States are partisan laboratories of democracy where policy is misaligned with constituency preferences. Yet governors are popular. To resolve this puzzle, we argue governors use aligned rhetoric to make up for out-of-step policymaking, and this alignment has improved as nationalization, polarization, and policy extremity have increased. To test our argument, we measure the partisan slant of gubernatorial rhetoric in 2,400 State of the State Addresses (1962–2023). We fine-tune BERT models to predict the partisanship of held-out speeches using other contemporaneous addresses as training data. When a governor “sounds like” her co-partisans, the model labels her speech as more partisan. This predicted probability provides a dynamic, time-varying measure of gubernatorial partisan slant. We show governors have polarized, but these changes increasingly correlate with constituency partisanship. We also find rhetorical alignment predicts gubernatorial approval as well, which may help explain why governors are so popular.
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