Thread: Voters in Big States Are Shifting

Voters in Big States Prefer Skinflint Candidates

A Commentary By Michael Barone


Thursday, June 17, 2010

"Government in New York is too big, ineffective and expensive," the candidate's website proclaims.



"We must get our state's fiscal house in order by immediately imposing a cap on state spending and freezing salaries of state public employees as part of a one-year emergency financial plan, committing to no increase in personal or corporate income taxes of sales taxes and imposing a local property tax cap."

A Tea Party candidate? Some right-wing Republican?

No, it's Andrew Cuomo, son of three-term Democratic Gov. Mario Cuomo.

Interestingly, he's the only Democrat with a significant polling lead in the governor races in our eight largest states, which together have 48 percent of the nation's population.


It's a poorly kept secret that government is growing not only at the federal but also at the state and local levels.

Especially in some of the biggest states, public employee unions have successfully pressed for higher pay and lavish pensions (one Illinois school superintendent's pension is valued at $26 million) to the point that public employees salaries and benefits are higher than those of the private-sector taxpayers who pay for them.


So while 8 million private-sector jobs have disappeared, the number of public-sector job losses is near zero.

Barack Obama's solution is to send borrowed federal dollars -- one-third of the $862 billion stimulus package last year and now a proposal for another $23 billion for teachers -- to states and localities to prop up the pay of unionized public employees.

One reason: Unions gave Obama and the Democrats $400 million in the 2008 cycle.


State governors can't resort to deficit spending without risky gimmicks, and what's more, as Andrew Cuomo's platform suggests, voters don't want them to.

As a result, Republicans are leading or running even in governor races in seven of the eight largest states. In California, Democrat Jerry Brown -- at 72, seeking the office he first won at 36 -- is below 50 percent against eBay billionaire Meg Whitman.

In Texas, Tea Party favorite Rick Perry leads Democrat Bill White, who had a moderate record as mayor of Houston.

In Florida, all polls have shown Republicans leading the one Democrat in statewide office.

In Pennsylvania, Republican Tom Corbett seems likely to regain the governorship for his party in a state where party control has shifted every eight years since 1950.

In Illinois, would-be tax-raiser Pat Quinn, elevated to the governorship when Rod Blagojevich resigned, trails a little-known downstate Republican legislator.

In Ohio, Democrat Ted Strickland, popular for his first two-and-a-half years, is only even with John Kasich, former chairman of the U.S. House Budget Committee.


Perhaps most surprisingly, in the nation's No. 1 unemployment state, Michigan, voters are leaning toward replacing tax-raising Democrat Jennifer Granholm with one of the four Republicans running in the August primary over either of the two Democrats.


That's pretty good proof that in times of economic distress voters don't want to keep feeding the government beast, but believe it needs to cinch the belt a little tighter, as most Americans have been doing.

It's not only in America's big states that we're seeing this phenomenon.

As former Economist editor Bill Emmott notes in London's Times, parties of the left have been getting shellacked all over Europe, most recently in Britain.

You might wonder whether spending cuts will prove as unpopular as big spending programs.

That's unclear -- but there's an interesting test case in the nation's 16th largest state, Indiana.

In 2008, even while Indiana voters went 50 percent to 49 percent for Barack Obama, they re-elected spending-cutting Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels by a 58 percent to 40 percent margin. Daniels carried young voters 51 percent to 42 percent and college-educated voters 62 percent to 34 percent. He ran ahead of Ronald Reagan's 1984 showing in Indiana's most affluent county while winning 25 percent from blacks and 37 percent from Latinos. Among all these groups, he ran ahead of John McCain by double digits.

Daniels' skinflint instincts were unpopular with Republican as well as Democratic members of Congress when he headed the Office of Management and Budget in George W. Bush's first term.

But they seem to have struck a chord with Hoosiers of all stripes.

His performance is evidence that the polls showing voters in our biggest states favoring smaller government may not just be a passing fancy.


Congress may vote more money for the public employee unions. But in New York, Andrew Cuomo seems to have gotten the message.

Michael Barone is senior political analyst for The Washington Examiner .

COPYRIGHT 2010 THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

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http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_ ... mmentary...

I can't speak for all states, but a school superintendent is not a rank and file employee. If you study your local state government, school districts, and country and city governments you will NOT find that type of pay differential throughout the public system. Now, a school superintendent (i.e. the boss of an entire school district) is almost by definition a public employee. What would his counterpart in the corporate world really be?

Check and see if all the public employees you wish to study are paid and governed under the same plans. Chances are, they aren't. In most cases, there is a "boss" layer who gets paid real well, generous vacation time, and other perks. Remember that the level of your salary in these systems is what determines your pension. Now you will also find that the vast majority of employees in public systems are not working under the generous plan. Most will be "worker bees" who get shorter vacations, lower pay, and therefore lower pensions. Their only consolation is that they cannot be fired suddenly on a whim, there is a certain amount of due process involved. But they CAN be fired. (it is a common myth that they can't) The worker bees are usually called "classified" employees.

For me, in the state of Colorado as a classified employee, my salary was frozen for years. Other classified employees were already taking unpaid furloughs. We were also experiencing short-staffed departments due to hiring freezes. The notorious "step" system of automatic pay increases had been abolished for years before I hired on. Our pay, promotions, and vacation were stiffly governed - and limited - by state rules and policies that were rigidly enforced. But for the higher tier of employees, the sky was the limit as to pay, hiring, and promotions, and they started out with four weeks of paid vacations - I never made it past two and I was there for nearly a decade.

So, when discussing public employees, I never hear people making this distinction. They point to either worker bees hired and paid under the old pay system or very long ago, who have built up big seniority and pensions, or else they point to an example from the top tier of public workers as if all of us got paid and treated like that. That's why it pays to really research the system being criticised.