All those people won. Big.
That doesn't mean they are good
And you can believe that, but it wasn't the question I was asking.
Show me a candidate that Democrats nominated who was so out of the mainstream that it caused them to lose a sapphire blue state?
Look. I'm not saying KS is lean D or anything, but I believe Laura Kelly has opened up a path to winning there.
Well, Jealous in Maryland and Gonzalez in Massachussetts lost gubernatorial elections in saphire blue states by much more, then Kobach.
Yeah, I'm sure those losses had absolutely nothing to do with facing incumbent governors with favourables somewhere between 65-70%.
I'm sure the same voters who voted for Elizabeth Warren must really have been disgusted at how Extremely Left Wing(TM) Jay Gonzalez is.
Given percentage Warren got (about 60, IIRC), and which Gonazalez got (33) - many of them surely were. And it doesn't matter - whether you run against popular incumbent of not, what matters is WHY these Republicans were so popular even among Democrats and why a lot of Democrats preferred them over their "own" candidate in "sapphire blue states"....
They literally only voted for Baker because they really like him. That's all there is to it. Gonzalez didn't even have negative net favourables.
Jay Gonzalez did not get blown out because "he was too liberal for Massachusetts". He got blown out because he was a sacrificial lamb against an opponent that was considered (righly) unbeatable.
Under your wonderful logic, Jim Keet was too right wing for Arkansas in 2010 just because there were plenty of Boozman voters who went Beebe.
Quite good logic. For Arkansas-2010 he, probably, was. And that is one of the reasons of Beebe's landslide in addition to Beebe's personal popularity. But for Arkansas-2018 - not sure. And not sure Beebe would beat him this year
No, it's not. Boozman and Keet had pretty much the same policy positions on everything, and they were clearly not seen as too far right given that Boozman absolutely obliterated an incumbent Senator. The main difference was popularity/name recognition, and federal/state partisanship differences.
I was able, through the Wayback Machine, to find the numbers from the last Mason-Dixon poll before the election in 2010. For your reference, Boozman was ahead 21 and Beebe was ahead 26.
They had Boozman at 55% favourability (95% name recognition), while Blanche was at 52% unfavourability (99% name recognition). That tells me Boozman won easily because Boozman was popular and his opponent was not, with both sharing near universal name recognition.
In the governor's race, Beebe had 56% favourability and just 14% unfavourability. Keet had a decent net favourability of +14, but it didn't matter because
60% of voters had a neutral opinion or didn't recognize him at all! A quarter of voters seriously didn't know who Jim Keet was less than two weeks before election day!
The conclusion to draw from that is that Beebe won because he was a very well liked incumbent going up against an all-but-anonymous opponent. This is also what happened in Massachusetts.
MassINC's final poll of 2018 shows a similar dynamic in the governor race, just on the opposite side partisanwise.
Jay Gonzalez had positive net favourables, just like Keet. However, just like in Keet's case, it meant absolutely nothing because the majority (54%) of voters were either "neutral" or "don't know" (which, to be honest, is much the same thing). Baker, on the other hand, was like Beebe with near universal name recognition and
very high popularity.
TL;DR: Gonzalez and Keet lost because they were anonymous sacrificial lambs going up against highly popular incumbent governors. It was
NOT due to voters in those states thinking they were too extremist on ideology.
