American policy is splitting, state by state, into two blocs

TO UNDERSTAND THE future of America, don’t head to Washington, DC. Instead, talk to the governors of its most conservative state, Mississippi, and its most progressive one, California.

Bespectacled and calmly confident, Mississippi’s Republican governor, Tate Reeves, is on a high. It was his state’s 2018 ban on abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy that returned the issue to the Supreme Court, setting the stage for the reversal of Roe v Wade in June, a decision which gave all state governments the freedom to decide their own abortion regimes.

In August, at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas, Mr Reeves boasted of his state’s other bans: on vaccine mandates; on teaching critical race theory; on transgender students taking part in school sports on the basis of the gender with which they identify. “I think Mississippi has led on social and cultural issues for years,” he says, and he plans to keep that lead. Though he declines to say which policies he and the Mississippi legislature will target next, “there will certainly be opportunities for us to do [more].”

Some 2,700km (1,700 miles) away, California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, is as depressed as Mr Reeves is upbeat. “It’s the great unravelling,” he says. “All the progress that I’ve enjoyed in my 50-plus years, all being unravelled, in real time.”

Californian Democrats are reasserting the liberal values he sees threatened. A law Mr Newsom signed in June protects people who get or facilitate abortions in California from lawsuits filed in states where abortion is banned. He recently began dangling tax credits in front of companies which might be considering moving out of states that impede reproductive, gay and trans rights. California is also considering declaring itself a “sanctuary state” for trans-identifying children, shielding them from court actions by states that penalise surgery aimed at aligning their bodies with their professed identities.

Mr Newsom does not see this as differentiation. He sees it as active defence. “I want to punch the bullies back,” he says. “I don’t like what they’re doing.” He has used campaign funds to throw those punches. “I urge all of you living in Florida to join the fight or join us in California where we still believe in freedom,” he said in a TV ad which aired on the opposite coast: “Freedom of speech, freedom to choose, freedom from hate and the freedom to love.”

There is, however, one thing that unites Mr Newsom and Mr Reeves. They both believe the federal government receives too much attention. Increasingly, policies that matter in people’s lives are originating in the states.

Those policies reflect America’s growing ideological polarisation. “State policies vary more than they ever have before,” says Chris Warshaw of George Washington University, co-author of a forthcoming book, “Dynamic Democracy”. As states go in different directions on social and economic policy, the consequences will be deeply felt by all Americans, regardless of their place on the political spectrum, with implications around the world.

To quantify the divergence among states, Mr Warshaw and Devin Caughey of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology analysed 190 policies from the 1930s to 2021. On the whole, states have become more liberal. They have unwound, for example, racial restrictions, bans on women serving on juries and laws criminalising sodomy.

These trends are true of the states in general. Those likely to vote Republican in presidential elections are becoming more conservative in terms of state poli­tics; the same, broadly speaking, holds for Democrats, though the effect is only seen in more strongly Democratic states.