SALON

Tuesday, Mar 19, 2013 11:46 AM UTC

The GOP’s phony silver lining

No, GOP governors haven't stumbled on a magic formula for the national party

By

Topics: Opening Shot, Republican Party, Chris Christie, Bob McDonnell, John Kasich, Rick Scott,

The GOP's phony silver liningNew Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (Credit: AP/Mal Evans)

The Republican National Committee’s “autopsy” of the 2012 election acknowledges some of the failures that resulted in the party losing the national popular vote for the fifth time in the last six races. It also ignores a major reason why the GOP’s base is shrinking. But one particular aspect of the report rings particularly false – an effort to find a silver lining in the party’s image problem:

At the federal level, much of what Republicans are doing is not working beyond the core constituencies that make up the Party. On the state level, however, it is a different story. Republicans hold governorships in 30 states with 315 electoral votes, the most governors either party has had in 12 years, and four short of the all-time GOP high of 34 governors who served in the 1920s.

The notion that the Republican Party is alive and well in America’s state capitals and that the national GOP need only learn from the examples of Chris Christie, Susana Martinez and Bob McDonnell to reverse its fortunes is commonly voiced on the right these days. But it’s built on some very flawed premises.

First, as conservative writer Ramesh Ponnuru noted on Monday, there’s a fairly straightforward reason the GOP is so well-represented at the gubernatorial level: the wave election of 2010. This had very little to do with the individual Republican candidates who were on the ballot that year or any policy programs they offered. Instead, it represented a simple – if seismic – public reaction to dire economic conditions and complete Democratic control of the federal government (and in some cases, state governments too).

By their nature, midterm elections favor the out-of-power-party. Its voters tend to be more motivated to show up and swing voters are more likely to treat it as a protest vehicle for their frustrations. Generally, the real question in a midterm year is whether the damage for the ruling party will be severe or mild. And the conditions of 2010, when unemployment reached over 10 percent just two years after Democrats had gained control of the executive and legislative branches, virtually dictated that the ruling party would pay dearly up and down the ballot. Thus were Republicans able to make massive gains across-the-board – in Senate, House, gubernatorial, state legislative and local contests.

The stars were aligned for the GOP in ’10, but both parties have benefited from similar circumstances in the past – Democrats in 2006, 1982 and 1974 and the GOP in 1994 and 1966, to cite a few examples. So while 17 new Republicans won governorships in ’10 (and two more – Christie and McDonnell – did so under similar conditions in 2009), the results told us only that those candidates had the good sense to run in the right year.

Then there’s the matter of how those governors are faring now. Christie is an unqualified success, politically speaking, although much of his popularity stems from his response to a natural disaster — not necessarily his policy agenda. There are other popular members of the GOP gubernatorial class of ’09/’10, but there are just as many who are in serious trouble heading into their 2014 reelection campaigns. Here’s a sampling of recent job approval/disapproval ratings for each Republican governor first elected in ’09 and ’10 (note that I couldn’t track down data from the last few months on South Dakota’s Dennis Daugaard and Wyoming’s Matt Mead):

Chris Christie, New Jersey: 74-22% (2/20)

Bill Haslam, Tennessee: 68-14% (1/13)

Susana Martinez, New Mexico: 64-25% (2/7)

Brian Sandoval, Nevada: 58-28% (11/5/12)

John Kasich, Ohio: 53-32% (2/28)

Bob McDonnell, Virginia: 48-35% (1/10)

Nikki Haley, South Carolina: 44-39% (2/20)

Sean Parnell, Alaska: 46-44% (2/7)

Terry Branstad, Iowa: 45-44% (2/6)

Scott Walker, Wisconsin: 48-49% (2/26)

Nathan Deal, Georgia: 36-41% (2/20)

Sam Brownback, Kansas: 37-52% (2/26)

Paul LePage, Maine: 39-55% (1/20)

Rick Snyder, Michigan: 37-54% (3/6)

Rick Scott, Florida: 33-57% (1/16)

Tom Corbett, Pennsylvania: 33-58% (3/12)

Mary Fallin, Oklahoma: 65-24% (1/8)*

*The Sooner Poll on Fallin measured her favorable/unfavorable score, and not her job approval rating

So that’s six GOP governors who have logged upside-down approval scores in recent polling, and another four who aren’t that far from being underwater. The GOP’s gubernatorial crop will likely be thinned in next year’s midterms, when the tide probably won’t be as strongly anti-Democratic as it was in ’10, and Republicans are in danger of losing governorships in some very big states. Scott in Florida, Corbett in Pennsylvania and Snyder in Michigan seem particularly vulnerable. Their struggles, in many cases, can be traced to pursuing policies that are in sync with the sensibilities now driving the national Republican Party.

It’s also worth noting that Republican governors don’t face the same pressure to meet the conservative movement’s litmus tests that members of the House and Senate do. They don’t have to address all of the polarizing issues that national politicians are forced to take positions on and they have much more room to pursue bipartisan deals that will attract positive headlines. Greg Marx explained why a while back:

National politics, though, don’t work the same way. The key players in national parties are not individual bosses, but “intense policy demanders” who put pressure on elected officials not to stray too far off script—a distinction that has real implications for the likelihood of bipartisan deals, and in how committed a party’s elected officials will be to a set of policy views.

For any currently popular Republican governor who wades into the 2016 waters, the game will change. Suddenly, he or she will be expected to sync up with the national party’s consensus on most every issue — and he or she will face the same basic problem Mitt Romney faced in 2012: an inability to carve out positions that might attract voters who aren’t part of the GOP’s existing (and diminishing) coalition. So until Republicans stop demanding that aspiring national candidates hew to Tea Party-ish conservatism, a batch of popular governors really won’t do the party much good, at least when it comes to winning back the White House.

Steve Kornacki

Steve Kornacki writes about politics for Salon. Reach him by email at SKornacki@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @SteveKornacki More Steve Kornacki.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 16 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

Alex Pareene surveys the burgeoning and bloated world of political news and opinion and explains the day's most essential story in Opening Shot, posted by 8:30 a.m. each weekday. Bookmark this page; follow @pareene on Twitter.

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

vote
New Yorker launches tool by Aaron Swartz to protect leaks: Strongbox, co-created by the late technologist, is an open-source drop box for leaked documents
245 points246 points | 10 comments
vote
Loaded terminology like "entitlements" and "welfare" skews the debate and alters America. How right-wingers use semantic tricks to kill government.
226 points227 points | 47 comments
vote
New Yorker launches tool by Aaron Swartz to protect leaks: Strongbox, co-created by the persecuted late technologist, is an open-source drop box for leaked documents
184 points185 points | 1 comment
vote
Obstruction will ruin the GOP: Playing politics and abusing the system can excite the extremes, but it's a recipe for long-term political disaster
54 points55 points | 8 comments
vote
How right-wingers use semantic tricks to kill government -- "...much of the U.S. economic security support system consists of subsidies for the affluent in the form of tax breaks, like those for private retirement savings plans such as 401(k)s and private employer-provided health insurance."
44 points45 points | 3 comments

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: So long, Sookie Stackhouse

Recommendations