In 37 states today, the governor's office, senate, and house are all controlled by the same party, whether Democratic or Republican. As Grover Norquist said in our interview at the Atlantic Economic Summit last month, Washington might be paralyzed, but one could see which policies work (and which don't) by studying the states where one party has the opportunity to enact its full agenda with limited opposition and measure its effect.
Our states have long served as "laboratories" of democracy, as Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis put it. Thanks to polarization, it seems, we have something like control groups in our great national experiment.
So don your lab coats and let's investigate.
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