Is The Era Of Governors Contending For President Over?
On Monday, Montana governor Steve Bullock announced that he was suspending his presidential campaign. It went over with about the same impact as the proverbial tree falling in the forest. On paper, Bullock had many advantages as a candidate in an era where, in theory, one of the main qualities the Democratic Party is seeking in their nominee is the ability to maximize the chances of victory against Donald Trump. Bullock is the centrist, well-spoken Governor who won election twice in the deep red state of Montana, in presidential election years no less. More importantly, he was a governor, which for the second half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first was seen as the most surefire stepping stone to the White House. But that era of Presidential politics has already come to a close, the total nonstarter that was Bullock’s campaign is just confirmation of this fact.
For many years, conventional political wisdom held that serving as governor of a state was the ideal stepping stone for anyone hoping to make a bid for the White House. Running a state is, of course, a microcosm of being chief executive of the nation, after all, even if a state like Montana is a positively subatomic microcosm. Furthermore, it conveys on a prospective future candidate real experience and qualifications without having to cast votes on polarizing national issues, as would be the case with members of the Senate or the House of Representatives. Governors were seen as more “of the people” than any who served in Congress.
And indeed, for decades the results of Presidential elections did bear this out. Four out of the six Presidents elected (discounting Gerald Ford since he only came into office due to Richard Nixon’s resignation) between 1968 and 2008 served in statehouses prior to attaining the White House. These states ran the gamut from the small (Bill Clinton’s Arkansas) to the medium-sized (Jimmy Carter’s Georgia) to the huge (Reagan’s California and George W. Bush’s Texas). Furthermore, a long list of Senators went down to defeat as their party’s nominee, in many cases brought down by controversial votes or stances they took in Congress- John Kerry’s “flip-flop” on Iraq war funding votes being a key example.
Things started to change in 2008, when for the first time since 1860, the Presidential election was contested by two nominees actively serving in Congress, Barack Obama and John McCain. Obama won, partly due to his unique charisma and the historic appeal of his candidacy to be the first African-American President, but also because he discovered there were, in fact, advantages to being in Washington if one sought the country’s highest office. In an era of twenty-four hour cable news joined by the internet and social media (2008 was the first election where social networks such as Facebook played a major role), being in the nation’s capital was a surefire way to gain national press coverage and build up name recognition. And because Obama had only been in the Senate for just one term, he had a scant voting record for opponents to attack; in essence he enjoyed all of the advantages of national office but none of the disadvantages.
One under-appreciated aspect of how politics have changed in the Trump era is the advantage it has given to Senators looking to build a national profile. Before him, it was a common joke among anyone who follows politics that C-SPAN, the public access channel covering Congressional hearings, never gets watched by anyone due to the sheer dullness of its content. No longer, as in the age of committee investigations and impeachment inquiries, hearings of career government bureaucrats can become appointment viewing, let alone of Supreme Court justices. It is no accident that two of the frontrunners for the Democratic nomination are Senators and a third (Biden) is a longtime former Senator turned Vice President.
On the other end of the extreme, having an extraordinary amount of distance from “the swamp” of Washington is increasingly a positive for an electorate that is suspicious of conventional politicians. Pete Buttigieg’s friendly persona of “Mayor Pete,” the young fresh face of the Democratic primary field, would not come over nearly as well if he were a junior Congressman rather than the Mayor of South Bend (just ask young Congresspeople and failed Presidential hopefuls Beto O’Rourke and Eric Swalwell about that). Obviously the extreme example is Trump, a political outsider who could leverage the media in the way that only a lifelong entertainment insider could.
In the current climate, Governors are stuck in a political no man’s land- they find it harder to access the resources of national media than denizens of Washington, but neither can they effectively portray themselves as political outsiders. Montana may be a long way from Washington, D.C., but Steve Bullock and those like him had no way to stand out from a crowded, noisy field of Presidential contenders. Indeed, all but one of the current or former Governors who have contested the 2020 Democratic nomination have already ended their campaigns, as all struggled with the same issues as Steve Bullock did. The one who remains in the race, late entrant Deval Patrick, is unlikely to make much of an impression and will likely not survive long past the New Hampshire primary, at the latest.
Maybe Governors of larger, more high profile states will be able to break through in future Presidential races, but I doubt it. Few states are more high profile than New York, and Andrew Cuomo’s hopes of the White House were dashed before he could even launch a campaign. California’s Governor, the clearly ambitious Gavin Newsom, will certainly try to buck this trend in either 2024 or 2028. But the trends on the one hand of increasingly nationalized political coverage and distrust of conventional politicians are in my estimation, only going to continue and intensify as time goes on. The verdict is clear- the time of the Governor becoming President is over.
