Paul Davis (D-KS) still leads incumbent Gov. Sam Brownback, and still is moving up the rankings.
With just over five weeks to go, the three dozen battles for governor are still getting short shrift in the national political conversation. Given the narrow margins in the balance of power for the United States Senate, that is entirely understandable. Everyone is watching the Senate, where a handful of percentage points in a handful of races could be the difference between a Democratic-controlled or a Republican-controlled Senate.
Meanwhile, somewhat under the radar, one could make a compelling argument that more than half of the gubernatorial contests are worthy of a ton of attention. Some are interesting because of the pure competitiveness of the contests. Some are interesting because they offer the prospects of being legitimate "dark horse" upset prospects. And some are interesting solely because of the outsized personalities involved, or the pitched ideological battles the races represent.
From contest No. 1 to contest No. 36, you can point to damned near every one of these races and give a true electoral junkie a reason to watch. Alas, the Power Rankings are about that top 10. So, follow us beyond the squiggle to get this month's edition of the Daily Kos Elections gubernatorial Power Rankings.
(As always, for those curious about the criteria for determining these power rankings, feel free to jump to the end of the piece to peruse the methodology.)
One key point of separation between the Daily Kos Elections Senate Power Rankings (which, if you missed them last week, check them out here) and these gubernatorial Power Rankings is, quite simply, fluidity.
As noted last week in those Senate Power Rankings, the top 10 states in the countdown were the same 10 from earlier in the summer, albeit in a different order. As I noted in last Friday's Polling Wrap, the "races to watch" in the Senate has grown smaller and smaller as the election cycle has progressed. Our own Election Outlook for the Senate shows that, for all intents and purposes, 11 competitive Senate races remain.
At the gubernatorial level, meanwhile, the field is a little bit deeper. By the same metric (which is looking solely at races that are between a 5 and 95 percent chance of Democratic victory, thus eliminating the sure things and the lost causes), there are 16 gubernatorial races that are "competitive." And there are a handful of others that the respective parties have not quite slammed the door on.
As a result, there has been a lot more mobility in the gubernatorial Power Rankings than we have seen in the Senate ones. This month, three new entries make their way into the top 10, and there is marked movement across the board. Last month's No. 5 selection, Colorado, dropped all the way to No. 14, while Georgia went the other direction, jumping from No. 12 to No. 4.
The simple reason for this is that this particular slate of contests for governor are less nationalized, and all have their own bases of interest and support. While the RGA and DGA do exist (and are important), they don't dictate the level of competitiveness and interest in races in quite the way that the Senate map can get altered (and specifically, narrowed down) by the targeting efforts of the national committees and affiliated interest groups.
In short, nearly every one of these gubernatorial contests has its own potential for generating momentum, which makes the potential "field" of contests a good deal more broad.
Let's illustrate this fact with a pretty interesting example. At the bottom of our Power Rankings (well, 35th out of 36) lies the battle in Idaho between Republican incumbent Gov. Butch Otter and Democratic challenger A.J. Balukoff. Polls have shown this race rather comfortably in Otter's corner, but a couple of them have shown at least some grounds for concern for the GOP. That, plus a heap of anecdotal evidence, compelled one major electoral pundit (Larry Sabato) to move the race from a safe GOP hold to the more competitive ranking of Likely Republican. In other words, even the race our Power Rankings lists as the second least intriguing battle for governors is still viewed as at least marginally competitive.
With that reminder that there are a plethora of races worth examining in this year's slate of gubernatorial battles, here, in order, are those that "missed the cut": Pennsylvania (Corbett—44 points); Arizona (GOP-held Open Seat—42 points); South Carolina (Haley—36 points); Colorado (Hickenlooper—33 points); Iowa (Branstad—32 points); Ohio (Kasich—30 points); Hawaii (Dem-held Open Seat—29 points); Rhode Island (Dem-held Open Seat—28 points); Oregon (Kitzhaber—25 points); Minnesota (Dayton—25 points); New Mexico (Martinez—24 points); Texas (GOP-held Open Seat—23 points); Alaska (Parnell—22 points); New Hampshire (Hassan—21 points); Maryland (Dem-held Open Seat—20 points); New York (Cuomo—18 points); Nebraska (GOP-held Open Seat—16 points); California (Brown—12 points); Oklahoma (Fallin—11 points); Vermont (Shumlin—9 points); South Dakota (Daugaard—8 points); Wyoming (Mead—8 points); Tennessee (Haslam—8 points); Nevada (Sandoval—5 points); Idaho (Otter—4 points); and Alabama (Bentley—4 points)
As for the races that rose above even this slate of potentially intriguing battles, here is the (late) September edition of the Daily Kos Power Rankings for the gubernatorial elections of 2014.
