Good News for Matt Bevin

As a Rhode Islander, it gives my great pride to say that my governor holds the title of “most unpopular governor” in the United States, according to Morning Consult.  Just kidding.  For the past several surveys conducted by Morning Consult, I have found myself sandwiched in between the most unpopular governor in the country, recently departed Connecticut Governor Dan Malloy, and the most popular governor in the country: Massachusetts’ Republican Governor Charlie Baker. 

In addition to her title as most unpopular governor in the United States, Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo also has another title: Chair of the Democratic Governors’ Association. Each year, the Republican Governors’ Association and the Democratic Governors’ Association select a governor to oversee the gubernatorial elections taking place that year. The heads of the respective organizations work to ensure that their party wins as many gubernatorial races as possible. Raimondo should have an easy job, considering the fact that only three gubernatorial elections will take place this year. However, like her job as Rhode Island Governor, Raimondo’s tenure as chair of the DGA could end up as an absolute failure. In fairness to Raimondo, Democrats find themselves at a huge disadvantage in this year’s gubernatorial elections; since all three will take place in states that President Trump won by double digits and will almost certainly win with equally strong, if not stronger margins of victory in 2020.

In spite of the unpopularity of Raimondo, who boasts a 56 percent disapproval rating; she won re-election easily last fall.  Raimondo took 52 percent in a multi-candidate race while Republican Allan Fung came in a distant second with 37 percent of the vote.  Both Raimondo and Fung underperformed their party’s respective standard bearers in 2016.  In the 2016 Presidential Election, Hillary Clinton received 54 percent of the vote while President Trump won 39 percent.  Joseph Trillo, who styled himself as a Trump-style Republican, ended up taking roughly four percent of the vote.  Raimondo ended up carrying two municipalities that President Trump won in 2016 while Fung ended up winning his home city of Cranston, where he serves as mayor, that President Trump lost.  Rhode Island’s 2018 gubernatorial election proved that even a relatively weak Democratic incumbent can easily win re-election in an overwhelmingly Democratic state.

So, the same should apply to a red state. According to the most recent list of gubernatorial approval ratings conducted by Morning Consult, Raimondo beat out Kentucky’s Republican governor Matt Bevin for the not-quite-so coveted title of most unpopular governor of the United States.  Following Malloy’s departure from office, Bevin had taken that title.  His approval rating stands at 34 percent, slightly lower than Raimondo’s, but his disapproval rating hovers at 53 percent; also slightly lower than Raimondo’s. Really unpopular governors such as Chris Christie, Sam Brownback, Mary Fallin, and Dan Malloy saw their approval ratings in the 20s or even the teens. 

Raimondo’s approval ratings essentially mean nothing at this point; she has already won re-election and term limits will prevent her from running for a third term in 2022. However, Bevin’s approval ratings matter a lot more. He has to run for re-election in less than two weeks.  The fact that President Trump won his state overwhelmingly in 2016 should make Bevin the favorite and it probably does. Nonetheless, his approval ratings call into question his ability to become the first Kentucky Republican in decades to win re-election to the governorship.

While Kentucky has not voted for a Democratic President since 1996, the state has remained open to electing Democrats at the state level. Democratic Secretary of State Allison Lundergan Grimes tried unsuccessfully to unseat Senator Mitch McConnell in 2014 but still held onto her seat when she ran for re-election the following year. The most recent Republican Governor, Ernie Fletcher, lost re-election to Democrat Steve Beshear; who went on to serve two terms. The former governor’s son, Attorney General Andy Beshear, hopes to oust Bevin this fall.

In his effort to win a second term, Bevin has a secret weapon: President Trump. Instead of focusing on his own re-election, President Trump will spend the first few days of November holding rallies for gubernatorial candidates in two states in the deep south where Democrats have at least a modest chance at winning; at the very least, a far higher chance than any Democrat would have in the Presidential election in those states next year. President Trump will appear in Tupelo, Mississippi on Friday, November 1 to campaign on behalf of Republican Lieutenant Governor Tate Reeves, who hopes to succeed term limited Republican Governor Phil Bryant. Democrats got the best candidate they could have hoped for in Attorney General Jim Hood, who has won statewide several times.  Three days later, President Trump will travel to Lexington, Kentucky to campaign on behalf of Bevin; who won an upset victory against Democratic Attorney General Jack Conway four years ago.

