Correction: A perception of "real things".

When Lindsey Graham was first elected, my dad said he didn't vote for him, but he had promise (his opinion is the opposite almost 20 years later).
Gen X and boomers tend to have low bars for people in authority. https://twitter.com/Bajanlady08/status/1324690103327989760

A Democrat in his 50s once told me he thought Nikki Haley was a good governor of SC because she took down the Confederate flag from the capitol in 2015. Literally, that's it.

And in Baltimore, I have seen people in their 40s and older brag about voting for Larry Hogan AND Catherine Pugh and insist that both have been good leaders.
This isn't a party issue, this is a "deference to authority and mediocrity" issue.

I've lived in Maryland during 4 out of the 6 years of Larry Hogan's term as governor. One of the only things he'd done right was bring in PPEs from South Korea, but even that turned out to be a dud.
I would never stoop so low as to call him a "good governor".

I know people get pissed off when I badmouth the south, but you have to face the facts, the reason Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell won again isn't because of what THEY did, but because of the kind of political culture consolidated by the likes of Strom Thurmond.

And it's completely and age and generational thing. Decades ago, people in certain southern states were accustomed to getting scholarships and job references from pork-barrel segregationist dinosaurs like Strom Thurmond.

It's very much an extremely low-cost patronage machine that both Democrats and Republicans here have conceded to.
South Carolina is stuck with the likes of Lindsey Graham and Jim Clyburn because both inherited the same system from Strom Thurmond.

Georgia and North Carolina have very similar problems, but have overcome them simply because they attract more young people and immigrants to overturn this cynical southern "respect-the-elders" political machine.