Gastonia, North Carolina Correspondent

On the morning of September 11 the North Carolina House took a vote to override the governor’s budget veto while most of the Democratic members were at a memorial service, having been told, by their account, that no votes would be held that morning, and the override passed fifty-five to nine with barely half of the hundred and twenty members in the room, and I edited the story that night and I can tell you it was the most-read thing in my paper that month, which in a regional daily in a textile town is a fact about the state of American politics. Nobody in Gaston County can tell you what the budget override was about. Everybody in Gaston County can tell you that the legislature did it on 9/11 while the other side was at a funeral. That is the answer to the question before I have argued it: yes, the states are now the arena, and the evidence is not the abortion bills or the Georgia governor’s race but the fact that a parliamentary maneuver in Raleigh is a front-page story in Gastonia, which it would not have been ten years ago, because ten years ago nobody here knew the legislature was where the fighting happened.

Let me describe what has happened in this state, because North Carolina has been the laboratory for the thing the question asks about since 2010, and the rest of the country has been catching up. The Republicans took the legislature in 2010 for the first time since the nineteenth century, drew maps in 2011 that a federal court later called racial gerrymanders and that a state court struck down this September under the state constitution after the Supreme Court said in June that federal courts would no longer hear partisan gerrymandering claims. They passed a voter identification law that a federal court threw out for targeting black voters with what it called surgical precision, then put a version of it on the ballot as a constitutional amendment, which passed. They passed a bill in 2016 about bathrooms that cost the state the NBA All-Star Game and a good deal else. They stripped powers from the governor’s office in a special session between his election and his inauguration. And they have governed, for most of the decade, with veto-proof majorities drawn by their own maps, until last year’s election took the supermajority away and left them with a majority and a Democratic governor who can now veto, which is why the budget has been in a standoff since June and why the override on September 11 was taken the way it was. Every one of those fights was a state fight. Every one of them was national news. And every one of them was decided by who drew the lines, which is a decision the states make.

So the abortion bills and the Georgia aftermath are, from where I sit, the rest of the country discovering what North Carolina learned a decade ago, which is that the real power over the questions people care most about, who votes, how the districts are drawn, what the schools teach, whether a woman can end a pregnancy, lives in a building in the state capital that most voters could not find, elected in off-year races most voters skip, and that a party which controls that building for a decade can shape a state regardless of how the state votes for president. Alabama and Georgia and Missouri passed abortion bans this spring that every legislator knew would be enjoined, and they passed them to get a case to the Supreme Court, which is the most honest statement of where the power lies: the states make the law, the federal courts decide whether it stands, and Congress does nothing, which is the pattern on every major question now. Abrams refused to concede in Georgia because the man she ran against was the official who ran the election and the voter rolls, and whether or not one credits her claims, the structure she pointed at is real: in most states the referee is a partisan elected official, and the referee’s party has an interest in the rules. That is a state fight. It will be a state fight in 2020. Congress will hold hearings about it and pass nothing.

Now the thing a copy editor notices, which is where the attention is and where it is not. The national press covers the states the way it covers a foreign country, which is when something explodes. The Alabama ban got a week. The 9/11 override got two days. The Virginia legislative elections this month, which flipped both chambers and will produce new maps and a new abortion law and gun legislation in a state that was Republican-run for a generation, got a night. Meanwhile the national coverage is impeachment every hour, and the impeachment will end in the Senate with the arithmetic everyone can already count, and the state fights will decide what the next decade actually looks like in Virginia and North Carolina and Georgia, and the readers in Gaston County, who are not fools, have figured out which of those two things touches their lives. They read the override story. They did not read the impeachment stories, by the numbers I see, in anything like the same proportion. The public has moved its attention to the states. The press has not followed it, because the press lives in Washington and New York and the states are a flight away.

I will say where I am, since this forum wants it and I am, as ever, in two places. I think the Republican legislature in Raleigh has behaved badly, from the maps to the special session to the 9/11 vote, and I think the Democrats who are now outraged by all of it drew maps just as bad when they held the pen for a century and are outraged mainly because the pen changed hands. I think the abortion bans this spring were passed by people who knew they were unconstitutional under current law and passed them anyway as a litigation strategy, which is a legitimate strategy and an honest one, and I think the New York law in January that the same people denounced was passed for the mirror reason. Both sides have decided that the states are where you make the law you want and the courts are where you find out if it stands, and both are right, and the result is that the quality of a citizen’s rights now depends on his address in a way it has not since before the civil rights era, and nobody in Washington has a plan for that, and most of them have an interest in it.

So my answer is yes, the states are the main arena, and they have been in North Carolina for a decade, and the rest of the country caught up in 2019 when the abortion bans and the Georgia aftermath and the Supreme Court’s refusal to police the maps made it impossible to miss. The signal is not that the states have become more powerful. It is that Congress has become so useless that the states are the only place a party with a majority can do anything, and both parties have noticed, and the fights have moved to the buildings where majorities still legislate. Virginia flipped this month. Kentucky elected a Democratic governor. North Carolina took a budget vote at a funeral. Those are the stories, and they are on page one here, and the readers put them there, and the readers are right about where the power is. I have been editing their choices for twenty years. They are ahead of the national desk again.

