. V Hello from the Other Side; I'll Compromise a Thousand Times How Minority Party Governors Win Unlikely Elections by Megan Elizabeth Goldberg Submitted to the Department of Political Science in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctorate of Philosophy at the MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY June 2019 @Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2019. All rights reserved. S i Signature redacted A uthor ............................ Department of Political Science May 29, 2019 Certified by ..... Signatureredacted Adam Berinsky Mitsui Professor of Political Science Thesis Supervisor Signature redacted Accepted by......... .... MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE Taylor Fravel OF TECHNOLOGY Arthur and Ruth Sloan Professor of Political Science Chairman, Graduate Program Committee SFP 25 2019 LIBRARIES 77 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02139 MITLibraries http://Iibraries.mit.edu/ask DISCLAIMER NOTICE Due to the condition of the original material, there are unavoidable flaws in this reproduction. We have made every effort possible to provide you with the best copy available. Thank you. The images contained in this document are of the best quality available. Hello from the Other Side; I'll Compromise a Thousand Times How Minority Party Governors Win Unlikely Elections by Megan Elizabeth Goldberg Submitted to the Department of Political Science on May 29, 2019, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctorate of Philosophy Abstract Despite increasing nationalization and polarization in state politics, some blue states con- tinue to elect Republican governors, while some red states continue to elect Democratic governors. These minority party governors are out of step with their state's mass ideology and partisanship when research on public opinion and voting behavior suggests that it should be fairly easy for voters to elect officials that match their own ideology by using partisan cues and other information shortcuts. How do these governors win elections and maintain relatively high approval ratings? This dissertation uses data and text from gubernatorial social media accounts from 2009 through 2017 to argue that minority party governors are able to defy electoral odds by distancing themselves from their national party, through the use of language to downplay their partisan identity and ideological moderation, and then emphasize non-ideological valence issues such as the economy, good governance, and public health to shift the focus from issues that are highly partisan. Thesis Supervisor: Adam Berinsky Title: Mitsui Professor of Political Science 3 4 Acknowledgments This dissertation was only made possible by a scaffolding of support and invisible labor that deserves not only recognition, but celebration and thanks: My committee and chair (Adam Berinsky, Devin Caughey, and Chris Warshaw), and all the faculty in the Political Science department, who guided me through the many ups and downs of coursework and dissertation writing, and who showed me the many ways to be a political scientist. Thank you for finding ways to support me navigating the past three years as a new working parent and the vast amount of feedback you've given me over the past six years. My fellow graduate students, and especially my cohort who entered in the fall of 2013: you have been an bottomless well of support, a source of great friendship, and the best possible colleagues I could have ever hoped for. I never would have survived the past six years without our many trips to the Sloan Cafeteria for Diet Coke and research talk, your willingness to babysit my kids at the last minute so I can make a meeting, and our yearly winter trips to Vermont. The staff and administrators in the Political Science department, who always made sure the t's were crossed and the i's dotted, and always went out of their way to make sure I had the support I needed as a graduate student mother. Thank you for always being willing to look at baby pictures and help me figure out what forms I needed. My faculty and mentors at Saint Mary's College, especially Joanne Snow, Amy Caven- der, and Patrick Pierce, who always made themselves available for guidance years after I graduated, and who made sure I left Saint Mary's prepared for graduate work. To Pat, especially: thank you for planting the seed over a decade ago the first time I sat in your office, and you told me you wished more women at Saint Mary's knew they were capable of doing PhD work. You guided me through my first ever research projects, and your influence on my work will last far into the future. And finally, my family. My mom, who flew and drove all over the country to provide childcare at conferences and interviews, reminded me to work and take