The new Senate majority was last week’s leading headline. When Democrats won it, along with the House, on Election Day, it was hard to find a bigger story.
But the more durable midterm election result is a Democratic majority of governorships that hasn’t existed in more than 15 years. Voters appointed six new governors in the southeast region, both Democratic and Republican, where American companies are building. Each inherits an unfinished argument about who pays, and each works with a legislature that, unlike Congress, will actually pass something.
No region has turned over this much executive power at once in decades.
Virginia started the clock in its off-year election. The other five (Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Tennessee and South Carolina) were decided Tuesday, and two of them made history. Keisha Lance Bottoms is the first Black woman to be elected governor, and Byron Donalds is the first Black Republican to be elected governor. Two neighboring states and two opposing parties made the same decision on the same night. Texas elected a Democratic governor Tuesday as well. It sits outside this comparison because the state runs its own grid — but Gov.-elect Gina Hinojosa inherits the country’s biggest load-growth problem. Like Bottoms, she will face a Republican state Senate with a Democratic lieutenant governor presiding.
In Georgia and Florida, a governor decides which factories, battery plants and data centers get built and where. That authority now sits over the largest economic region in America, which is also the fastest-growing in population and corporate relocations. No region has turned over this much executive power at once in decades.
You don’t have to take my word that a governor’s mansion now arguably outranks a Senate seat. The senators settled that argument themselves — and the voters agreed. Five sitting or former U.S. senators ran for governor this year, the most in any cycle since senators began being directly elected in 1913. Three of them won. Marsha Blackburn walked away from four remaining years in a safe Senate seat and will be Tennessee’s first woman governor. Amy Klobuchar did the same in Minnesota. And in Alabama, a sitting Republican senator ran against a former Democratic senator for the governorship, a rematch of the 2020 Senate race Tommy Tuberville won. He won this one, too, by four points. But it was still Alabama’s closest governor’s race since 2002.
The refusals tell you as much as the candidacies. Senate Majority Leader John Thune flew to Atlanta last year to recruit Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp for the Senate seat Republicans most wanted to flip. Kemp said no. Glenn Youngkin passed on Mark Warner’s seat. Former Gov. Chris Sununu turned down the open New Hampshire seat after Trump publicly urged him to run. His brother John ran instead and lost it Tuesday. A spokesperson for Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear put it plainly: He “wouldn’t trade a single day as governor for six years in the Senate.” Eight governors were recruited for Senate races this cycle and declined.
Having worked for three Atlanta mayors — Maynard Jackson, Shirley Franklin and Andre Dickens, whose campaign I ran — I’ll admit that time in city halls makes you attentive to whoever holds the pen. Legislators debate. Executives decide.
Senators vote on the national agenda and national agendas drive national coverage. But when it comes to where American companies build, a senator votes on a framework while a governor decides whether a multibillion-dollar project gets incentives, how fast the queue moves and what the utility can charge the household next door. One takes a position. The other issues a permit.
And Southern governors work with bodies that actively legislate. The region’s statehouses have moved substantive tax, energy and economic policy while federal authority migrated toward the executive branch — a trend that predates this administration but accelerated sharply under it. Appropriations get impounded or redirected, agency rules get rewritten by order and the Senate’s leverage over the agenda narrows accordingly.
Nothing in American politics is hotter right now than who pays for the artificial intelligence buildout — the data centers, the transmission lines, the generation behind them.
Which is the irony of Tuesday: The majority that just won Congress arrives to find that much of the authority it was competing for has already left Capitol Hill.
Nothing in American politics is hotter right now than who pays for the artificial intelligence buildout — the data centers, the transmission lines, the generation behind them. Congress has held hearings and passed nothing, so the question fell to statehouses and utility commissions. Over roughly 18 months, Southern states took up the same version of it and returned a different answer every time.
Virginia moved hardest, with good reason. It holds the world’s largest data center market, with roughly 13% of global operational capacity. It passed 15 data center bills, including a first-in-the-nation levy on large-load power consumption. South Carolina took the contractual route, governing how utilities negotiate rates with their largest customers. Tennessee required new large loads to bring their own generation. North Carolina’s legislature overrode a veto to pass the Power Bill Reduction Act. And Georgia, with the country’s second-largest data center market, debated a raft of bipartisan bills and passed none.
One question, one region, five answers. Republicans controlled four of those five legislatures, and those four diverged as widely from one another as they did from the Democratic-led one, so party doesn’t explain the variation. What separated them was which states had a utility commission willing to move first, which governors treated energy costs as a kitchen-table issue, and which ran out of session.
The new Southern governors will write the next answers, and voters have no direct say. Roughly 50 local data center measures reached ballots in 13 states this year, and every one decided before Tuesday went against development. Just one was in the nine-state South — Edgewater, Florida. The South leaves it to governors, legislatures and utility commissions, while the rest of the country lets voters decide.
And AI is just one item on the desk. Whether to expand Medicaid, how far state police go in enforcing federal immigration law and who rebuilds after the next storm are all decisions a governor makes and a senator comments on. Bottoms will make hers under a divided legislature: Republicans held the state Senate, while Democrats won the House for the first time in 22 years.
In fairness, the historical pattern runs the other way. Since 1914, more than 330 governors have run for the Senate, compared with roughly 60 senators who ran for governor. This is one cycle, not yet a trend. And two of the five senators lost, though one of those was unavoidable: Alabama pitted two of them against each other. Only Michael Bennet lost to someone outside the group, beaten by 10 points in Colorado by a state attorney general already doing state work.
The post The Senate got the coverage. Six southern governors got the power. appeared first on MS NOW.
Author: Source Author
From MS Now.
Leave a Reply