Candidates have various reasons to share

In other states, gubernatorial hopefuls have been releasing personal tax info for years

Maybe a candidate wants to show off just how charitable she really is.

Maybe a candidate wants to show he is in touch with the everyday American.

Maybe a candidate just wants to squelch some questions about financial dealings.

Whatever the reason, governors around the country and their challengers have been releasing tax returns to the public for years. Sometimes, it’s just good politics. Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton, a member of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, released his tax returns during his first run in 2010. In doing so, he pointed out that Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush had taken similar steps.

“Their bipartisan commitment to transparency should set an example,” Dayton said in a statement at the time.

That same year, Democratic California Gov. Jerry Brown posted 10 years of full state and federal returns online — meeting a deadline set for all the candidates in that race as part of a challenge posed by the San Jose Mercury News.

“Tax filings help to show who candidates are, how they accumulated wealth and how charitable they’ve been,” the newspaper’s editorial board reasoned.

It has been a sort of tradition in Tennessee observed to varying degrees by that state’s governors.

In Iowa, longtime Gov. Terry Branstad was known for making his tax returns available annually to journalists at the state Capitol and having an accountant as well as aide on hand to answer questions.

But in other instances, such disclosures have revealed financial interests that may not have been widely known. Republican Nikki Haley released her tax returns when she was running for governor of South Carolina in 2010. The returns revealed that she had received money from an engineering firm with state business but did not disclose that income on other ethics filings. She had maintained such disclosure was never required.

Beyond the practical reasons to release tax returns, though, such measures have also taken on a particular political significance of late.

Donald Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns during the 2016 presidential campaign has prompted candidates around the country to make their filings public and challenge competitors to do the same.

Candidates for governor of Maryland have been releasing their returns, for example, after one contender specifically called out the president. Oregon Gov. Kate Brown, a Democrat, recently released her tax returns as she runs for re-election and urged her Republican challengers to do the same. Candidates for governor in Kentucky and Ohio have also released their tax returns this year.

And as a member of Congress, New Mexico Democrat Michelle Lujan Grisham was among those who criticized Trump for withholding his tax returns. She signed on to a letter with more than 160 members of Congress calling on committee chairmen to formally request the Secretary of the Treasury release Trump’s returns for each of the past 10 years.

Now running for governor, she refused a request by The New Mexican to release her 2017 and 2018 returns. The same request was made of the other three gubernatorial candidates and two complied.