trail nationally, or for a presidential candidate who might pick you as vice president. All of those people want to see you manage your state well through this generational crisis.
