Besides losing control of the House last Tuesday, Republicans suffered a blow in gubernatorial elections. The GOP went into the midterms with 33 governors. By the time the dust settles, only 27 will remain.
It could have been even worse for Republicans. Hoping that progressive candidates would achieve Obama-like high turnout rates among minorities and young voters may have cost the Democrats in key races, notably with Andrew Gillum in Florida and Stacey Abrams in Georgia. Both were appealing candidates who garnered lots of national attention and money, and both ran surprisingly close races in states Trump won. However, they were unabashedly left-wing on issues on which it’s unclear that their stances helped more than hurt.
Both were outspoken on gun control in southern states with large rural populations. Abrams had even sponsored a bill in the state legislature that would have required confiscation of so-called “assault weapons” and continued to campaign on such a ban, which would outlaw the most commonly owned rifle in America. Gillum boasted of his endorsement from the Everytown for Gun Safety advocacy group and attended a fundraiser with Sheriff Scott Israel, whose conduct and activism following the Parkland school shooting were polarizing. It’s hard to imagine that their stances on gun control didn’t cost them votes, even if they ramped up media attention and out-of-state donations. Similarly, Richard Cordray’s reputation as an Elizabeth Warren protégé and progressive darling, from his days as the combative head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, was not the special sauce Ohio voters were looking for in the governor’s race there.
And while Abrams and Gillum were minority candidates, that didn’t necessarily translate into the needed levels of support from minority voters. According to exit polls, Abrams’s opponent, Brian Kemp, got 37 percent of the Hispanic vote in Georgia. And Gillum, who was dogged by corruption charges that he said were motivated by racism, nonetheless seems to have underperformed among black voters, relatively speaking. According to exit polls, Gillum got only 86 percent support among black voters overall and only 82 percent support from black women. With over a million votes in Florida from African Americans, a four or five point increase in support might have made the difference for Gillum.
There were a lot of promising underdogs in gubernatorial elections this cycle, but in the end, national party dynamics seemed to drag incumbents over the finish line. Two weeks before the vote, a Republican pollster expressed genuine surprise to me at internal polls showing GOP candidate Knute Buehler narrowly ahead in deep-blue Oregon and GOP incumbent Kristi Noem losing in red South Dakota. However, despite the fact that Buehler’s and Noem’s opponents were exceptionally appealing centrist candidates, voter sentiment started to revert to form in the final week’s polls, aligning with Oregon’s and South Dakota’s general partisan orientation on Election Day. In neither state were voters who showed up energized to support their party in congressional elections willing to suspend that partisanship for the governor’s election. The same dynamic seems to explain Republican Bob Stefanowski’s narrow loss in Connecticut.
There are exceptions to almost every trend, of course, and three notable Republican governors haven’t just managed to buck party dynamics and get elected in blue states—they’re shockingly popular to boot. Larry Hogan was reelected in Maryland with a comfortable 56 percent of the vote. What’s remarkable is the level of support he got even in the most liberal areas of a liberal state. Hogan got 45 percent of the vote in the D.C. suburbs of Montgomery County, a Democratic stronghold.
Republican Charlie Baker, meanwhile, won reelection in Massachusetts in even more impressive fashion, receiving almost 67 percent of the vote. That outpaced Senator Elizabeth Warren, who took 60 percent in her reelection bid. Baker even took a majority of votes in Boston. In Vermont, Republican incumbent Phil Scott won by a whopping 15-point margin.
It’s true that Baker, Hogan, and Scott are out of step with the more socially conservative politics of most congressional Republicans, but they do seem to provide a template for Republicans hoping to present a winning alternative in states where Democratic governance is dominant, profligate, and sometimes corrupt. (Knute Buehler cast himself very much in this mold in Oregon, and with the state’s metastasizing financial and law and order problems, he may get another bite at the apple.) It’s notable that there are no counterparts to Hogan, Baker, and Scott among Democratic governors in solidly red states.
The bigger question remains: Do the Republican gubernatorial losses represent long-term momentum for Democrats at the state level? Or are the midterm results just a reversion to the mean after Democrats’ extensive state-level losses during the Obama administration? For now, Republicans still control almost twice as many state legislative chambers as Democrats and can feel good about the fact that their governors seem to represent a more politically diverse group of states.
