Sucking wind

Governors can't get no respect in 2016

They were supposed to lead the way in the GOP primary. Instead, they're sucking wind. 

By Kyle Cheney

This was supposed to be the election where there was no question about who would lead the 2016 Republican ticket — a governor, drawn from the deep pool of current and former state executives coveting the Oval Office.

It was obvious as early as 2013, when an influential early-state voice made clear that the party's next nominee should hail from a state capital. “Leadership is going to come out of the states, not Washington. Look at the governors," said Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad.

Yet of the nine current and former GOP governors who entered the presidential race, only one, Jeb Bush, comes close to top-tier status at the moment. Two of them — former Texas Gov. Rick Perry and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker — dropped out after brief and dismal candidacies. Govs. Chris Christie of New Jersey, John Kasich of Ohio and Bobby Jindal of Louisiana are polling below the presidential Mendoza line; former Govs. Jim Gilmore of Virginia and George Pataki of New York are even lower — so low that they are assigned asterisks, rather than numbers, in the latest CNN poll.

“I am surprised that they’ve fallen short," said Kellyanne Conway, a GOP pollster who supports Sen. Ted Cruz. "It’s surprising that this particular crop that is filled with serious men who have a full slate of accomplishments in their respective states have not been able to translate that nationally.”

At the moment, the two highest-polling governors are Bush of Florida and Mike Huckabee of Arkansas — both of whom are still mired in single digits.

It's hardly a ringing endorsement from GOP primary voters.

"Governors made great presidential candidates because they're chief executives who know how to run a government. But that's not what Americans seem to be wanting these days," said Eric Fehrnstrom, a senior adviser for former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney in 2012. "Most people look around and see that everything is broken right now with no obvious path to stability. They think our political class is corrupt. Ultimately, voters will have to decide if they want someone who has the experience of public office or roll the dice on an untested and untried candidate."

Many Republicans insist current polls are misleading — when the first states begin voting in February, the field is likely to have been reshuffled. And the consensus among those Republicans is that primary voters are not rejecting governors so much as they are embracing outsiders. That would explain why the three candidates without any experience at all in elected office — Donald Trump, Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina — are capturing more than half the vote in recent polls.

"Governors at this time are at a distinct disadvantage because typically they’re not fluent in the language of anger," said Jon Huntsman, Jr., the former Republican governor of Utah and a 2012 presidential candidate. "I think Walker made the error of trying to come across as an angry candidate, which was perceived as disingenuous. He lost a sense of authenticity, which is critically important. ... He tried to out-Trump Trump, which nobody can do."

While the depth of the anger toward politicians and the rise of Trump, Carson and Fiorina may have caught the class of governors flat-footed, GOP establishment hands believe that once voters begin to assess policy positions and electability, they'll return to the familiar.

"If you come back to me in mid-January and it’s the same thing, I’ll be damn surprised," said Austin Barbour, who helmed a now-defunct super PAC supporting Perry. "Republican primary voters right now are screaming that they’re mad at Washington — rightfully so. They’re going to these three never-elected officials, but I just think it’s really, really early."

Republicans like Barbour are convinced that once the outsiders receive more attention and become better known, they'll be supplanted by more experienced officeholders.

"I do think, in the end, it will be probably a governor or a former governor who we turn to as a party," said Ron Kaufman, a Republican National Committee member from Massachusetts who supports Bush. "Everyone was ahead of [2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney] early on in the polls because the bar for Mitt was so incredibly high and the bar for everyone else was so incredibly low."

If nothing else, the scattershot nature of the early GOP primary knocks down the early conventional wisdom that Republicans would consider only an elected official with executive experience for the nomination to succeed President Barack Obama — resentment against the establishment might override all other considerations.

"People are not blown away by the fact that you are or have been a governor," said Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, noting that Presidents Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton — all former governors — didn't rely on their records to win but rather their "interesting national agendas."

Kristol said Walker's failures as a candidate — despite a solidly conservative record in Wisconsin —— demonstrated "the degree to which people just didn’t care."

"Walker’s the exclamation point," he said. "In a wrong-track environment like this, governing experience isn’t going to count for much."