No. 10—MAINE (45 points)—DKE Rating: Tossup
(Last month: NR)
Seriously, you almost have to wonder if, somehow, Independent gubernatorial candidate Eliot Cutler is a distant cousin to right-wing GOP Gov. Paul LePage, or something. LePage is, and always has been, a piss-poor ideological fit for his state. Like many state legislatures (not just Democratic ones), Maine's state legislature passed Medicaid expansion. LePage vetoed it. LePage's commitment to right-wing values has led to him polling quite poorly, averaging just 39 percent of the vote over the past five polls. And, yet, he still has a puncher's chance of being re-elected. Why? Because Cutler is still polling in double digits, which ain't enough to win, but it is sufficient to swipe enough votes from Democrat Michael Michaud and send LePage back for a second term.
No. 9—CONNECTICUT (46 points)—DKE Rating: Tossup
(Last month: 7)
This hard-hitting ad from earlier in the month made one thing crystal clear: Democratic Gov. Dan Malloy is eager to turn this rematch with Republican Tom Foley into a choice, and not a referendum. That, given Malloy's flagging favorability numbers, is a shrewd decision. An early September Quinnipiac poll (albeit one with their rather wonky LV screen) had Malloy down 6 points, with right-of-center Independent Joe Visconti nabbing 7 percent. Rather counterintuitively, Visconti is not disproportionately stealing votes from the Republican, meaning that his presence is potentially not the boon Democrats might have hoped.
No. 8—ARKANSAS (50 points)—DKE Rating: Leans Republican
(Last month: 9)
Nobody, and I mean nobody (Mark Pryor included), was happier to see that Suffolk/USA Today poll this week than Democratic gubernatorial challenger Mike Ross. Ross desperately needed a good polling headline, given the persistent sense that the race was slowly getting away from him. Indeed, absent a rather perplexing Rasmussen poll in August, the last time we saw a Ross lead in the polls was in April. That said, however, Ross has never trailed dramatically, and this race is just a slight change in the prevailing winds away from Democrats stealing a race that just about every Republican has assumed would be a GOP pickup.
7No. —KANSAS (51 points)—DKE Rating: Tossup
(Last month: NR)
Based on what we thought the election cycle would look like at the start of 2014, I think it's safe to say that few races have defied expectations more than the gubernatorial battle in Kansas. Democrat Paul Davis has actually led incumbent Republican Gov. Sam Brownback in 11 of the last 15 polls in the state. What's going on? Well, one clear explanation is that state's infamous moderate Republican wing appears to be in revolt, and the devoutly conservative Brownback isn't able to keep them in the fold. The state has a distinct GOP lean, and that might be enough to save Brownback. But this race is clearly a tossup, and if you forced a lean, it'd be more likely designated as "Lean Democrat" than "Lean Republican".
No. 6—WISCONSIN (51 points)—DKE Rating: Tossup
(Last month: NR)
Just when GOP Gov. Scott Walker thought he might be righting his listing ship, he got some pretty crappy news this week. Walker, who had been showing some very modest signs of recovery in the polls, discovered this week that an appeals court has lifted the injunction that had halted the investigation into possible violations of campaign finance laws by the governor, related to his 2012 recall. While it is doubtful that much will be probative in the case in the next five weeks, it does not help the governor to see the words "Walker" and "investigation" in the same sentence once again.
No. 5—MASSACHUSETTS (52 points)—DKE Rating: Likely Democratic
(Last month: 1)
In the final primary night on the calendar, Democratic state Attorney General Martha Coakley finally nailed down the nomination for Massachusetts governor, albeit by a considerably smaller margin than had been predicted. This led to Twitter panic aplenty, with Democrats ruefully remembering her inability to close the deal in 2010, when she lost the special election for the U.S. Senate to Scott Brown. But this isn't 2010, and Coakley is already benefitting from the fact that her opponent, 2010 GOP nominee Charlie Baker, has already managed to crapped the bed pretty spectacularly in the early weeks of the truncated general election campaign. Polling on this one, meanwhile, is all over the map, the state of the race depending on whether you prefer MassINC's likely voter screen (which favors Coakley), or SocialSphere's (which favors Baker).
No. 4—GEORGIA (54 points)—DKE Rating: Likely Republican
(Last month: NR)
This is a race where, candidly, the odd rules of the state are preventing Democrats from what should be a real source of optimism. After all, incumbent Republican Gov. Nathan Deal is less than 2 points ahead of Democrat Jason Carter, according to the most recent polls. Deal's tenure in office has hardly been a rousing success. His state is among the nation's highest in terms of unemployment, which led him to make an amazing ass of himself when he tried to explain it (hint—it is a conspiracy!). So, how is this still classified as "Likely Republican"? Because, sadly, Georgia is one of the few states that employs a ridiculous state election law that requires a runoff election (which will be held over a month later) if no one reaches 50 percent. There is a Libertarian candidate (Andrew Hunt) who could easily be the spoiler, and Democrats have not won one of these statewide runoffs in over two decades.