Long Island, New York Correspondent

On June 27 the Supreme Court held, five to four, that claims of partisan gerrymandering present political questions that federal courts may not decide, and I want to begin there because it is the legal event of 2019 that most directly answers the question, and because almost nobody outside the law noticed it against the noise of the abortion bills and the Georgia aftermath. The Court did not say gerrymandering was constitutional. It said that the federal judiciary has no manageable standard for policing it, and that the remedy, if there is one, lies with state courts, state constitutions, state ballot initiatives, and Congress. Two months later a state court in North Carolina struck down that state’s legislative maps under the North Carolina constitution, which is exactly the path the Supreme Court pointed to. The question asks whether state legislatures are now the main arena of American political conflict. The Court answered it in June: on the one question that determines who sits in every other legislature, the states are the only arena there is.

Let me take the abortion bills next, because they illustrate the same structure from the other direction. Alabama’s law, signed in May, bans nearly all abortions with no exception for rape or incest and makes performing one a felony punishable by up to ninety-nine years. Georgia’s and Missouri’s and four other states’ laws ban the procedure after six or eight weeks. Every one of those statutes is unconstitutional under the Supreme Court’s existing precedents, every legislator who voted for them knew it, every one of them was enjoined by a federal court before taking effect, and that was the point: the sponsors said in public that the bills were written to produce a case that would reach a Court with two new justices and give it the opportunity to revisit the precedents. The Court took a Louisiana case in October that may or may not be that opportunity. On the other side, New York enacted a law in January codifying the existing federal right in state statute, so that if the precedents fall the right survives here, and Illinois did the same in June. Both sides have reached the same conclusion about where the fight is: the law is made in the states, the federal courts decide whether it stands, and the states that want to be ready for a change in the courts are writing their statutes now. That is state legislatures as the main arena by the explicit design of the people who sit in them.

Now Georgia, where I think the legal frame is less flattering to the candidate who refused to concede and more alarming about the structure. Stacey Abrams lost by about fifty-five thousand votes to a man who was, at the time, the secretary of state responsible for administering the election and maintaining the voter rolls, and who had removed several hundred thousand inactive registrations and overseen the closure of precincts in the years before. She has not proved that any of that changed the outcome, and the lawsuit her organization filed will have a difficult time doing so, because the law permits most of what was done and the margin was not small. But a paralegal who has worked in zoning knows that the appearance of a conflict is a legal problem whether or not the conflict changed a result, and a referee who is also a contestant is a conflict that no other democracy would tolerate. In most states the chief election officer is a partisan elected official. In Georgia in 2018 he was on the ballot. Fixing that is a state legislative question, and the Georgia legislature has shown no interest in fixing it, and Congress has no power to make it, and so the question of who referees the next election in Georgia is, again, a question that the state legislature will answer in its own interest.

Here is the structural point a legal observer would make about why this has happened, because it is not a coincidence that all three of the question’s examples point the same way. Congress has passed one major piece of contested domestic legislation in a decade, the 2017 tax law, and did that through a budget procedure that sidestepped the filibuster. The filibuster, the parties’ polarization, and the small majorities have produced a federal legislature that can fund the government, confirm judges, and do very little else, and a party that controls a state legislature has discovered that it can do, in a single session, what it could not do in Washington in a decade: restrict or protect abortion, draw the maps, set the voting rules, decide what the schools teach and what the police may do. Thirty states have unified Republican legislatures and eighteen have unified Democratic ones, and in a unified state there is no filibuster, often no effective minority, and a governor of the same party who signs what arrives. The states are the arena because they are the only legislative bodies in the country that still legislate, and the federal courts are the referee because the Supreme Court is the only federal institution that still decides, and the result is a country whose laws on the most contested questions now vary by state line in a way the law has not permitted since 1965.

I want to say what that means for the thing I actually work on, which is the ordinary citizen’s encounter with the law. A woman’s right to end a pregnancy, a felon’s right to vote, which Florida’s legislature narrowed this summer after the voters had broadened it, a citizen’s weight in the drawing of his own district, a worker’s right to organize, a child’s curriculum: all of those now depend on which state the person lives in, and the dependence is widening every session, and the national press covers the widening as a series of outrages rather than as a structure. The structure is that the Constitution left most of this to the states, that for fifty years federal courts and Congress narrowed the states’ room, and that the room has been reopening since 2010 by congressional default and since June by judicial design. Virginia flipped both chambers this month and will, by next spring, have new abortion protections, new gun laws, and a redistricting commission. Kentucky elected a Democratic governor against a Republican legislature and will have a standoff. North Carolina is in one. Those are the stories of the next decade, and they are state stories, and the lawyers know it, which is why the state attorneys general have become the most active litigators in the country and the state supreme courts the most contested judicial elections.

