Charlie Crist suffered from weak midterm turnout compared to presidential years
With Democrats smarting badly from terrible midterm turnout, here's a truly great, outside-the-box idea: Let's move some gubernatorial races to presidential years. It's not as crazy as it sounds. As Kevin Cate, an advisor to Charlie Crist, explains, Florida's quadrennial contest for governor
used to coincide with the presidential election, but segregationists grew worried that increased turnout would threaten their grip on state politics.
So they amended the state constitution to move the governor's race to the midterm cycle, which meant that the winner of the 1964 election, racist Jacksonville Mayor Haydon Burns, served only two years. But from then on, gubernatorial contests were held every four years, always during midterms.
(Incidentally, Cate says that the Dixiecrats were worried that liberals like JFK would act as "a drag on the (conservative) Democratic ticket," while scholars cited by Wikipedia elaborate that coattails from strong Republican presidential contenders where that the old political establishment feared. In any event, the gambit failed. Burns lost to a more liberal candidate in the 1966 primary, Miami Mayor Robert King High, whom he'd defeated two years previously. Burns wouldn't endorse High afterward, and the intra-party split led to Florida electing its first Republican governor since Reconstruction, Claude Kirk.)
Now, though, there's no reason why Democrats can't simply return things to the way they once were. Cate thinks that a measure to move gubernatorial races back to the presidential cycle would cost just $4 million, though that's just for signatures. Actually getting the 60 percent needed to amend the constitution would cost a lot more. But Crist spent almost $50 million this year to fall just short of beating GOP Gov. Rick Scott, and now that money is gone.
By contrast, a successful ballot measure (which would entirely bypass the Republican legislature) would pay dividends for years to come—and if Crist could have run in 2012 or 2016, he'd surely have won. It might also be possible to push similar shifts in states like Michigan and Ohio. Republicans will surely howl that Democrats want to "rig" the system, but all these changes would simply be aimed at increasing the voter pool for important races. It's not a silver bullet, and there are still many other things the party has to work on, but it's still the right thing to do.