care of myself, and sent us a week's worth of takeout before my defense. My dad, who is always up for a con- versation about statistics or politics, and goes out of his way to read my work. My siblings, who were nothing but encouraging and always knew the right time to remind me what the end goal was. And most importantly: David and the girls. Thank you, David, for taking on countless hours of labor to make sure I had the time and space to write and work when I needed to. Thank you for pushing me to do better work, for always being willing to let me bounce ideas off you, and for going above and beyond to learn more about political science than you ever wanted so that you could help me more. And thank you to my two daughters, Finn 5 Maddie and Ari - thank you for being a daily reminder that life exists outside the pages of a dissertation, and for the love you have injected in our lives. A non-trivial number of pages of this dissertation with one or the other (or even both!) of you asleep in my lap, and the drive to work quickly was often inspired by a fear that you would soon wake up. Without your disinclination to sleep, I might still be slowly writing. 6 Contents 1 Introduction 15 1.1 Minority party governors as puzzles ........... ............ 16 1.2 Electoral strategies of minority party governors ................ 17 1.3 Overview of Dissertation . ............. .............. 18 2 Minority Party Governors 21 2.1 Representation and Minority Party Governors ...... ......... .. 22 2.2 Challenges from the Mass Public for Minority Party Governors . ....... 26 2.3 A Measurement Strategy for Minority Party Governors . ......... .. 28 2.4 Minority Party Governors, 1972 - 2014 ......... ............ 32 2.5 The Role and Impact of Minority Party Governors ........ ....... 34 3 Winning Unlikely Elections 37 3.1 Overcoming the Power of Party Identity .. .............. .... 38 3.2 Minimizing Partisan Effects .... ......... ......... ..... 40 3.3 Evaluating Candidates on a Non-Policy Dimension .......... .... 42 3.3.1 Interaction of Spatial Models with Valence .. ........ ..... 43 3.3.2 Measuring Valence . ......... ........ ........ , . 44 3.3.3 Minority Party Governors and Valence .... ........ ..... 45 3.4 Importance of Communications ....... .............. .... 46 3.5 Minority Party Strategies ............. .............. 47 4 Data on Political Communications 49 4.1 Gubernatorial Communications ..... ......... ......... .. 52 4.1.1 Data Collection for Gubernatorial Tweets .... ........... 52 4.2 Turning Tweets into Usable Data .... ............. ....... 53 4.2.1 Text Processing ......................... ..... 53 4.2.2 Extracting Text Features: Document Term Matrix and Word Embed- d in gs ............. ....................... 55 5 Mavericks or Party Loyalists? 57 5.1 Governor Partisanship Intensity .. .............. ......... 58 5.1.1 R esults ...... ............. ............ .... 60 5.2 Copying the National Party ..... ...... ....... ....... .. 64 5.2.1 R esults ...... ............. ............ .... 66 7 6 Beyond Party Cues: Moderating on Ideology 71 6.1 Are minority party governors ideological moderates? .. ...... ..... 72 6.1.1 Estimating ideology using Twitter follows ... ...... ...... 73 6.1.2 R esults . ......... ........ ......... ........ 75 7 A Focus on Valence Criteria 81 7.1 Using structural topic models to evaluate tweets ....... ......... 82 7.1.1 Estimating fhe Structural Topic Model . ............ .... 82 7.2 Estimating the structural topic model ....... .............. 84 7.3 Locating valence topics .... .............. ............ 84 7.4 Relationship between valence topics and oppositional party strength ..... 86 8 Discussion and Conclusion 91 8.1 N ext Steps ......... ............. .............. 92 A Descriptive Data: Minority Party Governors, 1972-2014 95 B Gubernatorial Twitter Handles 97 C Supplementary Analysis for Ideal Points 103 D Structural Topic Model Additional Analysis 111 8 List of Figures 2-1 Pooled PartisanSelection: The figure on the left shows a strong positive re- lationship between mass liberalism and presidential vote share for Democrats pooled over 1972 to 2012, while the relationship between state level mass liberalism and gubernatorial vote share for Democrats is much flatter. .... 23 2-2 Partisanselection for state and national executive races over time: the figure on the left shows the coefficient from an OLS regression of mass liberalism on state level election outcomes. In presidential races, mass liberalism consis- tently has a positive, statistically significant effect on election outcomes, while results are far less consistent at the gubernatorial level. .. ........ .. 24 2-3 Four ways to compare a governor to their electoral context: This project will compare a governor's party to mass partisanship in