So my answer is yes, and the clearest evidence is not the three examples in the question but the Supreme Court’s June decision handing the maps to the states and the explicit litigation strategy behind the abortion bills, both of which show the actors themselves treating the states as the place where law is made and the federal courts as the place where it is tested. The Georgia aftermath shows the dangerous corollary, which is that the states also referee their own contests. The remedy for a federal legislature that cannot act is a federal legislature that can, and there is no sign of one, and so the states will go on legislating in opposite directions and the Court will go on choosing which direction stands, and the citizen’s rights will depend on the address. A paralegal reads a lot of documents in which the address determines the outcome. I did not expect the Constitution to become one of them. In 2019 it did, and the Court said so, and almost nobody heard it over the shouting about everything else.

Tyler, Texas Correspondent

I spent five years on a city planning commission, I sit through more school-board meetings than any sane man should, and I will tell you that the question asks something that anyone who has done either already knows the answer to, which is that the government that actually touches a person’s life is not in Washington and never was. The state sets the property tax rules that fund the school my kids attend. The state decides what the school teaches. The state licenses the clinics I insure, sets the minimum coverage for the contractors, decides whether the church can build on the lot it bought, runs the courts where my clients’ claims get tried, and draws the lines that decide which of my neighbors’ votes count for what. Washington sends a check for some of it and argues about the rest. So when the question asks whether 2019 signals that the states are now the main arena, my first reaction is that they always were, and my second is that 2019 is the year the national press and the national parties finally noticed, because the states started doing things the national press and the national parties could not ignore.

Let me take the three examples in the order the question gives them, and I will do it as an insurance man, which means asking what each one costs and who pays. The Georgia governor’s race was decided by fifty-five thousand votes, the loser refused to concede because the winner had been the referee, and she has spent a year building an organization around the claim that the rules were rigged. I do not think she has proved it and I think the claim was politically useful whether or not it was true. But I sat on a planning commission and I know what it looks like when the man deciding the variance has a cousin in the deal, and a secretary of state running his own election is that, and it is legal in most states, and the only people who can change it are the legislators who benefit from it. That is a state fight, and it costs the public the confidence that the count is honest, and the public pays for that in every election after.

The abortion bills are the second example, and here I will say what I think as a man who votes in Texas and whose state passed its own restrictions this session, short of a ban. The Alabama and Georgia and Missouri laws were written to be struck down and appealed, and the men who wrote them said so, and I respect the honesty if not the method. They were passed by legislatures that have majorities large enough to pass anything, in states where the other party cannot win a statewide race, and they were answered by New York and Illinois passing laws in the other direction in states where the first party cannot win either. That is not a signal that the states are the arena. It is a signal that the country has sorted itself into states that agree with themselves, that each state’s majority has decided to make the law it wants and let the courts sort it out, and that the only thing stopping either side is a federal judiciary that both sides are now trying to fill. The cost of that is a woman in Alabama and a woman in New York living under laws that are opposites, and the bill for it is paid by whoever has to drive.

The third example, which the question does not list and which I think is the real one, is the maps. The Supreme Court said in June that the federal courts will not hear complaints about partisan gerrymandering, which means that whoever controls a state legislature in 2021 draws the lines for a decade, and the census that sets those lines is next year, and every party operative in the country knows that the 2020 state legislative races are therefore the most important elections on the ballot, more than the presidency, because the presidency is four years and the maps are ten. Texas will draw its maps in 2021 with whatever legislature it elects next year, and the growth in this state, which is enormous and mostly in the cities and suburbs, will be either reflected in those maps or managed by them, and which one happens depends on about a dozen state House races that nobody outside the districts will hear about. That is the arena. It is not glamorous. It is where the decade gets decided, and both parties know it, and the money is already moving there, and the national press is covering impeachment.

Now who pays, which is the question I always ask and which has an uncomfortable answer here. The reason the states have become the arena is that Congress has stopped being one. Congress cannot pass a budget without a shutdown, cannot pass an immigration law, cannot pass a health law, cannot pass a gun law, and has not passed anything large and contested since the tax cut two years ago, which it did through a procedure that avoided a real vote. A party that wins a state legislature can do in a session what it cannot do in Washington in a decade, and both parties have figured that out, and so the energy and the money and the talent have gone to the states, and the states, which are run by part-time legislators in buildings with no press corps, are now making the law of the land on the questions people fight about most. The cost of that is a country where the law depends on the address, and the person who pays is the one who cannot move. I insure people who cannot move. They are the ones who get the state they are in, whether or not they voted for it, and in a country sorted the way this one is, most of them did not.

I will say the plain thing I think about it. I like federalism. I would rather have Austin decide Texas’s laws than Washington, and I think the states are the right place for most of what they are doing, and I think the men and women who go to Austin for a hundred and forty days every other year for a salary that would not cover a used truck are doing more honest work than anyone in Congress. But a federalism in which the states make opposite laws, the courts choose between them, and Congress does nothing is not the federalism I was taught. It is a federalism of default, produced by a national legislature that has quit, and the states are the arena because they are the only building left where a majority can act, and I would rather they were the arena because they were the right one than because the other one has gone dark.