While Bevin has the electoral politics of Kentucky working in his favor, he has another factor working against him.  As I have explained before, the only Presidents to lose re-election since World War II had very strong primary challengers. Governors do not necessarily need primary challengers to lose re-election; although recent history suggests that primary challengers definitely do not help governors in their quests to win re-election. Just last year, Illinois’ Republican Governor Bruce Rauner, who caved to the liberal agenda on the issue of abortion, nearly lost the Republican primary to conservative challenger Jeanne Ives. That fall, he went down in flames by losing to Democrat J.B. Pritzker by double digits. Rauner had awful approval ratings heading into the re-election campaign but never held the title of most unpopular governor.

Earlier this year, Bevin performed poorly in the Republican gubernatorial primary in terms of vote share but the fact that he had multiple challengers enabled him to beat the second-place finisher by double digits. Bevin lost several counties in eastern Kentucky, which has become the base of the Republican Party.  Bevin has one advantage that Rauner did not have: he finds himself aligned with the party that dominates federal elections in the state. Rauner, on the other hand, had to run in a state that Democrats routinely win by double digits in Presidential elections.

Needless to say, the latest batch of gubernatorial approval ratings provide some good news for Matt Bevin; who probably does not mind holding the title of underdog. Bevin burst onto the political scene in 2014 by mounting a tea party-backed challenge to Senator Mitch McConnell.  McConnell and Bevin appeared to have buried the hatchet, as the state’s senior Senator endorsed his former primary challenger when he prevailed in the Republican gubernatorial primary in 2015.

While poor approval ratings do not necessarily indicate defeat for an incumbent governor, strong approval ratings do not always guarantee victory.  Democratic Governor John Bel Edwards of Louisiana will have to run for re-election on November 16 against Republican Eddie Rispone.  Edwards has differentiated himself from the extremists in the national Democratic Party on the issue of abortion and has a high approval rating of 52 percent but the primary election that took place on October 12 signaled that the state’s Republican lean may prove too much for Edwards to overcome.  Edwards had hoped to avoid the need for a runoff by clinching the magic number of 50 percent in the jungle primary but he only ended up winning with 46 percent of the vote. Even if Edwards ends up winning re-election, he will have to deal with a Republican supermajority in at least one of the chambers of the state legislature. He may end up having to deal with a Republican supermajority in both chambers of the state legislature; whether or not Republicans get a supermajority in the House will depend on the results of another state election headed to a runoff on November 16.

If Bevin wins re-election, it will not only mean good news for the Kentucky governor but also good news for President Trump in the 2020 Presidential Election. After all, if Bevin can win re-election despite low approval ratings, so can President Trump.  While America, unlike Kentucky, has a roughly even split of liberals and conservatives, the Democratic nominee for President that President Trump will have to face off against will have a profoundly different worldview than any of the Democrats running for governor in Kentucky, Louisiana, and Mississippi.  No matter which of the crop of Democratic candidates ends up winning the party’s nomination for President, they will almost certainly have far-left positions on abortion and immigration that find themselves far outside the mainstream. 

Looking at President Trump’s approval ratings in key swing states, he performs slightly better than Bevin in terms of net approval in most of them; with one exception.  President Trump has a net approval rating of -23 in New Hampshire, slightly worse than Bevin’s net approval rating of -19.  Still, President Trump finds himself underwater in all but two of the swing states: Georgia and Texas. As for the solid red states that supported President Trump by double digits in 2016, President Trump finds himself slightly underwater in two of them: Montana and Nebraska. Not surprisingly, President Trump has negative net approval ratings in all of the states that supported Hillary Clinton by double digits in 2016.

No matter what happens in Kentucky next month, Bevin will surely receive higher than 34 percent of the vote in the gubernatorial election; meaning that some of the people who disapprove of him will end up casting their ballots for him anyway.  The same will definitely apply in President Trump’s re-election bid, if not more so.  While some Americans will vote for a third-party candidate, most will recognize that the election will ultimately come down to a race between two people: President Trump and a Democrat. Many Americans may not like President Trump or approve of President Trump’s performance but they might vote for him anyway just to keep a radical leftist out of the White House.

So, approval ratings definitely do say a lot about the electorate’s feelings about a candidate, they do not tell the whole story.  Approval ratings only serve as one variable in the very complex phenomenon known as American politics. The identity and popularity of an incumbent’s challenger and the partisan lean of a state also make a difference in election outcomes. In less than a month, the election of 2019 will go into the history books. Matt Bevin likely finds himself the most vulnerable governor running for re-election this year. However, the fact that he no longer occupies the bottom spot among the nation’s governors as well as the strong performance by Louisiana Republicans, definitely represent good news for Matt Bevin. Keep an eye on my 2019 political calendar; which I will end up having to update quite a bit over the next three weeks as election results come in. With the end of the 2019 election rapidly approaching, the 2020 election will officially kick into high gear; although, considering the 24-hour news cycle and the lengthy primary process, it basically already has.