Governors Gone Wild(ly Unpopular)

I missed in the end-of-week shuffle last week a new Wisconsin poll showing that Badger State Gov. Scott Walker remains miserably unpopular among the voters who know him best. This seems like a good time to remind people that the batch of wildly unpopular governors running for president this year is without precedent.

Marquette Law School, whose poll is a political benchmark for the state, released a new survey last Thursday showing that 39 percent of Wisconsinites approve of the job Walker is doing as governor while 57 percent disapprove. This is statistically unchanged from the 41-56 split the last time Marquette released a poll, in April, so the bleeding seems to have stopped, but being 18 points under water is hardly a strong position from which to run for president – it's harder to brag about your record of accomplishment back home when all it's gotten you is the loathing of your constituents.

Walker's not the only current or recently-former chief executive running for president, of course. It's a motley crew. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who has, according to the Real Clear Politics survey of surveys, recently slipped out of the top 10 in the GOP field, is no more popular than his Midwestern counterpart. A Rutgers-Eagleton poll released earlier this month had him at a 37 percent approval rating with 59 percent disapproving. There are two ways to look at this: On the one hand, it's somewhat better than Christie did in a June Fairleigh Dickinson PublicMind poll, which pegged his rating at 30 percent approval and 55 percent disapproval; on the other hand – comparing apples to apples – Christie's 37 percent approval is the lowest he's ever scored in Rutgers-Eagleton polling. The third member of the GOP governors' terrible triumvirate, Louisiana's Bobby Jindal, hasn't had any new polling data since the spring as far as I can tell.

Intrigued at the novel idea of unpopular governors running for president, I did some research back in July to put them into historical context. What I found then was:

There were cases where people ran while getting mediocre approval back home, but governors who are so deeply into negative territory is without precedent. Of course, it's important to mention that the GOP does have a couple of recent or sitting governors who fare better than Walker, Christie and Jindal. Rick Perry left office as governor of Texas with a mid-to-high 50s approval rating, and Ohio Gov. John Kasich had a 60 percent approval rating as of June.

I've said for some time that if I was in the Hillary Clinton campaign, Kasich – the popular governor of the most important swing state – would be the scariest GOPer to me. He sounded like a compassionate, moderate, adult in the first GOP presidential debate and came across as likable. It's no wonder he's been creeping up in the polls, though he's still only tied for eighth in the Real Clear Politics compilation, a product in part of grassroots conservatives reviling him for taking the Obamacare Medicaid expansion.

Still, with the most popular governor running for president seen as a traitor and someone 18 points under water seen as a top-tier candidate, it's no wonder that nonpoliticians like Donald Trump and Ben Carson are doing so well in early surveys.