So my answer is that the states were always where government touched people and that 2019 is the year the fights moved there in public, because Congress had stopped fighting and the Supreme Court handed the maps to the states and both parties decided to make the law they wanted in the states they controlled. Georgia showed the referee problem. The abortion bills showed the sorting. The maps, which the question did not mention and which matter more than either, will show in 2021 who won the arena, and the 2020 state legislative races will decide it, and I will be at the school-board meeting the night most of them are called, because that is also the arena, and it always was.

Clermont, Florida Correspondent

In November of last year nearly sixty-five percent of Florida voters approved a constitutional amendment restoring the vote to people with felony convictions who had completed their sentences, which was the largest expansion of the franchise in this country since the voting age was lowered, and in June of this year the Florida legislature passed a law defining completion of sentence to include payment of all fines, fees, and restitution, which the state does not track in any central database and which most of the people in question cannot pay, and the governor signed it, and the whole thing is now in federal court. I want to begin there because the question asks whether the states are the main arena, and Florida’s answer in 2019 is that the arena has two rings: the one where the voters act directly, through initiatives and amendments, and the one where the legislature decides what the voters meant, and the second ring has spent the year winning, and that is the development I would flag above the abortion bills or the Georgia aftermath.

Let me describe the pattern, because Florida is not alone in it. Florida voters passed the felon-voting amendment and a medical-marijuana amendment and, in earlier years, a class-size limit and a land-conservation fund, and in each case the legislature spent the following session narrowing, delaying, or redirecting what the voters had done. Missouri voters raised the minimum wage, legalized medical marijuana, and passed an anti-gerrymandering reform in 2018, and the Missouri legislature spent 2019 trying to undo the redistricting reform and slow-walking the rest. Utah voters expanded Medicaid and the legislature cut the expansion back before it took effect. Michigan’s lame-duck legislature adopted the voters’ minimum-wage and paid-leave initiatives last fall precisely so it could gut them in December before they reached the ballot. The initiative process, which exists in about half the states, was designed a century ago as the voters’ check on captured legislatures, and in 2019 the captured legislatures have learned to treat an initiative as a first draft. That is a state fight of a particular kind: not party against party but legislature against electorate, and the legislature is winning because it meets every year and the electorate meets every two.

Now the three examples in the question, taken as a migration analyst takes things, which is by asking who moves and why. The Georgia governor’s race was close because the Atlanta suburbs have filled with people from elsewhere who vote differently from the Georgians around them, and the loser’s organization is built on the premise that the state’s election machinery was used to blunt that shift, and whether or not the premise is proved, the shift is real and will continue and the machinery is run by the legislature’s party. The abortion bans in Alabama and Georgia and Missouri were passed in states whose legislatures are safe because the sorting is complete, and the mirror laws in New York and Illinois were passed for the same reason, and the result is a country in which a woman’s legal position depends on where she lives and the people who can move will and the people who cannot will not, which is the migration consequence of federalism and is already visible in the moving data. Florida sits in the middle of both patterns: a state whose legislature is safely one party and whose electorate, swollen by a thousand arrivals a day, is not, and the gap between the two is the reason the initiative fights here are so bitter. The voters are more purple than the building. The building knows it. The building is using the session to manage the voters.

Here is what that says about the question. The states are the arena, yes, and the reason is the one everyone will give, which is that Congress has stopped legislating and the Supreme Court said in June that it will not police the maps, so the states are where law gets made and the courts are where it gets tested. But the arena is not a level one, and the unevenness is the story. A party that controls a legislature controls the maps, the voting rules, the referee, and now, in the initiative states, the interpretation of what the voters directly decided. That is a great deal of power concentrated in buildings that meet for two months, are covered by a handful of reporters, and are elected in off-year races with turnout that would embarrass a school-board election. The abortion bans got the headlines. The quiet rewriting of Amendment 4 is the better signal, because it shows the legislature asserting that even the voters’ direct verdict is subject to its revision, and that is a claim about where power lives that goes beyond anything in the question.

I advise small firms, and I will offer the business view of what this does, because the firms I work with feel it before the voters do. A professional-services firm in Central Florida now has to track the state’s position on a dozen questions that were federal a decade ago: the minimum wage the voters may raise next year, the licensing rules the legislature changes every session, the insurance regulations, the growth-management rules that the legislature has been dismantling since 2011, the preemption laws that strip the counties of the power to regulate anything the state has decided to regulate itself. The firm that used to watch Washington now watches Tallahassee, and Tallahassee is harder to watch, because it moves fast, meets briefly, and is lobbied by people with much better access than a dentist in Clermont. The states as the arena means the states as the regulator, and the regulator is a part-time body with a full-time lobby, and the small firm is the one that notices.

So my answer is yes, the states are the main arena, and 2019 showed it in the abortion bans and the Georgia aftermath and the Supreme Court’s June decision, and showed something more specific in Florida and Missouri and Utah and Michigan, which is that within the states the legislature has become the arena’s referee as well as its contestant, overriding the voters’ direct decisions when the voters’ direct decisions are inconvenient. That is the signal I would read. It says that the shift to the states is not a shift toward the people, which is what federalists hoped, but a shift toward the buildings, and the buildings are run by whoever drew the lines, and the lines will be redrawn in 2021 by whoever wins next year’s races that nobody is watching. The voters here restored the franchise by sixty-five percent. The legislature added a fee. The fee is in court. That is the arena, in one sentence, and it is not the one the question described, and it is the one Florida lives in.

