Why do people say that Virginia is so blue it cannot elect a Republican Governor when Republicans have won 6 of the last 8 gubernatorial elections in Massachusetts?
VA-MD would be the appropriate comparison here, not VA-MA, but I’d say:
1) Considerably more inflexible/concentrated D base in VA (government workers, D.C. liberals, much higher proportion of non-white voters)
2) New England Republicans having more leeway to run moderate campaigns (especially on social issues) that are divorced from the national GOP while Southern Republicans have to placate a very conservative R base
3) The legislature being reliably D in most New England states and the R governor serving as a check on the legislature rather than setting the agenda in/with it
4) Much of the Southern D base being out-of-state transplants who are less susceptible to campaigns centered on "local issues" or "local pride"
5) VA races being more nationalized due to the off-year dynamic — there’s no way Hogan would have beaten Brown in MD in 2013 either.
6) Blue state voters being even less persuadable now than during the Obama era, with straight-ticket voting increasingly determining every statewide race in a blue state. (This was already the case in Senate races under Obama but now seems to apply to gubernatorial/non-federal races as well.)
The reality is that >95% of blue state Republicans are DOA from the beginning regardless of the quality of their campaign in this day and age, which basically makes gubernatorial races like MD/CT/VA/NJ/CO/etc. unwinnable for GOP in 2021/2022 and the foreseeable future even in GOP wave environments and/or with particularly strong Republican candidates. I also think Baker and Scott could have a much closer call in 2022 than people think (also Sununu if he runs for GOV again). Hogan probably would have lost reelection in 2022 if he had been eligible for another term.
Youngkin struggling this much to even match Trump 2016 in a non-federal race also flies in the face of the notion that Maggie Hassan is the most vulnerable D Senator in 2022 — with partisanship and PVI ruling the day, it’s really hard to argue that the Democratic Senator from the Biden +7 state is somehow more vulnerable than the Democratic Senators from the Biden +<0.5 and Biden +2 states.
