Why governors don’t become presidents anymore

Govs. Gavin Newsom (D) and Ron DeSantis (R) would like to know when it will be their turn.

Presidential primary polling shows a matchup between the governors of California and Florida will likely have to wait until at least 2028. By then, state executives will have been shut out of the White House for two decades, after a long run of governors dominating presidential politics. 

In seven out of the eight presidential terms leading up to Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2009, the Oval Office had been occupied by a former Sun Belt governor.

Governors seeking the presidency today face a pair of problems that precipitated this shift: an evolved presidential job description and ideological polarization. 

First, the executive branch’s growth after 9/11 and the Global Financial Crisis made it practically impossible for any chief executive to oversee. Voters responded by shifting their desire for management experience to the deal-making prowess that Obama, Trump and Biden all touted. State governments are now so negligible in size and complexity compared to the federal bureaucracy that the presidential electorate offers little credit for running one.

Second, the post-2000s spread of broadband internet decimated split-ticket voting in federal elections by opening the floodgates of ideology into every race. Voters stopped overlooking incumbents’ unfavorable positions on issues like guns and abortion when those became easily exposed online. This trend hastened a Republican realignment in rural America that cut short the congressional careers of a generation of Democrats there. Similarly, urban states that had occasionally elected Republicans to the U.S. Senate became uncompetitive for the GOP. 

The relative proximity of the state level to quality-of-life concerns like schools and traffic is the reason gubernatorial split-ticket voting endures in states with uncompetitive presidential elections. Minority-party governors of eight states (Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, North Carolina and Vermont) won reelection in recent years by outperforming their respective party’s 2020 presidential vote share by an average of 19 percentage points. Voters are willing to give the leadership of their state to the candidate from the other party, if they look like the better administrator.

The ability of governors to run ahead of their parties’ presidential nominees — in some cases far, far ahead — should not be mistaken for an outcome that can be nationalized. Presidential voting is more bound to ideology. Candidates are now judged on more nuanced skills such as persuasion and negotiation.

Swing voters in presidential elections are less educated, less affluent, and harder to reach, making them a trickier demographic than the suburbanites that often tilt gubernatorial races on kitchen table issues. 

The governor-as-president archetype is from an era when the federal government was considered manageable, regional power was shifting south and west, and ideological differences could be downplayed in the absence of digital media. It’s now harder to reach the presidency from the governor’s mansion, because the job of winning and serving as president is so different from that of being a governor.

Ten years ago, Donald Trump spurned an effort by a group of consultants to chart a path to the White House by first getting him elected governor of New York. It shouldn’t be surprising that he continues to fend off challengers from that direction. Trump sensed then how conventional wisdom about presidential electability was wrong.

Rich Danker is a former political operative who served in the Trump administration.