Prescott Valley, Arizona Correspondent

In the spring of 2018 the teachers of Arizona walked out of their classrooms for six days, wearing red, and marched on the legislature in Phoenix in numbers the capital had never seen, and they did it because a decade of state budget cuts had left Arizona near the bottom of the country in teacher pay and classroom funding, and the governor and the legislature, both Republican, gave them a twenty percent raise over three years to make them go home. I was retired by then and I marched anyway, and I want to begin there because it is the clearest lesson I have about the question, which is that the states are indeed the arena, that they have been the arena for everything a teacher cares about for as long as I have been teaching, and that the difference in 2019 is not that the fights moved to the states but that the country noticed, because the fights in the states this year were about the things the country watches, abortion and voting and the maps, rather than the things it does not, which is schools.

Let me say why a teacher knows this before anyone else. Education is a state function in the American system; the federal government supplies about a tenth of the money and most of the paperwork, and everything else, the funding formula, the curriculum standards, the testing regime, the teacher certification rules, the charter laws, the voucher programs, the class sizes, the salaries, is decided in a building in the state capital by part-time legislators who meet for a few months a year and are lobbied by people who do not teach. Every important thing that happened to my classroom in twenty years was decided in Phoenix. The cuts after 2008 that put thirty-five children in a room built for twenty-five were decided in Phoenix. The voucher expansion that sent public money to private schools was decided in Phoenix, and when the voters repealed it by referendum in 2018, the legislature spent 2019 looking for ways around the repeal, which is the same pattern the initiative states have all seen this year. Teachers have known the states were the arena since before the word arena was fashionable. The abortion bills and the Georgia governor’s race simply brought the national press to a building teachers have been marching on for a decade.

Now the three examples, through a teacher’s eyes. The Georgia aftermath is about a referee who was also a player, and I spent twenty years grading students and I know that the grader’s credibility is the whole system, and that a grader who is also competing for the prize has forfeited it whether or not the grade was fair. Fixing that is a state legislative question, and the legislatures that benefit from the arrangement have no interest in fixing it, and so the voters who distrust the count will go on distrusting it, which is a civics lesson I would rather not have to teach. The abortion bills are about legislatures passing laws they knew the courts would strike, to get a case to a Court they hope will change the rule, and I would grade that as honest strategy and poor civics: honest because they said what they were doing, poor because it treats the legislature as a litigation shop rather than a place where the people’s representatives make the law they intend to live under. And the Supreme Court’s June decision, which the question does not mention and which a civics teacher would put first, hands the maps to the states for good, which means the students I taught will live for a decade under lines drawn next year by whoever wins the state legislative races that none of them will vote in, because off-year turnout among the young is the one civics failure I never managed to fix.

Here is Arizona’s contribution to the question, and it is a hopeful one, which I am aware is unusual for me. In 2000 the voters of this state took redistricting away from the legislature by initiative and gave it to an independent commission, and the legislature sued, all the way to the Supreme Court, and lost, in 2015, five to four, and Arizona has had maps drawn by a commission ever since. They are not perfect and both parties complain about them, which is the sign that they are roughly fair. The teachers’ walkout in 2018 won a raise from a legislature that had refused one for a decade. The voucher repeal in 2018 won by two to one against a legislature that had passed the expansion over the objection of every education group in the state. What those three things have in common is that in Arizona the voters have a tool, the initiative and the referendum, that lets them overrule the building when the building has stopped listening, and the building knows it, and the knowing is a discipline. The states are the arena. In the states that have the tool, the people can enter the arena directly. In the ones that do not, the arena belongs to whoever drew the lines, and the lines were drawn by the people who sit inside it.

I want to say what I would teach about this, if I were still teaching it. I would say that the framers made the states the main arena on purpose, that the twentieth century moved a great deal of the fighting to Washington because the states had used their power badly on the question of race, that the fighting is moving back because Washington has stopped being able to fight, and that the return is neither a restoration nor a catastrophe but a test: whether the states, given back the power to decide who votes and how the lines are drawn and what a woman may do and what a child learns, will use it better than they did the last time they had it. The evidence of 2019 is mixed. Alabama and Georgia used it one way, New York and Virginia another, Arizona’s voters used it to overrule their own legislature twice, and Florida’s legislature used it to overrule its voters once. That is what an arena looks like. It is loud and uneven and the referee is sometimes a player, and the only remedy is for the people to show up, in the off years, for the races nobody covers, and I spent twenty years failing to persuade teenagers of that, and I would try again.

So my answer is yes, the states are the main arena, they have always been the arena for the things that touch a classroom, and 2019 is the year the arena filled with fights the country actually watches. The signal in the question’s three examples is real, and the signal in the June decision on the maps is larger, and the signal in Arizona is that the arena can be entered by the voters directly when the voters have the tool and the will. The teachers used the tool in 2018 and won. The students I taught will inherit the maps drawn in 2021. I would like them to show up for the races that draw them. I would write that on the board, underline it twice, and know, from long experience, that about a third of them would copy it down. A third is enough to change a legislature. It has been, here. It could be anywhere.

