I've seen people remark on this phenomenon in a couple of places, but nobody seems to have a good explanation for it, so I'll just bring it to your attention and see if anybody has any hypotheses. When you look at the net approval ratings of our nation's governors, the most popular Democrats are almost all from red states. Of the top 12 Democratic governors, 10 are from red states and 2 are from blue states. The effect spans all regions of red America -- the West, Midwest, and South all have their popular Democrats. Then there's a big gap, and you get the bottom nine Democrats, only one of whom is from a red state. With Republicans, the correlations are much weaker, but it looks like the general direction is similar. I wonder how long-standing this phenomenon is -- back in '94, Democrats Jim Hunt of NC and Evan Bayh of IN were the nation's top governors just after the GOP landslide.
It makes sense that governors would be somewhat insulated from national sentiment, since they don't have to obey the party leadership and they can focus on more local issues. But this inverse effect is just weird. What's going on?
