Governors who took swift and decisive action are now polling through the roof. Here are 4 key ways federal leaders can follow in their footsteps.

• Paul Constant is a writer at Civic Ventures, a cofounder of the Seattle Review of Books, and a frequent cohost of the "Pitchfork Economics" podcast with Nick Hanauer and David Goldstein.
• In the latest episode of Pitchfork Economics, they spoke with Matt Stoller, the director of research at the American Economic Liberties Project.
• Stoller said that Americans have been skeptical of the stimulus package because of a lack of leadership.
• Governors who took decisive action have seen their poll numbers go up, but federal leaders need to step up.

Governors made a terrible showing in the Democratic presidential primaries this year. Montana Governor Steve Bullock quietly slipped into and out of the race without making much of an impression at all. Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper followed the same course. And while the governor of my home state of Washington, Jay Inslee, managed to make climate change a major issue in the race, he too dropped out of the race long before a single ballot had been cast. At the time, pundits leveraged the failure of those campaigns into columns wondering if governors had lost all clout in national politics.

Then came coronavirus, and governors who took swift and decisive action to lessen the impact of the pandemic on their states — Republican and Democratic alike — are now polling in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Even their worst partisan critics are largely praising governors for leading the way at a time when the federal response has been at best muddled and at worst actively harmful to the public health.

The lesson to be taken from this? People like it when their leaders lead. They want their leaders to explain and identify the problem, and then take decisive action to solve the problem. At a time when trust in federal government institutions are polling at all-time lows, it seems that the real frustration voters are expressing is not so much an ideological protest as it is an exasperation at the lack of leadership they've seen from Washington, D.C.

In the latest episode of Pitchfork Economics, Matt Stoller, the director of research at the American Economic Liberties Project, explained how the public is so skeptical of the federal stimulus package because they haven't seen leadership from the government. When stimulus funds go to giant corporations with no strings attached, it's perceived as just business as usual.

"People look at the [bailouts of the] airlines," Stoller explains, "and they say, 'you really screwed me over. You always gave me the middle seat and you spent all your money on buybacks. So screw you — I don't like you.'"

"And that's just true across the economy," Stoller continues. "We have a trust problem, because even though we don't want to destroy these companies, the management of these companies have been bad actors for a really long time." And that's because government hasn't established a set of consequences for bad corporate actors.

If you or I were to rob a bank, we'd rightfully be looking at decades of prison time. But when banks rob us with fraudulent account-making scam, they get — at best — a fine that amounts to just a couple minutes' worth of their profits. It's not fair, it's not equal, and it's perceived as a lack of leadership at the top.

Stoller says the stimulus package doesn't work and isn't popular because leaders are afraid to lead: "Donald Trump, and I think the Democrats, too, really are against having public control of a lot of these domestic institutions," Stoller says.

"Controlling the financial sector and then restructuring the corporate sector, basically, for socially beneficial purposes? That's called governing," Stoller concludes, "and we haven't done it in a long time."

Which qualities have governors displayed that make them so well-loved by America today? I've broken it down to four basic categories:

1. Transparency. The most successful governors have been open and honest about what they know and what they don't know about the pandemic as it has unfolded. They've kept in contact with the media and the people on a regular basis, with debriefings, town halls, and through other methods.
2. Data-driven approaches. The best leaders display a willingness to defer to expertise and give the experts a platform.
3. Decisiveness. Though so much has been unknown about coronavirus since it broke into the national consciousness, we've expected our leaders to present a plan of action to guide us through the unknown, and we reward our leaders for sticking to the plan.
4. Equality. We don't want our leaders to establish one recovery plan for wealthy CEOs and another plan for Gap employees. For an idea of the importance of one rule for everyone, look at the tsunami of outrage in Great Britain over Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson's adviser who established a national lockdown plan and then promptly ignored his own guidelines.

While our governors have outperformed expectations during the pandemic, the fact is that they simply cannot enact some of the policies America needs to make it through. Governors don't have the ability to increase federal spending, or establish the strict guidelines for corporate bailout money that Stoller is calling for. That means we need federal leaders who are willing to lead.

This isn't a Republican or Democratic issue. This boils down to the concept of fairness that we all grasp at age two — the rage we all feel when someone else gets away with a breach of social behavior that would cause us to be punished. If stimulus funds continue to go to large companies at the expense of tens of millions of unemployed Americans who don't know how they're going to pay next month's rent, that exasperation at the lack of federal leadership is going to transform into white-hot rage — no matter which party is in power.

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