No. 3—ILLINOIS (63 points)—DKE Rating: Leans Republican
(Last month: 6)
Meanwhile, Illinois remains as a "Leans Republican" race for governor, but it may not stay there for much longer, if the trajectory of the polls continues in the direction it has headed. In the five polls released in September, Republican Bruce Rauner has a "lead" of 0.4 percentage points over incumbent Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn. If you look at the five polls released in August, Rauner's average lead was 6.0 points. In July? 7.8 points. You get the idea. What's more, as I mentioned in Tuesday's Polling Wrap, one of Rauner's best pollsters (GOP outfit We Ask America) suddenly sees what was a 12-point GOP lead evaporating down to a 3-point advantage.
No. 2—MICHIGAN (71 points)—DKE Rating: Tossup
(Last month: 4)
Were it not for Florida, which is rightfully getting the lion's share of the gubernatorial attention, Michigan would be a national marquee race. The polls have been tight (eight of the last 10 polls have shown leads of 3 points or less), and the contest is an appealing battle of personalities and ideologies. There is no doubt that incumbent GOP Gov. Rick Snyder is concerned about his inability to put any daylight between himself and Democratic challenger Mark Schauer. This month, as our own Joan McCarter noted, Snyder began touting Medicaid expansion, a cause to which he was quite late to the party, in an effort to make voters forget that he battled it for an extended period of time. This race is one of several examples (both federally and at the gubernatorial level) of how the national debate over health care has changed markedly over the past several months.
No. 1—FLORIDA (91 points)—DKE Rating: Tossup
(Last month: 2)
And then, as always, there is Florida. What else is there to say that hasn't already been said? Polls show a coin flip, as it has throughout the contest. A Libertarian candidate, Adrian Wyllie, is polling fairly well, perhaps a sign that voters have grown wary of both major party candidates in a contest that has been relentlessly nasty. So what's left? Our own David Nir took a look at something that actually has not received a ton of focus—those stubborn undecideds:
The $50 million question, of course, is where that final block of undecideds winds up. Do they stick with Scott, the man they know? Or do they side with Crist, the man they also kinda know, too? There's also the matter of which candidate Wyllie's supports drift over to, assuming he fades by Election Day, which often happens with third-party candidates. That doesn't seem dispositive, though. Quinnipiac tried to answer that second question by asking Wyllie voters whom their second choice was; recalculated, Scott still leads by 2 points, 46-44, so we can't say very much about these erstwhile Libertarians.
Getting back to the undecideds, 39 percent of the respondents in SurveyUSA's poll identify as Democrats while just 20 say they're Republicans and 40 percent call themselves independents. Quinnipiac's undecideds are even more extreme, at 29 D, 8 R, and 64 I (though of course we're talking about a very tiny sample here). Florida also makes things tricky because lots of conservative Dixiecrats who despise Obama still consider themselves Democrats.
So, if the undecideds break slightly to Crist (which, in a very basic analysis of their partisan leanings, seems plausible), that makes the race ... damned near a tie. Absent a late surge one way or the other, I will go on record with this "prediction"—I will be absolutely shocked if either man wins this office by more than 2 points.
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With the rankings in the books, here, as promised for those interested, is the statement about the rubric for determining the power rankings:
THE RUBRIC: Three criteria were used to generate our top 10 list.
One is competitiveness. This was done rather easily, utilizing our DKE Gubernatorial race ratings. If a race had been designated by the Daily Kos Elections crew as a "toss-up," that netted that race 15 points. If the race was designated as a "lean" D/R race, it was worth 10 points. If the race was designated as a "likely" D/R contest, it was worth five points.
The second criteria is newsworthiness. Some races, for lack of a more elegant way of putting it, have more going on than others. The criteria here was also objective: a gubernatorial race received a single point for every day in the past month in which it was mentioned in a Daily Kos Elections Daily Digest. For those who are curious, top spot during this month went to Florida, a race that was mentioned in our Digests an amazing total of 24 times.
The final criteria is "pollworthiness". Media outlets, campaigns, and polling firms are not going to poll a race for nothing. The more intriguing races are going to get more data points, typically. So, four points were awarded for each poll conducted (general election only) in a given state's gubernatorial race, as logged in our comprehensive DKE polling database. Florida, with the primary season now over, is back to number one by this metric, with a whopping thirteen polls in the period from August 1-September 15.
The "tiebreaker," when races have the same number of points accumulated, is as follows: 1) The first tie-breaker is the number of mentions in the month ("newsworthiness"); 2) The second tie-breaker, should their number of mentions also be equal, is that the state that was lower in the rankings in the previous month gets the higher of the rankings among the tied races. If last month was also a tie, it goes back to previous months until the tie is broken.