Politics

We thought it would be instructive to look at the 17 states with Democratic governors and Democratic majorities in their state legislatures over the past two years, and study what they actually got done. We wanted to separate those states that took up the challenge of governing from those that were unwilling to use the power they have been bequeathed by the electorate.

The resulting ranking, which we’re calling the Blue State Power Index, is admittedly highly unscientific. We took into account the margin of Democratic support in the legislature: What a nearly all-Democratic legislature can do should be more than a closely divided one. We thought about what record these states already had in place: If states had already accomplished key elements of a progressive agenda, then they had less to potentially achieve. Given that most states must balance their budgets, we took into account their resources and tax bases: What a state with a poor population can manage to fund is necessarily more constrained than a state with a rich one—especially with Trump administration cuts and threats looming.