{"id":19928,"date":"2019-02-04T14:11:06","date_gmt":"2019-02-04T19:11:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/?p=19928"},"modified":"2019-02-04T14:11:06","modified_gmt":"2019-02-04T19:11:06","slug":"primary-post-governors-and-senators","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2019\/02\/04\/primary-post-governors-and-senators\/","title":{"rendered":"Primary Post: Governors and Senators"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

So. This weekend, I was thinking a bit about the Presidential Primary, and the experience of the candidates. I had written, three cycles ago, about experience and exceptions<\/a>, making the point that mostly we elected Presidents who had experience either as Vice-President or as Governor (or both), but that Presidential candidates are mostly exceptions to rules.\r\n

The reason I was thinking about this was that none of the women who are running for President in this cycle have been state Governors. I heard some analysis recently that in the recent cycle Democrats largely preferred to vote for women candidates for legislative<\/i> office, but that there still seemed to be a group who were reluctant to vote for women for executive<\/i> offices. Thus, we have only nine women who currently serve as Governor, of whom I believe only Gina Raimondo and Kate Brown are on their second terms, and of the recent Governors there are only a handful who have been talked about as potential candidates (perhaps Christine Gregoire, Kathleen Sebelius or Jean Shaheen). However, Senators Warren, Klobuchar, Gillibrand and Harris are all formidable candidates\u2014each of them more obviously top-tier than any of the Governors.\r\n

And the top tier of candidates who do<\/i> have that experience as Governor are all white guys\u2014John Hickenlooper, Jay Inslee and Terry McAuliffe each have the potential to break through. I suspect that even if our Party has managed to get past the bias for white guys in legislative offices, it will be a long while before the results of that bias aren\u2019t visible in the pipeline.\r\n

And I do think that, all things being equal, I have a preference for a candidate with experience as a Governor. More than my actual preference for experience, though, I think it\u2019s somewhat easier for a Governor to differentiate himself as a candidate. What did Senator Klobuchar do<\/i> in the Senate that Senator Warren or Senator Booker did not? Who are the people whose lives were changed by Senator Harris and not Senator Warren? My guess is that they all have very similar voting records, and to the extent that they differ, it\u2019s on stuff that doesn\u2019t draw a lot of votes. Meanwhile, whatever happened in Colorado during Governor Hickenlooper\u2019s terms, he can take credit for it personally. Every job, every project, every dollar allocated\u2014the blame, too, sure, as well as the credit, but it helps to make a distinction. Not so much the Senate.\r\n

On the other hand, what do I know? Clearly if Governors had an easier time than Senators, Governor Sebelius would have an exploratory committee right now. And for all that I have thought (and written) that Governors have an edge, in the three cycles since I wrote that note, not only were the three people who took office men without experience as Governor or Vice-President, but two of the other nominees had no experience in those offices. Mitt Romney was the only Governor who won the nomination, and I think it\u2019s fair to consider that he ran on his business record far more than his Gubernatorial record. In fact, I think the last Governor to be a top-tier candidate (sorry Martin O\u2019Malley and Bill Richardson) was Howard Dean in 2004. And when was the last time there were two<\/i> former Governors who were in the top tier of candidates on the D side? If you count Jerry Brown as top-tier, 1992 (or if you count him as top-tier in his previous run, 1976). If you count Bruce Babbitt as top-tier (much more questionable), 1988. Then there\u2019s 1972, when Governors Muskie and Wallace were probably what we would now call top-tier, but of course Senator McGovern won the nomination.\r\n

So, maybe there isn\u2019t<\/i> room for two Governors to distinguish themselves in the primaries, after all.\r\n

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,<\/I>
-Vardibidian.\r\n\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Which Your Humble Blogger was probably wrong about something at the time, but is certainly wrong now.","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[204],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19928","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19928","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19928"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19928\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19932,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19928\/revisions\/19932"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19928"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19928"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19928"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}