The year of the blue state governors

The year of the blue state governors
The Democrats' congressional leadership dropped the ball. But the party's governors offered action and inspiration

By Heather Digby Parton
Columnist
Published December 30, 2025 9:30AM (EST)


(Salon) As the smoke cleared after the 2024 election, it was clear that Democrats were going to be hamstrung in Washington. With Donald Trump as president, and with Republicans controlling both chambers of Congress, their options were limited.

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A year ago, I wrote about the one place Democrats might vest their hopes for real resistance to Trump’s coming onslaught: the big blue states. Our federalist system confers a lot of power to individual states, which has sometimes frustrated liberals and progressives who wanted to, for example, advance civil rights and civil liberties for all Americans. But in the current circumstances, this very system has worked in the party’s favor: Democratic governors hold a lot of institutional power themselves and have served as a counterbalance to Trump’s Washington.

It had been a while since governors had been on any Democrats’ radar. In the old days, they were considered the most likely of presidential candidates because they had executive experience and were not tainted with having “gone Washington.” But since Illinois Sen. Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008, most attention turned to the Senate; few looked very hard at Democratic governors. And the sad fact was that the party had neglected most state and local offices for some time, leaving Democrats with only 16 governorships by 2018. The bench was very shallow.

But that was then. Today, 24 of the nation’s governors are Democrats — and they are leading the way for the party. As I noted back in 2024, those governors had been planning what they might do if, god forbid, Trump managed to win. It showed the kind of foresight that had been lacking in Washington and offered some hope that there would at least be some institutional pushback. .................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2025/12/30/the-year-of-the-blue-state-governors/