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National Review, Dec 7, 1998 by John Hood

RALEIGH, N.C.-After Election Day 1994, the big news wasn't just a GOP takeover of Congress. At the grassroots, the story was the coming parity between Democrats and Republicans in state capitals. Two states, separated by thousands of miles and very different political traditions, typified the new competition in the legislatures: North Carolina and Washington.

The GOP made its largest state legislative gains in these two states in 1994, the year of the Republican Revolution. An increase of 38 Republican legislators gave the party control of the North Carolina House and a bare minority (24-26) in the Senate. Washington Republicans picked up both legislative chambers with an historic gain of 25 seats.

In 1998, the year of Republican Dissolution, these gains evaporated, leaving Democratic leaders giddy and their Republican counterparts flummoxed. "We didn't expect it," Democratic consultant Cathy Allen told the Seattle Times after her party took back both houses of the Washington legislature in a statewide Democratic wave. "Frankly, we didn't deserve it." Her counterpart in North Carolina, where the Democrats recaptured the House, sounded equally surprised. "No one thought we were going to win the House back-no one," Liz Chadderdon, who directed the N.C. House Democratic Committee, told the Associated Press. "We just out-campaigned 'em. We out-mailed 'em, out-phoned 'em."

Chadderon is right about one thing: successful voter-turnout drives among key Democratic constituencies helped to blunt Republican hopes in state legislative races nationwide. Republicans had based their hopes of 180 seats, and thus a majority of state legislators around the country, on historical trends. On average, a sitting president's party has lost about three hundred legislative seats in every off-year election since 1962. The most dramatic legislative cycle was 1966, when Republicans gained a whopping 762 legislative seats, many in the South as conservatives began their switch from Democratic to Republican allegiance. The next-most-dramatic cycle was 1974, the post-Watergate GOP debacle in which Democrats claimed 628 seats. Many Republicans this year had pointed to 1974 as a precedent for a Lewinsky-led rout of the Democrats.

It was not to be. In fact, Democrats actually gained about 50 seats this year and uprooted Republican control in five legislative chambers. In addition to the Washington and North Carolina victories, the Democrats reclaimed the Wisconsin Senate they had lost in a special election earlier this year and grabbed the New Hampshire Senate for the first time since 1912. Democrats also broke a tie in the Indiana House. Their gain in total legislative chambers was four. (The Michigan House, thanks to popular GOP Gov. John Engler, and the Minnesota House-no thanks to Jesse "The Body" Ventura-tipped over to the Republican column.)

What happened? Again, consider North Carolina and Washington. Republicans in both states had made their unprecedented gains in 1994 primarily on the issue of taxes. Republican legislative campaigns that year focused on recent state tax increases and burgeoning state budgets. In North Carolina, a Democratic-controlled legislature had raised taxes by $650 million during a recessionary budget crisis in 1991, then approved a double-digit increase in spending as the economy picked up and revenue growth accelerated. In 1994, North Carolina lawmakers spent a billion-dollar budget surplus without even considering tax rebates or cuts. The state GOP ran radio ads across the state ridiculing big-spending Democrats for raising their own pay while ignoring the pay of overburdened taxpayers. The result was strong voter turnout in traditional Republican bastions-the western mountains, small-town Piedmont-as well as historic inroads in suburban Raleigh and Greensboro.

In Washington, the tax hike had been even more recent. Former Democratic Gov. Mike Lowry and a unified legislature raised general- fund taxes by $600 million in 1993, plus millions more in taxes to fund a Clinton-style health-care package. Washington Republicans capitalized on traditional party strength in Eastside King County and districts outside of the Democrats' urban core in Seattle and Tacoma to turn the state elections into a referendum on two years of Democratic governance.

In 1998, Republicans ran into a host of problems coast to coast, most of their own making. First, weak showings at the top of the ticket hurt Republican incumbents in marginal seats. Sen. Patty Murray's relatively easy win over Republican U.S. Rep. Linda Smith in Washington and John Edwards's come-from-behind victory over Republican Sen. Lauch Faircloth in North Carolina helped Democratic candidates up and down the ballot. In both states, Democratic organizers used tape-recorded phone messages from Hillary Clinton and flurries of mailers to turn out minority voters, government employees, and other elements of the Democratic base.

As with Republican candidates nationwide, GOP incumbents in Washington and North Carolina had problems with both their base and the small but critical contingent of swing voters who showed up at the polls. Fiscal- conservative voters pined for the spending restraint and massive tax cuts they expected but never got. Social conservatives despaired that, whatever they did, President Clinton would get away with his egregious conduct. Even a statewide initiative in Washington to ban partial-birth abortion didn't turn out the religious Right (the ballot measure lost while a medical marijuana-legalization measure won).