Bevin vs Beshear in each Southern State

[Antonio the Sixth]

Basically, that's one of the few ways the Deep South/Outer South distinction still matters.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Basically, that's one of the few ways the Deep South/Outer South distinction still matters.

GA/TX/SC/MS going Republican and TN/AR simultaneously going Democratic must be a joke.

It's not. You need to look at more than just PVI to understand local election dynamics.

[Antonio the Sixth]

It's not. You need to look at more than just PVI to understand local election dynamics.

No, I’m very much aware of local election dynamics and I’m not just looking at PVI. However, I’m also aware of how Beshear was actually able to forge a path to victory in KY, which was by (1) massively outperforming previous Democratic candidates for federal and statewide office in urban KY not just in terms of raw votes and turnout but actual percentage of the vote, (2) dramatically outperforming Clinton and pretty much every recent Democratic candidate for statewide/federal office in the historically Republican suburban/exurban areas of the state, (3) holding his own or only losing a little ground in the state's rural areas, and (4) benefiting from the fact that enough Trump supporters stayed home in an off-year election, not least due to Bevin's unpopularity. There’s really no way Beshear wouldn’t have been able to replicate this path against a Republican as unpopular, incompetent, and odious as Bevin in GA/TX (and arguably even SC), where Republicans are even more reliant on suburban and (especially in the case of TX) urban support primarily but not solely(!) from college-educated voters and to a lesser extent non-white voters to be competitive statewide. These voters might not have a determining influence on the outcome of a KY election, but they sure do have enough influence in TX and GA to give a Bevin-type Republican the boot. Factors (1) + (2) + (4) would have been in Beshear's favor in TX/GA/SC too (this isn’t really arguable either), and arguably factor (3) would have been in his favor too considering the weird turnout dynamics in off-year elections and Collier's very respectable showing in rural TX last year. 

The premise of your argument is that Beshear's victory was solely due to the revival of some conservadem/Dixiecrat/rural populist coalition unique to the Upper South/Clinton 1996 states, but that’s not really true and hardly tells the whole story. Sure, Beshear would have lost KY with less rural support, but he could have afforded to do a lot worse in rural GA and TX simply because the demographics of those states are infintely more favorable to Democrats than in a state like KY or TN at pretty much every level, and he almost certainly would have lost in AR for similar reasons too. This isn’t 1980.

The demographics of GA/TX give Democrats a higher floor, but the problem is the ceiling. There are two of the most inelastic states according to 538's metric, and that's because there's a big enough share of White voters there who would never even think of voting Democratic. This might be changing soon, but at least in 2019, I don't believe that it has yet. Atlanta and Dallas/Houston/Austin suburbs are definitely trending Democratic, there's no denying that, but that wasn't enough for
Abrams or O'Rourke to win and I doubt it would have been for Beshear either. Again, the conversation might be very different in 2024 or 2028, but we're not there yet.

[Antonio the Sixth]

O'Rourke weren’t running against deeply unpopular and incompetent Republican incumbents who had lukewarm support among their own party and alienated pretty much anyone who wasn’t a hard-core Republican voter already.

...uh, doesn't Ted Cruz fit that description to a T? The only reason O'Rourke even came close to beating him is because even many Republicans can't stand him. And he still won. I'll grant you that a Senate election is different from a Gubernatorial election, so it's possible that Beto could have beaten Cruz if it had been the latter. TX was the state I struggled the most when making that map, so I can see arguments either way, but it would be a close race.

Kemp admittedly didn't quite fit the bill since he'd more or less consolidated Republican support, but still, I don't see a road for a Democrat to get those last few points needed to get to 50% (remember that 50% is what they need to get, because otherwise you get to a runoff and Black turnout falls down the toilet). I'd love to be proven wrong in 2020, but I'll believe it when I see it.

[Antonio the Sixth]

O'Rourke weren’t running against deeply unpopular and incompetent Republican incumbents who had lukewarm support among their own party and alienated pretty much anyone who wasn’t a hard-core Republican voter already.

Kemp admittedly didn't quite fit the bill since he'd more or less consolidated Republican support, but still, I don't see a road for a Democrat to get those last few points needed to get to 50% (remember that 50% is what they need to get, because otherwise you get to a runoff and Black turnout falls down the toilet). I'd love to be proven wrong in 2020, but I'll believe it when I see it.

Jesus christ Kemp won by 1 point and you don't see a road to get that one point when we are applying a 25-30 point swing to the 2016 results where Trump won the state by 5? Unlike the earlier poster I do believe in elasticity, and there's no doubt that its harder to flip the vote of white evangelicals in Georgia than it is no religion wcw's in the midwest and new england, but do you know what state has FAR more white evangelicals than Georgia? Kentucky.

You're going to ignore my entire point about the runoff? Huh, OK then.

Never thought I'd see people arguing that TN and LA would go blue before GA.

In the very specific scenario that we're discussing here

[Antonio the Sixth]

O'Rourke weren’t running against deeply unpopular and incompetent Republican incumbents who had lukewarm support among their own party and alienated pretty much anyone who wasn’t a hard-core Republican voter already.

...uh, doesn't Ted Cruz fit that description to a T? The only reason O'Rourke even came close to beating him is because even many Republicans can't stand him. And he still won. I'll grant you that a Senate election is different from a Gubernatorial election, so it's possible that Beto could have beaten Cruz if it had been the latter. TX was the state I struggled the most when making that map, so I can see arguments either way, but it would be a close race.

Kemp admittedly didn't quite fit the bill since he'd more or less consolidated Republican support, but still, I don't see a road for a Democrat to get those last few points needed to get to 50% (remember that 50% is what they need to get, because otherwise you get to a runoff and Black turnout falls down the toilet). I'd love to be proven wrong in 2020, but I'll believe it when I see it.

Ted Cruz had a 50% approval, which is significantly higher than Matt Bevin's approval in most polls. He's not nearly as unpopular as Matt Bevin was, and plenty of Republicans enthuisatically supported him in a way they didn't for Bevin.

Also, the dynamics of a Beshear/Bevin race would mean the Atlanta suburbs become a lot more Democratic than they were for last year's Governor race, which would be more than enough to push a Dem above 50%.

You have a point on Cruz, and as I said Texas is the one state I'm on the fence about, but I'm still not convinced about GA.

Here's the 2014-2018 gubernatorial swing for GA:


And here's 2015-2019 for KY:


The two maps are roughly comparable since GA 2014 and KY 2015 were won by 8 and 9 points, respectively. And you see the same rough magnitude of swings in both states, ie in the 10-20 range. If anything, some GA suburban counties seem to have had the biggest swings. So I don't see evidence of Abrams underperforming compared to the baseline Beshear established in KY. The main difference is that Abrams bombed in rural Georgia, while Beshear held his own or improved in large parts of rural KY.

Of course that's not a perfect comparison, but it's the best data we've got, and it doesn't suggest that Abrams did worse than Beshear in suburbs.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Why would they swing more in Georgia than they did in Kentucky given that the question is about taking the Kentucky matchup to other states? The only reason I could see is that Georgia suburbs specifically have more potential swing voters than Kentucky ones, but I'm not sure what the basis for that is.