David Broder's Gubernatorial Survivor Bias
David Broder seems to think that the (astonishing?) fact that there are some Republican governors still in office could signal the resurgence of the GOP:
After the celebrations of the success of Barack Obama, Joe Biden and the congressional Democrats, it is time to tip the hat to some other people — with names such as John Hoeven, Jon Huntsman, Jim Douglas and Mitch Daniels. They are Republicans reelected Tuesday as governors of North Dakota, Utah, Vermont and Indiana.
…
Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour believes, on the basis of personal experience, that governors can be the catalyst for party revival. “When I became chairman of the Republican National Committee after Bill Clinton’s election, I quickly found that our governors were the most popular, influential people in the party,” he told me last week. “When the other party has the White House and both houses of Congress, as they did then and will now, the only place people can actually see Republican ideas being implemented is in the states.”
While there may be nothing factually incorrect in any of this, it does demonstrate a rather blatant survivor bias. Sure there are examples, perhaps several, of successful Republican governors. But there are also plenty of examples of failed Republican governors — especially when “failure” is defined not at the state level but at the national level. In the language of Wall Street, they had no “read-through” to Washington or to the national Republican audience.
The two examples that first come to my mind are George Pataki and Mitt Romney. Both were reasonably successful in their own states, both flirted with national politics (in long-ago times Pataki was widely mentioned as a running mate for — well, for whoever wound up winning the Republican nomination). And whatever (insufficient) success Romney had in the 2008 primaries was due only to the extent that he rejected everything he had in fact stood for as the governor of Massachusetts. Romney in essence ran against his own political past.
Bottom line: There are many ways to be a successful Republican governor. Not all of them translate into a way to be a successful Republican presidential candidate.
Another example, even discounting his constitutional asterisk, is Arnold Schwarzenegger. Imagine for a moment that he could run for president. Do you think he could be a viable GOP candidate without pulling a Romney? I’m skeptical.
And even Broder’s examples are not entirely persuasive. A Republican governor of Utah? Astounding! But could the Jon Huntsman who won in Utah also win in New York, California or Florida? Again, I’m skeptical.
Bobby Jindal, meanwhile, is where he is not because of his Republicanism but rather because of his ability. He is smart (e.g., Rhodes Scholar) and competent (e.g., dealing with post-Katrina, post-Brownie Louisiana). His extremist conservative views (e.g., on abortion and gay rights) may indeed get him to White House someday (I think it will), but those views did not necessarily get him into the governor’s mansion. (And an obligatory post script: Louisiana, like Schwarzenegger, also gets an asterisk for its unique political environment, which is both hopelessly corrupt and just plain loopy.)
Finally, two words that appear nowhere in Broder’s “Republican governors” piece: Sarah Palin. The silence is deafening.
In any contest between David Broder and George Will, the latter will inevitably win. It’s practically an axiom. And Will’s view wins here too:
With Tuesday’s defeat of Connecticut Republican Chris Shays, Democrats hold all 22 New England seats. As recently as 1996, when New York had 31 House seats, Republicans held 14; after Tuesday, they have just three of 29.
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But when the next Congress convenes, 19 of the probable 44 Republican senators — 43 percent of them — will be from the South, understood as including Oklahoma and Kentucky. The South is beginning to look less like the firm foundation of a national party than the embattled redoubt of a regional one.
The Republican Party is now, or likely soon will be, essentially a regional party. And success in a region simply does not suggest, let alone guarantee, success nationwide.
But look on the bright side: The GOP is still going gangbusters in Utah and Louisiana. So how can they not take back the White House with a power base like that?
Filed under: Politics
While I agree that Broder's arguments are colored by a "survivor bias," I think you're somewhat missing his argument, which is more about using the Republicans' comparative lack of failure on the state level as a laboratory for new Republican "ideas" (in scare quotes because parties don't have "ideas," they merely choose which ideas to push to enhance their electoral success). In many ways, Barbour (scumbag that he is) is correct in arguing that the Republicans largely rebuilt their party after 1992 on the basis of their governors, culminating in the 1994 Congressional elections.
We can debate whether that success was a result of Republican successes on the state level, the Contract with America, Rush Limbaugh, or Bill Clinton's overreaching (it's a combination of all, I think). But there's no denying that the Republicans consciously used their comparative success (or lack of failure) on the state level as a means of retooling their strategies on the national level.
One thing that this did was to use popular governors as sort of "guinea pigs" for retooling Republican policy goals and orientation. A popular Republican governor, by virtue of his popularity or success in a swing or Dem state, would give cover for the adoption of, or greater emphasis on, particular types of policies by other Republicans, including on the national level.
The end result of all this was Bush's BS "compassionate conservatism." We tend to forget just how popular this philosophy was with Republicans at the time, since they now try to disavow it due to its abysmal failure. But that's not the point – as an electoral strategy, it was pretty successful at the time.
I agree that Republicans can't be successful as a regional party – the larger question is how will they adapt?
My fear is that they will move a little to the left on economic issues and stick to the hardcore social agenda.
My preference is that they would switch that around and stay (relatively) conservative on the economics and move left on the social.
Unfortunately, I don't think they will be willing to walk away from the guaranteed support from the anti-abortion crowd.