The Trouble With Learning from State Democrats

Emulating a successful governor won't turn Biden's fortunes around.

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (photo by Julia Pickett) and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (photo by Tom Wolf, both under Creative Commons license)

Whatever happens in this election, Democrats are likely to have a plethora of appealing presidential candidates to choose from in 2028, many of whom are right now having success as governors. So it’s natural, with Joe Biden struggling in the polls, to say “Why can’t Biden do what those folks are doing so well? Shouldn’t he be learning their lessons?” Natural, but mostly wrong. 

This is an argument we see all the time, and to illustrate it I’m going to use a new column by the New York Times’ Frank Bruni in which he advises Biden and Democrats to heed the lessons of “an intriguing breed of enterprising Democratic governors who’ve had success where it’s by no means guaranteed, assembled a diverse coalition of supporters and are models of a winning approach for Democrats everywhere,” including Govs. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, Andy Beshear of Kentucky, Roy Cooper of North Carolina, Laura Kelly of Kansas, and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan. “They focus intently on the practical instead of the philosophical, emphasizing issues of broad relevance and not venturing needlessly onto the most divisive terrain,” Bruni writes.

This is the line you always hear from governors like these: It isn’t about Republican and Democrat or left and right, it’s just about getting things done for my state and its citizens. Which isn’t necessarily wrong in the context in which it’s offered; the problem is that the context at the state level is so different from the context at the federal level, and every state is different.

For instance, Bruni praises Laura Kelly for not putting abortion in people’s faces — not enough of a “kitchen table issue,” I guess — but if you want another view, you can check out his NYT colleague Michelle Golberg’s argument that it is precisely Gretchen Whitmer’s forthright advocacy for abortion rights that is driving her success. So should Biden learn from governors not to talk about abortion, or to talk about abortion? It’s almost as though things work differently in different states. 

Don’t get me wrong, these are all talented politicians with strong records. I think and hope one or two of them will be president one day. But as much as national Democrats ought to observe and understand what’s happening at the state level, it’s a mistake to think that Biden can just adopt what a successful governor is doing and glide to reelection.

Fix the damn highway

Consider the most high-profile achievement of Josh Shapiro’s tenure: the rapid repair of a section of I-95 in Philadelphia that collapsed in June of last year. Given how long these things usually take, it was an act of virtuoso governing that Shapiro and all the other people who worked on it got the highway reopened in just 12 days. Here’s Shapiro and Mitch Landrieu, the White House infrastructure czar, talking to Biden about it at the moment of triumph:

The collapse and rebuilding of that section of I-95 was not only national news but positively enormous news in the state, particularly in the Philly metro area. The media were full of reports on the progress and ultimate success, all of it starring Shapiro in the leading role. He did a great job managing both the practicalities of the job, and the PR (livestreaming the progress so people could watch was a smart move). But what did this news event not feature? A loud chorus of right-wing Shapiro opponents out every day calling him an incompetent communist bent on destroying the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, given equal time on mainstream news outlets and delivering their message unfiltered through right-wing outlets with enormous audiences. 

While there are certainly state- and local-level conservative news sources — especially talk radio — in this case they just didn’t have much to say, and couldn’t match the volume of news on local TV and elsewhere reporting the progress and completion of the repair. This was a discrete event — unlike “the economy” or “immigration” or the other things that occupy the national news agenda — and it just wouldn’t have been possible for Shapiro’s opponents to get on the air every day and say “Actually it wasn’t fixed! The highway is worse than ever!” 

This is just one example, but it demonstrates how governors operate in a different context than presidents, both in terms of the problems they address and the media environment that confronts them. And the media create a particular problem for Democratic presidents, because they are faced with a mainstream media determined to show how “objective” they are by writing the 4,000th story asking “Is Joe Biden too old?” on one hand, and a conservative media on the other that serves up an unceasing assault on the president. And yes, there’s a liberal media — MSNBC, magazines, this very newsletter — but it’s dwarfed in size and influence by the conservative media. 

Biden’s dilemma

Which means that the rules are just different at the national level. Biden can do many of the same things that produce political success for Democratic governors, and find that it makes almost no political difference. For instance, these governors have gotten a lot of things done, and their achievements should be acknowledged. But you know who else has gotten a lot of things done? Joe Biden! I’m not going to run through the list yet again, but it’s just a fact that whatever criticisms you may have of him, he has accomplished a great deal for the country in general and for liberal priorities in particular — far more, for instance, than Barack Obama. There are many reasons why he doesn’t get the credit he should, but a key one is that if and when the news media rouse themselves to report on some substantive achievement of his presidency, it will be accompanied by a chorus of voices trying to convince people that either it never happened, it was actually a disaster, or if it worked out well then he had nothing to do with it.

All this isn’t to say that eventually (say in 2028), Shapiro or Beshear or Whitmer wouldn’t be a great presidential candidate. Any one of them might be, though copious experience has taught us that there is simply no way to know how a politician is going to perform once they get up to the big leagues and face 100-mph fastballs for the first time; Ron DeSantis was only the latest whom many people thought would be a dynamite presidential candidate but who failed spectacularly. It’s worth understanding how they’ve performed in office, but not because doing so will reveal a lesson Biden can easily apply to his presidency or his reelection effort.

There’s a powerful impulse to believe that Biden is in danger of losing in November because he made some kind of misstep where the strategic meets the substantive: If only he had promoted this program more, or given a speech about that bill, or avoided that other issue, then it would all be different. He’s certainly made mistakes, and it might be a good idea for his campaign to change some things, but it’s unlikely that he will find a magic key that will unlock victory. And “Be like this governor who’s doing a good job” certainly isn’t it.