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I have to admit that I haven't really followed either, but has either delivered on the promise to be a moderate in the way that a Governor like Larry Hogan did? Biden in 2020 was able to sell the illusion of moderation largely because he had huge name ID from being VP, no recent record (since he hadn't done anything meaningful in 12 years), and the special circumstances of the covid campaign that let him run a sort of blank slate campaign with few rallies/appearances. As the infamous Maury Povich meme would say, "That was a lie." And a big reason Joe isn't +10 on Trump despite being old and declining is because it was a lie. If the Joe we were sold in 2020 actually was governing, inflation would never have spiked as hard as it did, there wouldn't be naked activists in White House photo ops, we'd only have one super embarrassing female Supreme Court Justice, there wouldn't be an embarrassing collapsed bridge in the Mediterranean intended to supply terrorists with stuff, etc etc.
So are Shapiro and Beshear really moderates? Have they let through 20+ week abortion bans? Have they let fracking happen when they had the chance to stop it? Have they stopped people trying to trans the kids?
The problem with running a "moderate" no one knows about is you have to establish their moderate bona fides. And usually this ends up being a lie. Sure, sometimes a real moderate like Romney or McCain gets the nomination, but they lose that luster pretty quickly when the Eye of Sauron is on them. And I have a suspicion that for relatively unknown Democrat governors, there will be little in actual evidence of being moderate.
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