Hated by the right people

The campaign for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination is already underway, although the presence of Donald Trump means it's not as open as it would normally be.  Ron DeSantis seems to have moved to the top of the field--Predicit has him at 0.23, with Trump at 0.31 and everyone else below 0.10.  I wondered whether DeSantis's position was slipping given the rise of Covid in Florida, so I looked for figures on the popularity of state governors.  That led me to something that wasn't exactly what I was looking for, but was still interesting--the Covid States project, which as the name suggests collects data on the state level for various things related to Covid.  One of them is approval of how your state governor has dealt with the pandemic.  The data run only to October 2020 (they have another report from March 2021 but the more recent data aren't available for download), but some patterns are visible.  Here is the average level of approval, by respondent's and governor's party:

 

Unsurprisingly Republicans in states with Republican governors (RR) and Democrats in states with Democratic governors (DD) are pretty satisfied.  Republicans in states with Democratic governors (RD) are more satisfied than Democrats with Republican governors (DR).  Independents in states with Democratic governors are more satisfied than independents in states with Republican governors, suggesting that the DR/RD difference is because Republican governors tend to pursue less popular policies, not because Democrats are more partisan.  

The next figure shows the standard deviation of state level approval ratings within each group.

Democrats' ratings of Republican governors have the most variation--some Republican governors got high approval ratings from Democrats and some got very low approval.  Independents' ratings of Republican governors also have pretty high variation.  There's not much difference among the other groups, although it's worth noting that variation in Republicans' approval of Democratic governors declined over the period.

Then taking the approval ratings of Democratic governors among Democrats and Republicans in the last survey (October 2020).

 

and the parallel figure for Republican governors (they are arranged so that approval within their party is on the horizontal and approval from the opposite party is on the vertical axis).

 

As the standard deviations indicate, Republican approval of Republican governors is pretty similar among states.  nineteen out of twenty-six were over 65%, and the maximum was 77.7%.  But Democratic approval of Republican governors ranged from below 10% (Iowa and South Dakota) to over 90% (Vermont).  DeSantis's approval from Republicans was just slightly above average (71% vs. 68%), but his approval among Democrats was among the lowest (14%).  Kristi Noem, who is also getting attention as a possible contender (PredictIt has her at #7) also was about average in approval from Republicans, but second-lowest in approval from Democrats.  Mike Hogan, who had high approval from both, has also been mentioned, but PredictIt has him down at #16, with a price of .01.  Greg Abbott of Texas and Doug Ducey of Arizona have also been mentioned--like DeSantis and Noem, they are distinguished by low rates of approval among Democrats rather than high rates of approval among Republicans.  

So it seems like the key to getting ahead for Republicans is not popularity among Republicans but unpopularity among Democrats.  A recent story on J. D. Vance quotes him as saying "I think our people hate the right people."  The data here show another aspect of the same thing--for Republicans today, the strongest appeal is negative: who you dislike and who dislikes you.