Many years ago, when Governing magazine was in its infancy, I bumped into one of Washington’s best-known political analysts, a certified talking head whose opinions I respected. I asked him what he thought of our publication on state and local governments.

He was candid. He clearly wasn’t all that taken with it, but what surprised me was the reason. He thought Governing didn’t do a good enough job of highlighting those upwardly mobile state and local elected officials who probably were destined at some point to make it to Washington, so that people in the nation’s capital knew something about who they were and what they had done.

I was a little taken back. I’d never thought of that as anything to do with the magazine’s mission. What these leaders did at home, the politics and policies they practiced, and their management style are what mattered to us. We didn’t intend for Governing to be like a report on minor league players who were prospects for the major leagues, or regional actors who all aspired to play on Broadway.

I was a little miffed but quickly got over it. It’s a standard mind-set in Washington. The states and cities and counties —known collectively as the country — serve as a backdrop to the great unfolding political drama that is Washington. The suggestion that there might be some degree of overblown self-importance attached to that notion is met with a blank stare.

It’s particularly apparent at election time. State elections are important to Washington for two reasons: The party that controls the governorship in any given state supposedly has an advantage in carrying that state in the next presidential election. And second, state legislatures draw the district lines in which members of Congress must run for office — and, as gerrymandering has become more aggressive and sophisticated, it is having a growing effect on who makes it to the big leagues and who doesn’t.

And so the Beltway convention says that governors and legislators are important as supporting cast for the main actors. What they actually do when they aren’t pulling the levers for their party’s presidential candidate or redistricting some opponent into political oblivion isn’t very interesting.

There are a couple of problems with this mind-set, the first of which is that it is based on pretty flimsy assumptions.

Alan Ehrenhalt, Governing’s executive editor, who’s good at debunking much of conventional wisdom, notes that if governors exert so much influence over the contests in their states in presidential years, you wouldn’t know it from the past two elections.

In 2000, he notes, the Republicans controlled the governorships in eight of the 10 largest states, but George W. Bush won in only three of them, including Texas, where he was the governor, and Florida, where his brother was. Then in 2004, when the GOP held the governorships of four out of the five largest states, John Kerry carried three of them. Again, the only really big states that preferred Bush were Texas and Florida. So it’s reassuring to know that governors are good for something other than helping out their party’s nominees, because they aren’t very good at that.

Then there’s redistricting. It has become a commonly accepted article of faith among political types and Washington journalists that gerrymandering has reduced the number of competitive seats in Congress and increased political polarization. But the problem is that political scientists who have examined the trends pretty carefully don’t quite agree. In fact, Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution and others have concluded that the effects of gerrymandering are overblown. “It is clear from the data,” Mann writes, “that redistricting has not had a uniform net national effect on the competitiveness of House districts.”

Instead, he says, the population has been congregating by sameness, where citizens “are drawn to neighborhoods, counties, states and regions where others shared their values and interests. This ideological sorting, geographic mobility and more consistent party-line voting produced many areas that were dominated by a single party at the municipal, county and state levels, and in state legislative and congressional districts.”

State legislatures, in other words, aren’t quite as influential as the Washington types have been saying in determining who can make it to the big show and who can’t. Gerrymandering is an overrated reason for increased polarization and less competition.

So if all these minor leaguers aren’t exerting the influence we had thought in selecting presidents or members of Congress, why should the Beltway cognoscenti care about them?

Here’s a hint. In a very real way, it’s because they are running the country. For all the noise and posturing and suffocating news coverage, the smarties in Washington haven’t done very much in domestic affairs in almost two decades. And whether it’s leading policy change on welfare or minimum wage or global warming or regulation of major industries, those rubes out in the states have.

Peter Harkness is the editor and publisher of Governing magazine, published by Congressional Quarterly Inc.