Why did Republicans gain 8 governorships in 1986?

[ultraviolet]

I was reading 538's new article on the 2022 gubernatorial races, and they showed this:


1986 is such an outrageous outlier that it seems like it couldn't have happened under normal circumstances. Even more strange, Republicans lost 8 Senate seats, and in MS and FL, the governorship flipped red and the senate seat flipped blue. So what happened here?

[Hope For A New Era]

Nine of the eleven R flips were open-seat races, and ten of the eleven (all except Alabama) had margins of less than ten points.

Alabama was an unusual case where a lot of Democrats cast protest votes for the Republican because of some kind of messy situation in the Democratic primary. I'm not sure of all the details.


It really seems like it was just an anomaly where a lot of close races all just happened to go one way.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Most of them were all in the South and West also. Though for Congress and Senate, Democrats did rather well in the South that year.

[Mechavada]

Oh man the year 1986.  Well I won't pretend like I'm that old but boy can I tell you that 1986 was actually one of the most momentous years in history.  That was like the zenith of the 80s man with all the people with the big hair and the pastel colored leather jackets and the coke and sh**t.  I know my Uncle Zed down in Miami was telling me at that time he could walk down any street in Miami and get primo stuff for the lowest prices imaginable while pretty Cuban chicks shake the tail feathers.

Sorry, that's probably a little inappropriate.  Let's get back to the subject of Republicans winning 8 governorships in 1986.  Like how could that happen?  Especially in a lot of these down home places where comfort food is king?  Well I suspect it may have something to do with the infamous onery mentality of the people there.  Why I tell you you go buzzing down one of those Florida highways during a mid summer vacation and you go to Ole Buck's gasoline quikmart and you fill your car up with Ole Buck's gasoline and you go inside and you get a quart of Ole Buck's best cherry limeade slushie and you go to the register and you say hi to Ole Buck and he asks you what a no good carpetbagger like you is doing coming in there and buying Ole Buck's gasoline and drinking Ole Buck's soda my oh my do you learn really quickly that all is not as right as it should be in the Panhandle! 

I tell you man a lot of these guys (and gals) they don't like to put up with too much outside interference you dig?  They don't like it too much when the circus comes to town or when some Oklahoma rednecks come slagging through there looking for a good time and wanting to score a little rock and roll on the Panama City Beach strip!  All us poor white Okie boys ever wanted was a good time and some freshly made mangela!  Why do you gotta be so cruel Ole Buck?  Why you gotta be so cruel!?

Alright alright, enough clowning around, let's get back on topic.  Why did the GOP win 8 governorships in 1986?

Well to tell ya'lls the god's honest truth here I always found this pecular and I'm pleased to Betsy that the OP brought this subject up.  It's really kept me up at night and I wonder why up till now there has been no discussion at all on the forum or in the national media about this serious issue.  In 1986, in a year when Republicans were pounded all over the country in Congress, how and why did 8 mysterious, dark, and handsome men (and possibly women? sorry I'm too lazy to look) rise to the top and take the states in their grasp?  How did voters, in the midst of a Republican presidency, decide to elect eight more Republican governors in a year when incumbent parties usually lose?  WEll all I can say to that friend is it's telling the duplicity and silence of those with the mouthpieces.  It's obvious from their silence and the continued lack of care for the lives ultimately affected by all of this that there is a most grievous conspiracy going on.  Obviously the Republican seats were part of a deal that Republican strategist Lee Atwater made with The Devil which were paid with the revenues generated by the Reagan tax cuts that were diverted towards this deal rather than paying off our nation's debt.  Yes you see kids it was all a trick, an evil demonic trick, on the part of Ronald Devil Reagan so that he could become one with the Dark Side and the Great Manahooney!

[Orser67]

This is a very unusual gain for the president's party in the mid-term. Looks like Dems were defending a lot of open seats after a very strong cycle in 1982 (all but two of the GOP pick-ups were in open seats), a lot of the pickups were in the South (which as we probably all know was shifting away from Democrats during this period), and a decent number of the Republican gains took place in fairly close races, but this is still a very weird result.

[MT Treasurer]

Hard to believe that this map represents a 3-point Republican win, even keeping in mind how radically different the two parties' coalitions were back then, especially in OK:

[OSR stands with Israel]

Hard to believe that this map represents a 3-point Republican win, even keeping in mind how radically different the two parties' coalitions were back then, especially in OK:

Nothing beats this though(it’s from 1980 but still)

[Vosem]

1986 was not really that intense of a backlash, but it had the really bizarre pattern where all of the close Senate races broke Democratic and all of the close gubernatorial races broke Republican, giving the impression of two different worlds.

Ultimately I think the general liberal movement in America got very lucky with the Senate results in 1986; had the GOP done just a tiny bit better it's very likely that Anthony Kennedy and David Souter would've been replaced by Robert Bork and Edith Jones, and you would have had a string of quite right-wing Supreme Court decisions in the early 1990s. Probably including a strike-down of Roe.

(Like, if you have a universal swing of 2% towards Republicans among Senate races, the pickups go from D+8 to D+1).

[Alben Barkley]

Nine of the eleven R flips were open-seat races, and ten of the eleven (all except Alabama) had margins of less than ten points.

Alabama was an unusual case where a lot of Democrats cast protest votes for the Republican because of some kind of messy situation in the Democratic primary. I'm not sure of all the details.


It really seems like it was just an anomaly where a lot of close races all just happened to go one way.

Wiki:

The Democratic primary brought out a number of candidates. It resulted in a runoff between Lieutenant Governor Bill Baxley and Attorney General Charles Graddick. Graddick, the more conservative of the two Democrats, won the runoff election by a slim margin. Baxley challenged the results, and claimed that Graddick violated Democratic Party rules by encouraging people who voted in the Republican primary to cross over and vote in the Democratic runoff election.[3] While Republicans in the state have held open primaries for years, the Democrats bar Republicans and Independents from voting in its primary election. This challenge went to the Alabama Supreme Court, which ruled that crossover voting had taken place in large numbers and that the Democratic Party either had to select Baxley as the nominee or hold another runoff election. The party opted to name Baxley as its nominee.