RALEIGH – If the country’s economic stagnation threatens the reelection of its political incumbents as much as many pundits say, how come this year’s elections for governor have been so boring?
You’d think that if seething voters were just waiting to wreak their vengeance on hapless politicians, incumbent governors Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Stephen Beshear of Kentucky would have drawn strong challengers and faced tough reelection bids. But Jindal, a Republican, won another four-year term last month with ease, drawing two-thirds of the vote. And in today’s balloting in Kentucky, Democrat Beshear is expected to swamp his Republican opponent, state senate president David Williams.
But are Jindal and Beshear are just outliers – entrenched incumbents who were able to resist the growing “throw-the-bums-out” wave that will turn blue to red and red to blue across the country in 2012?
Well, the two open-seat elections for governor this year haven’t been any more dramatic. In West Virginia, the election of former Gov. Joe Manchin to the U.S. Senate in 2010 led to a special election last month. Voters overwhelmingly chose another Democrat, Earl Ray Tomblin, the acting governor. And in Mississippi, where Republican Gov. Harley Barbour is retiring, the post is likely to stay in GOP hands with today’s expected victory of Lt. Gov. Phil Bryant over Hattiesburg Mayor Johnny DuPree, the Democratic nominee.
One way to discount the significance of these less-than-competitive elections would be to theorize that Mississippi and Louisiana have simply become lost causes for Democrats, while Kentucky and West Virginia have been poor targets for the GOP. But it wasn’t that long ago that Louisiana had a Democratic governor and Kentucky a Republican one. And Williams does preside over a Republican state senate in Kentucky, after all.
Perhaps the explanation can be found in the fact that America’s deep economic recession and shallow recovery haven’t affected all states equally. Some are doing better than others. These include resource-heavy West Virginia and Louisiana, which have lower unemployment rates lower than the national average (West Virginia by a little, Louisiana by a lot). So voters might be rewarding the incumbent parties in these states. But Mississippi and Kentucky have worse-than-average jobless rates. So that’s another theory that doesn’t fit all the facts.
The most likely explanation, it seems to me, is that campaigns and candidates matter. Skillful, well-funded campaigns on behalf of attractive candidates can convince even agitated or disaffected voters not to abandon the party in power. In Louisiana, Bobby Jindal has delivered impressive results and worked the speaking circuit tirelessly for years. (He strikes me as a sort of conservative, immigrant-family Louisiana version of North Carolina’s Jim Hunt, a comparison I doubt would upset either man.) In both West Virginia and Kentucky, the Democrats have managed to triangulate a comfortable electoral position between the unpopular national brand of Barack Obama and their relatively weak, untested, and underfinanced Republican competitors.
If you look at the approval ratings of the nation’s governors during 2011, you’ll be struck by how much the ratings vary by state and time period. Democrats Andrew Cuomo of New York and Beshear of Kentucky have consistently been among the tops in voter approval, as have Republicans Bill Haslam of Tennessee and Bob McDonnell of Virginia. At the bottom end of the scale, Republicans John Kasich of Ohio and Rick Scott of Florida have been particularly unpopular, as have Democrats Christine Gregoire of Washington and our own Bev Perdue of North Carolina.
There may well be important lessons to be gleaned from these trends about candidate recruitment, fundraising, strategy, and what messages work best in the current electoral environment. I’m sure that brainy Democratic and Republican consultants will be studying them intently as the 2012 election cycle approaches. But I would also submit that sometimes we overthink these things. Some politicians are just naturally better than others at getting swing voters to like and trust them.
You can’t bottle likeability and sell it to desperate pols. This is a case where demand most assuredly does not create its own supply.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.