Orange County, California Correspondent

I live in a state where the question has already been answered and the answer is not the one the question implies, so I want to offer California as the control case. The question asks whether state legislatures are becoming the main arena of political conflict. In California there is no conflict in the legislature to speak of; the Democrats hold supermajorities in both chambers and every statewide office, the Republican Party has been reduced to a regional protest movement in the inland counties, and the legislature passed this year, over no meaningful opposition, a law reclassifying hundreds of thousands of contract workers as employees, a rent cap, a statewide ban on new private prison contracts, a requirement that public universities provide abortion medication, and a dozen other measures that would have been national fights if a national legislature could still have them. The state is an arena in the sense that it is where the law is made. It is not an arena in the sense of a contest, because the contest ended in 2010 and one side won, and what has happened since is the thing I would ask the rest of the country to look at before it celebrates or mourns the shift to the states: the states are becoming the arena, and most of them are becoming one-party arenas, and a one-party arena is not a place where conflict happens. It is a place where it has been settled, and the settlement has consequences that the winners do not see.

Let me describe the consequences, because I analyze property and business for a living and I see them in the filings. A legislature with no opposition does not negotiate; it enacts, and what it enacts is the agenda of its own interest groups, which in California are the public-employee unions, the trial lawyers, the environmental organizations, and the coastal homeowners, and the agenda of those groups, taken together, has produced a state with the highest poverty rate in the country when housing costs are counted, the highest housing costs, the highest gasoline prices, some of the highest electricity rates, and an exodus of middle-income families to Texas and Arizona and Nevada that the state’s own demographers now track as a structural fact. The one piece of legislation this year that would have addressed the housing shortage, a bill to override local zoning near transit, died in committee in May, killed not by Republicans, who were irrelevant, but by Democratic legislators from the coastal cities whose homeowners did not want the apartments. That is what a one-party arena produces: not the opposition’s defeat but the majority’s internal factions fighting over the spoils while the problems the majority was elected to solve go unsolved because solving them would cost one faction something. The question imagines the states as the place where the two parties fight. In the states where the shift has gone furthest, the two parties do not fight. One party governs and fights itself, and the loser is whoever is not in the room.

Now the three examples, through that lens. Alabama, Georgia, and Missouri passed abortion bans because they are one-party states in the other direction, where the Democratic opposition is as irrelevant in Montgomery as the Republicans are in Sacramento, and the bans were not the product of a conflict but of a settled majority enacting its agenda for a national audience, with the state’s actual problems, which in Alabama include some of the worst health and education outcomes in the country, left exactly where they were. New York’s law in January was the same move from the same kind of legislature. Georgia is the one example in the question that involved an actual contest, a governor’s race decided by fifty-five thousand votes in a state the suburbs are changing, and the aftermath, the dispute over the referee, is what a real contest in a state arena looks like when one side also runs the scoreboard. That is the exception. Most states are not Georgia. Most states are Alabama or California, settled one way or the other, and the shift of power to the states is a shift of power to settled majorities, which is why both parties are so eager for it in the states they hold and so alarmed by it in the states they do not.

The June decision on the maps completes the structure. The Supreme Court said the federal courts will not hear partisan gerrymandering claims, which means the settled majorities will draw the lines in 2021 and settle themselves further, and the number of genuinely contested state legislatures, already small, will shrink. California, to its credit, took redistricting away from the legislature by initiative a decade ago and gives it to a citizens’ commission, which is why our legislative maps are among the fairest in the country and our legislature is nonetheless a supermajority, because the voters simply prefer one party by a wide margin. The commission did not produce competition. It produced an honest measurement of a settled electorate. That is worth having. It is not conflict.

Here is the business consequence, which is the thing I actually track. A company deciding where to put a facility now has to evaluate fifty regulatory regimes that are diverging, not converging: fifty labor codes, fifty environmental standards, fifty tax structures, fifty positions on the questions that used to be settled federally. The company I follow most closely moved a thousand jobs from this county to Texas last year, and the stated reason was cost, and the real reason was predictability, because a one-party state in either direction is predictable in its direction and unpredictable in its pace, and a business would rather know what the rules will be in five years than approve of them today. The sorting of the states is producing a sorting of capital, and the capital is going to the states whose settled majority is friendliest to it, which is a different criterion from the one the voters are using and produces a different map. The states are the arena. The companies are choosing their arena. The workers who cannot move are getting the one they are in.

So my answer is that the states are the main arena, that 2019 made it visible, and that the thing the question misses is what kind of arena most of them are. The shift is not from a federal contest to fifty state contests. It is from a federal stalemate to fifty state settlements, in which a majority governs without opposition, enacts its coalition’s agenda, fights internally over the spoils, and leaves the hard problems to the next session, while the courts decide which settlements stand and the companies and the mobile families vote with their trucks. California is the furthest along and the least happy with the result, and it would be a fine thing if the rest of the country learned from that before it arrived, and it will not, because the settled majorities in the other states are enjoying the view from Sacramento’s chair and have not yet looked down. The arena is real. The conflict in it is mostly over. What is left is governance, and governance without opposition is the one thing that neither party has ever done well, and both are about to get a decade of practice.

