There is only so long a governor can do great damage to a state before voters start to demand a change. In Kansas, Gov. Sam Brownback, a Republican who has driven down his state’s credit rating and cratered its budget with ill-advised tax cuts, is paying a huge price in popularity for his actions.
Mr. Brownback was elected in 2010 with 63 percent of the vote, but the latest NBC News/Marist poll shows him with only 43 percent support for re-election on Tuesday, a point behind his Democratic opponent, Paul Davis. “He’s leading Kansas down,” one regular Republican voter told a New York Times reporter a few weeks ago. “We’re going to be bankrupt in two or three years if we keep going his way.”
Mr. Brownback is not the only Republican governor who is struggling this year because extreme policies have failed. Some of the country’s most damaging governors are caught in tossup races with Democrats, fighting for re-election even while President Obama’s unpopularity has hurt his party’s chances of retaining the Senate.
Of 19 incumbent Republican governors running for re-election, seven are vulnerable to defeat, and one — Tom Corbett of Pennsylvania — is far behind in every poll. Only three of nine Democratic incumbents running this year are in close races.
Mr. Corbett, who will probably become the first Pennsylvania governor to be defeated for re-election since 1974, is a good example of how difficult it is to escape blatantly wrongheaded policies. Some of his unpopularity is due to a pornography scandal among state employees, and other voters still blame him for Penn State’s firing of Joe Paterno, the football coach, after the child sex abuse scandal there. But the biggest reason for widespread anger is Mr. Corbett’s decision to cut state education funding by $335 million in 2011, a reduction that hit poor districts particularly hard and from which the schools have never recovered. Even now, as a percentage of public school funding, the state’s contribution ranks 45th in the nation, largely because of big cuts to business taxes, which reduced revenues and forced widespread teacher layoffs and increased class sizes.
Similar actions have hurt Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, who won a 2012 recall election with 53 percent of the vote but has not been able to rise above 50 percent in any recent polls. Mr. Walker’s tax cuts have led to a $1.8 billion budget shortfall through 2017, and if he fills it the way he did the last budget gap, of $3 billion, there will be more cuts in aid to schools and cities, and significantly reduced pay and benefits for teachers and state employees. His budget plans are driven by his right-wing ideology. Had he agreed to expand Medicaid, the health program for the poor, the state could have saved more than $500 million over three and a half years.
In Maine, Gov. Paul LePage, perhaps the most conservative governor in America, has routinely embarrassed the state with a series of outrageous statements, claiming that Mr. Obama “hates white people” and comparing the health reform law to the Holocaust. He trails his Democratic challenger, Mike Michaud, in the latest polls. In Michigan, Gov. Rick Snyder’s tax cuts have failed to raise wages or dispel the sense of economic gloom, and Mr. Snyder is tied in polls with the Democrat, Mark Schauer.
Still, the most prominent example of failed tax-cut economics is Kansas, where a huge decline in revenues has meant cuts in spending on education and transportation. Far from experiencing the “shot of adrenaline” that Mr. Brownback promised, the state’s job growth has trailed the nation. Mr. Brownback has actually doubled down on his mistakes, saying it is just a matter of time before prosperity kicks in and promising more tax cuts if re-elected.
That is one of the reasons Standard & Poor’s has given Kansas a negative outlook on its finances. And it explains why many voters, in Kansas and elsewhere, are giving a negative outlook to ruinous policies and the politicians behind them.