GOP Governors May Be In Trouble

Less than a year after a cadre of Republican firebrands swept into statehouses from Ohio to Florida to Wisconsin, voters are turning on them—with significant implications for the 2012 presidential election, according to Daily Beast's John Avlon. In pivotal swing-states where voters narrowly elected Republican governors in 2010—like Florida and Ohio (with 47 electoral votes between them)—evidence of buyer's remorse is piling up fast.

Just seven months ago, Republicans swept the Sunshine State with Tea Party-backed candidate Rick Scott winning the governor's office with a 1.2 percent margin of victory.  But instead of consolidating support by reaching out and winning over the reasonable edge of the opposition,Scott continued with his campaign posture of refusing to talk to the press. He canceled a $2 billion federal high-speed rail project and is seeking to delay (and functionally deny) implementation of an anti-gerrymandering reform ballot referendum overwhelmingly passed in 2010.

Now Rick Scott finds himself the least popular newly elected governor in Florida history. Fifty-five percent of Florida voters disapprove of Scott's job in office, while only 32 percent approve, according to a mid-April poll.

In Ohio, Governor John Kasich is struggling as well, after narrowly defeating Democrat incumbent Ted Strickland last fall. A new Quinnipiac poll released on Wednesday found Kasich's approval numbers decidedly upside down, with 49 percent of voters disapproving and 38 percent approving of his efforts in office to date. This was a nominal improvement over the previous month, when he had a 46-30 split. But the persistent gender gap facing Kasich is stark—women disapprove of Kasich's job in office by a margin of 51 to 33 percent.

In Wisconsin, Governor Scott Walker's new effort to have same-sex couples' hospital visitation rights rescinded is unlikely to improve his approval ratings, especially among the 27 percent of independent voters in the state.

In Maine, Tea Party-backed Republican Paul LePage beat Independent candidate Eliot Cutler by less than 7,500 votes last fall. His stormy tenure has been marked by skirmishes over removing labor-history murals, initially refusing to attend MLK day celebrations and refusing to sign legislation to ban the chemical BPA because—in his words—"the worst case is some women may have little beards." A recent poll found that only three out of 10 Maine residents approved of LePage's job in office.

Avlon believes that swing voters supported Republicans in 2010 because they wanted a check and balance against unified Democratic control of Washington. They wanted to rein in unsustainable spending in the name of generational responsibility. They took Republicans at their word that social conservative evangelizing would be 'de-emphasized' in favor of more urgent economic concerns.