Bismarck, North Dakota Correspondent

The North Dakota legislature meets for eighty days every other year, its members are farmers and ranchers and insurance agents and schoolteachers who go home to their jobs when the session ends, it has no permanent staff to speak of, and I worked in state government long enough to know that this arrangement, which the national press treats as quaint when it notices it at all, is the thing the question is actually about, because the question assumes that a state legislature is a smaller version of Congress, a place where parties fight, and in most of the country it is not. It is a place where a few dozen people who know each other decide, in a short time with little attention, how a state will be run, and the question of whether that place has become the main arena of American conflict has, from Bismarck, a plain answer: the arena has always been here, it is not very conflictual, and the people who have just noticed it are noticing because the fights they care about arrived in buildings they had never thought about, and they do not like what they found.

Let me say what they found, because I think the shock is instructive. They found that Alabama’s legislature could pass a near-total abortion ban in a few weeks with no serious opposition because Alabama’s legislature has no serious opposition, and that Georgia’s and Missouri’s could do the same, and that New York’s could pass the mirror law in January for the mirror reason. They found that Georgia’s elections were run by a man who was on the ballot, because in most states the secretary of state is a partisan elected official and nobody had thought about it. They found, in June, that the Supreme Court would not police the maps, and that the maps are drawn by the legislatures, and that the legislatures are elected on the maps they drew. And they found that all of this had been true for a very long time and had simply not been covered, because the national press is in Washington and the state capitals are a flight and a rental car away and the sessions are short and the members do not hold press conferences. The arena was always here. The cameras arrived in 2019, and the cameras found a building that does not perform for cameras, and they called it a signal.

Now the thing I want to say for the building, because straight talk means defending what deserves defense. The North Dakota legislature passed a budget this year in eighty days, balanced, as the constitution requires, with the oil revenue set aside in a trust fund that now holds more than six billion dollars, and it did so with Republicans holding both chambers by margins that make the Democrats a formal courtesy, and the result was not the one-party extremism the question’s examples suggest. It was a budget that funded the schools, paid down the pension liability, and sent property-tax relief to the counties, argued over by people who would see each other at the grain elevator the following month. It implemented, with some foot-dragging that I criticized at the time, an ethics commission that the voters had put in the constitution by initiative over the legislature’s objection the previous November. It passed an abortion restriction, as most Republican states did, that was less aggressive than Alabama’s because the members here do not legislate for a national audience; they legislate for Mandan. A part-time citizen legislature in a one-party state is not automatically a factory for the laws that made headlines this spring. It is what its members are, and its members here are neighbors, and neighbors are restrained by the fact that they have to go home.

Here is where I will concede the question’s point, and then take it somewhere else. The states are the arena because Congress has quit. A party that controls a state can do in a session what it cannot do in Washington in a decade, and both parties have noticed, and the money and the organizers have followed, and the result in the big contested states, Georgia and North Carolina and Virginia and Wisconsin, is exactly the conflict the question describes: maps fought over, referees disputed, overrides taken at funerals, chambers flipping in off-year elections that used to draw nobody. That is real and it is new in its intensity. But the national attention that has arrived with the money is changing the buildings it lands on, and not for the better. A legislator who used to answer to the elevator now answers to a national donor list and a cable segment, and the laws that come out of a building like that are written for the segment, which is how you get a bill in Alabama that its own sponsors expected to be struck down. The arena is here. The spectators are new. The spectators are turning the arena into a stage, and a stage is a worse place to run a state than a room full of neighbors.

I want to say the plain thing about the maps, because it is the question underneath the question and it will decide the decade. The Supreme Court said in June that the federal courts are out of it. That leaves the state courts, the state constitutions, the initiative process in the states that have one, and the legislatures themselves. North Dakota has one congressional district and a legislature whose maps nobody fights over because the margins make it pointless, so this state is a spectator too. But I have watched Wisconsin, next door but one, spend a decade as the national case study in what happens when a legislature draws its own lines and the courts decline to look, and the lesson is that the arena, once captured, stays captured until the demographics or an initiative move it, and the capturing party knows that and legislates accordingly, and the opposing party knows it and spends its energy on lawsuits rather than on persuading the neighbors. That is conflict without resolution, and it is what the national attention has brought to the states it has reached, and I would not wish it on this one.

So my answer is that the states have always been the main arena of American government and have become, in 2019, the main arena of American conflict in the places where the national money and attention have arrived, and that the two are different things and the second is damaging the first. The question’s examples are the conflict: one-party legislatures legislating for a national audience, a referee on the ballot, a Court handing the maps to the players. The thing the examples do not show is the arena as it mostly is, a short session of neighbors in a cold capital doing the work that Washington will not, and that version is the one worth protecting, and it is being eroded, state by state, by the attention that has just discovered it. I would ask the people who have found the states this year to remember that they were here before the cameras, and that they worked, mostly, and that the cameras are not a neutral addition. The arena was fine. The crowd is the problem. I have never said that in a forum before and I expect I will not be thanked for it. That is usually how I know it needed saying.

