Is Your Governor Popular?
Governor approval rating polls can be misleading, and require a lot of context to really mean anything...
Earlier this week, Morning Consult released their second-quarter governor approval rating polls. These polls are truly amazing, as no other firm releases any dataset this robust covering all fifty states. However, it seems that whenever Morning Consult releases a new wave of polling, the dialogue surrounding them is, sadly, a bit detached from reality. Some individuals deeply question how Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York could possibly have a net-positive approval rating. They seem to forget that New York is a deep blue state, and that a generic-Democratic governor should be popular there. The real question is: are she and other governors more or less popular than one would expect them to be?
The net-popularity of a governor can have wildly different implications based on whichever state he or she governs. If a governor runs a deep-blue state and has a net-neutral approval rating as a Democrat, that is much worse than a governor with a net-neutral approval rating in a swing-state. The reason is because the lean of the state is different in both scenarios. In the case of the deep-blue state, the lean is one quite favorable to Democrats, and so a Democrat should automatically be popular. The same can not be said of the swing-state. That’s why it is better not to simply present a governor’s net-approval, but his net-approval relative to the partisan lean of his state.
The System
To quantify these ratings, I created a system called Net-Popularity Above/Below Expected, inspired by an idea developed a few years ago by Nathaniel Rakich. In order to make these scores as accurate as possible, I adjusted all polls for Morning Consult’s nationwide polling bias compared to other pollsters. Then, I corrected for individual biases on a state-by-state level, calculating how much they tend to overestimate approval ratings and underestimate different parties’ support.
Calculating the difference between these adjusted net-approval ratings and a weighted average of the state’s Senate, House, and Presidential election results from 2020-2024 resulted in the scores below.
The best way to understand these scores is: how many points above or below the partisan lean of the state is the governor’s approval? If the state leans 20% more Democratic, and the Democratic governor has a net +15% approval rating, his approval rating above expected is +5%. If he was instead a Republican, with a net +15% approval rating, his approval rating above expected would be +35%, as the score is the total difference away from the state’s partisan lean. The logic behind this is that a state with a Democratic lean of +15% should typically be expected to give a Democratic governor a net-approval of +15%. A Republican governor would be expected to get a net-approval of -15%.
The Ratings
The six most popular governors in the country all come from states that voted for the opposite party for president in 2024. This makes quite a lot of sense. If you are, for instance, a Republican governor in a state as Democratic as Vermont, you must be pretty popular in order to have gotten elected. Even if your baseline popularity was negative, as a Republican in a deeply blue state, your real net-popularity above expected would be quite high.
What’s truly interesting is that if you plot out all of the governors’ popularity ratings, in states that voted for the same party for governor and president, and compare them to their absolute margin in the 2024 presidential election, there is a very clear trend indicating that governors representing more competitive states tend to be more popular, and those representing less competitive states, less popular. My assumption behind this trend is that governors in more competitive states had to fight much harder in order to get elected. They had to win the popularity contest. Governors in lopsidedly partisan states simply had to be of the right party in order to win.
However, repeating this process for states that voted for opposite parties for governor and president, the trend is actually the complete opposite, which, based on my earlier point, makes a lot of sense. In order to have even gotten elected, in a state that typically votes for the other party, in the first place, these governors must be fairly popular.
Takeaway
I often feel that many governors, particularly 2028 Democratic presidential hopefuls, are quite overhyped in terms of their credibility as candidates. Two great examples of that are Gavin Newsom (D-CA) and Wes Moore (D-MD), who have approvals above expected of -13.4% and +1%. Neither of these scores implies anything impressive about their leadership abilities in their states. Other contenders, like Andy Beshear (D-KY) and Josh Shapiro (D-PA), are clearly doing something right, with net-approvals above expected of +48.2% and +25.9%. respectively. Just something to consider.
Don’t be led astray by the allure of a net-positive approval rating. There is always more context to add to numbers. Rarely, if ever, are numbers worth much at face value, and approval ratings are a great example of that.