Back in May, I wrote about the relative unpopularity of GOP governors (despite reasonably positive press coverage), which is turning out to be an across-the-board phenomenon in these perilous financial times. (VA and NM seem to be exceptions.)
As is his wont, Nate Silver has a lovely post quantifying that. He compares the ideology of the governors, Democratic and Republican, with their constituencies and gets this "picture is worth a thousand words" graph.
In fact, if you read the graph from R to L, you'll see the red line trend up, meaning that the marginally more conservative end of the line is sitting in liberal state territory. For those of you who wake up in a bad political mood in those states, there's a partial answer why.
Nate adds:
This is unusual behavior. Politics 101 would suggest that you need to be at least somewhat responsive to voters in your state. And American political parties in particular are traditionally broad-based coalitions that tolerate a fair amount of intellectual and ideological diversity, especially at the state level. Republicans, of course, are going to try to push policy toward the right and Democrats to the left. But you can go only so far before you get a ticket out of office, so electoral and policy goals remain in some degree of balance.The new breed of Republican governors run counter to this principle in a way that wasn?t true as recently as a year ago.
As to the overall effect on the Big Picture, a cautionary note:
I don?t know that I buy the theory that these unpopular Republican governors are likely to harm the aspirations of the party?s presidential nominee though a ?reverse coattail? effect, the evidence for which is quite spotty. But I do think it?s a significant problem for Republicans on its own terms. It suggests that the party has become uninterested in appealing to swing voters ? and that the voters are starting to notice.Making that possibility happen is our job.Retribution from the electorate is a strong possibility unless there is a change of course.
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