Knoxville, Tennessee Correspondent

I work for a county, and the question asks whether the state legislatures are the main arena, and I want to answer from one level down, because from where I sit the most important state fights of the past several years have not been between the two parties in the legislature. They have been between the legislature and the cities and counties it governs, and that fight has one side, which is the state, and it is winning everywhere, and almost nobody outside local government has noticed, because the losers are county commissions and city councils and the winners do not hold press conferences about it. The word for it is preemption, and Tennessee is a national leader in it, and it is the thing I would put at the center of any honest account of where power has gone.

Let me describe what it looks like from a public-works shop. The county I work for cannot set its own minimum wage, because the state forbade it. It cannot regulate short-term rentals the way its own residents asked, because the state passed a law protecting them. It cannot remove a Confederate monument from its own courthouse lawn without the permission of a state commission that has never granted one. It cannot regulate plastic bags, or ride-sharing, or the siting of cell towers, or the rules for its own police body cameras, because the state has claimed each of those for itself. When Nashville, the state’s largest city and its only reliably Democratic one, tried to require local hiring on public construction, the legislature voided it. When Memphis tried to take down its statues, the legislature cut its funding in retaliation. When the counties asked for the authority to raise their own revenue for roads, the legislature said no and raised the gas tax itself and distributed the money on a formula it controls. Every one of those was a state fight. None was between Republicans and Democrats in Nashville, where the Republicans have a supermajority and the Democrats are a formality. All of them were the state, as a single institution, deciding that the cities and counties would not be permitted to govern themselves on questions the state’s majority had opinions about. That is the arena. It is not an arena of party conflict. It is an arena of one level of government absorbing another.

Now the question’s examples, because I think they fit the same pattern once you look. The abortion bans in Alabama and Georgia and Missouri were passed by state legislatures with no meaningful opposition in the building, aimed at federal courts rather than at any local adversary. The Georgia aftermath was about a state official running a state election under state rules; the counties that closed precincts did so, in many cases, under pressure from the state. The Supreme Court’s decision in June on the maps hands the lines to the legislatures, which draw not only their own districts and Congress’s but, in Tennessee and many states, approve or constrain the counties’ as well. In each case the structure is the same: the state is where the decision is made, the decision is made by a majority that does not have to negotiate inside the building, and the losers are either in a federal courtroom or in a city hall. The question imagines the states as arenas of conflict between parties. From a county, they look more like arenas in which the state’s settled majority settles everyone beneath it, and the conflict, such as it is, is between the capital and the places the capital does not represent.

Here is the engineer’s version of why this matters, because it is not an abstract complaint. A county builds and maintains the things people actually use, the roads and the bridges and the water lines and the stormwater systems, and it does so with revenue the state permits it to raise and under rules the state writes. When the state preempts the county’s authority over, say, its own development standards, which the Tennessee legislature has done in pieces for a decade, the county loses the ability to make a developer pay for the road his subdivision will overload, and the road gets overloaded, and the county comes to the legislature for money, and the legislature distributes it on a formula that favors the rural members who control the chamber. The result is a structure in which the fastest-growing counties in the state, which are the ones around Nashville and here, have the least authority to manage their growth and the least share of the revenue it generates, and the slowest-growing ones have the most of both. I run a shop that pours the concrete at the end of that chain, and I can tell you that the preemption fights decide what gets poured where, and that the national press has never once attended a hearing about them.

I want to say what this looks like from the rural end of my own county, because I promised in an earlier forum that I would always say it. The people in the eastern districts send their labor into the city and get lectures back, and they are the constituency that the legislature’s rural majority claims to represent, and the preemption laws are sold to them as protection against the cities telling them what to do. The irony is that the laws do the reverse: they let the state tell the cities what to do, and the state is controlled by people who are not from the eastern districts either, and the revenue formula that the rural members defend sends more money to the rural counties per capita and less to the places where the rural residents actually work. The arena is the state. The people in it are speaking for the countryside. The countryside is paying for the roads in the city it commutes to, out of a formula written in Nashville by members who have never driven either. That is a conflict. It is not the one the question describes, and it is the one I live in.

So my answer is yes, the states are the main arena, and the signal of 2019 is that the country noticed the arena because fights it cares about arrived there; and that the more important development, which the country has not noticed, is what the states are doing with the power once they have it, which is taking it from the cities and counties beneath them as fast as Congress has surrendered it from above. The abortion bans and the Georgia dispute and the June decision on the maps are the visible part. Preemption is the structure, and it runs in one direction, and the counties are where the concrete gets poured and where the authority to decide what gets poured has been quietly removed. A civil engineer looks at a structure and asks where the load goes. The load is going to the states. The states are passing it down to the counties without the authority to carry it, and the counties are building anyway, with the money they are given, on the formula they did not write, in the arena they were never invited into. That is where American government actually happens in 2019. It is not in the question. It should have been.