Found The Problem, Your Governor Is Broken

Nate Silver crunches the numbers and finds America's Republican governors are far more conservative than the states they govern, explaining why Republican governors are increasingly unpopular...even in Republican states.

I’ve used data from the Web site OnTheIssues.com to rate each current governor’s ideology on a scale that runs from zero for liberal to 100 for conservative. OnTheIssues evaluates candidates’ ideology in each of about two dozen major domestic policy areas based on their public statements and votes. My process is simply to average the ratings for each issue area together and then translate them to my zero-to-100 scale. (In some cases, OnTheIssues has not scored the candidate on a particular topic, in which case it is excluded from the average.)

For example, Christine Gregoire, the governor of Washington and a Democrat, winds up with a score of 10, meaning very liberal. Rick Scott, the newly elected governor of Florida, has a score of 91 (very conservative). Other candidates are more in the middle: Mike Beebe, the Democratic governor of Arkansas, has a score of 39 (quite moderate), while Mitch Daniels of Indiana, a Republican, scores at a 74 (about halfway between moderate and conservative).

We can compare these scores against the ideology of the voters in each state, as measured by 2008 exit polls. This is also simple: I assign zero points for every voter who describes themselves as liberal, 50 points for every moderate, and 100 points for every conservative, and then average the result.

And here's a chart of Nate's results:




There are a few very liberal governors on the D side on this scale, but with the singular exception of Utah Republican Gary Herbert, all of the Republican governors are above 70 on the 100 point conservative scale, while their respective states are all less than 70.  Pretty much every state in fact is between 45 and 65, meaning that all the GOP governors (again, Utah's Gov. Herbert excepted) are more conservative than any US state's populace by comparison.

Which explains chart number 2.





Hey, my own Governor, Dinosaur Steve, is a popular guy round these parts.  And if you check the bottom of the list there, it's Scott Walker, Rick Scott, John Kasich, Paul LePage, the Governors I've been talking about for the last six months as really screwing up their states.

Bottom line:  the closest thing to a moderate Republican governor in America in 2011 is Steve Beshear.  2012 is going to be ugly for the GOP.