A governor and secretary of state compared with national offices

Why do state secretaries of state seem to attract attention mainly when something has gone wrong?

A broad analogy casts the governor as a president and the secretary of state as a prime minister or foreign minister handling routine government work.

Public visibility during controversy prompts a comparison of the governor's and secretary of state's work. The governor is likened to a president, while the secretary is compared with a prime minister or foreign minister. The analogy assigns much of the day-to-day work of government to the secretary. It remains a broad explanatory comparison, without a state-specific account of the office's legal powers.