This week, in the wake of Daily Kos Elections launching its new 2018 elections portal, we’ve already discussed this week where we stand with the Senate (where the Democrats need absolutely everything to go right to win a majority) and the House (where the Democrats are well-situated to flip the chamber, though it’s far from certain). Now it’s time for the third leg of the stool: the nation’s gubernatorial races.
Each week, we’ll be revisiting these same topics, with the Senate on Mondays, the House on Wednesdays, and the governors’ races on Thursdays. (Which isn’t to say that we don’t also care intensely about state legislatures, statewide downballot offices like Secretary of State, state Supreme Court races, and ballot measures … just that we don’t have enough polling information about those races to do regular features on them.)
Governors’ races tend to get the short end of the stick in terms of national media coverage, in large part because they’re usually fought in places far away from the major media centers, between candidates that the Beltway press corps don’t know and aren’t very interested in. Which is a shame, because governors don’t just handle obscure parochial issues but make big-picture decisions, which often interact with what’s happening in Washington. (Consider which states the Affordable Care Act is effective in and where it isn’t; it has a lot to do with which governors chose to accept Medicaid expansion.)
On top of that, governors can be important media messengers for their party, and often form much of the bench for presidential elections. And one other way in which they’re important at the national level is their role in the redistricting process, which in turn has a huge impact on what the next decade’s House will look like; in most states, a Democratic governor can veto a Republican legislature’s map and force a fair compromise or court-drawn map, or, in states with two Democratic-controlled legislative chambers, can sign off on an advantageous map.
The good news is, the Democrats are likely to gain a significant number of gubernatorial seats this year, at least half a dozen and probably more. Unlike the Senate, where this year’s map finds a lot of Democratic incumbents on the defensive in red states, the gubernatorial map finds a lot of swing states (and red states that tend to be more flexible for state officials rather than federal offices) with open seats where Republican governors first elected in 2010 are term-limited out. Those ample opportunities, combined with the strong wind at Democrats’ backs, have created a very friendly playing field.
Perhaps one other reason that people don’t like talking about gubernatorial races as much is there’s no magic number to shoot for. The party that controls more than 25 state houses doesn’t get any sort of policy bonus or get to tell the other states what to do. So, unlike the Senate or House, there’s no red line that gets crossed that tells you whether you “win” or “lose” the whole ballgame.
Still, there’s a lot to be learned by visualizing the governors’ races the same way we did with the congressional races, arranging them in a “totem pole” fashion, from the ones with the biggest Democratic margins down to the biggest deficits, based on the polling averages from each state on our gubernatorial page. (Keep in mind these are only the ones that Daily Kos Elections deems competitive, though that category — unlike with the Senate — encompasses a majority of the races; only four Dem-held seats are in the Safe Democratic column and only nine GOP-held seats are in the Safe Republican column. Many states that are implacably blue or red at the federal level are more willing to mix things up at the state level.)
STATE |
D CAND. |
D AVG. |
R CAND. |
R AVG. |
DIFF. |
FLIP? |
ILLINOIS |
Pritzker |
44 |
Rauner (inc.) |
28 |
+16 |
D FLIP |
MICHIGAN |
Whitmer |
49 |
Schuette |
38 |
+11 |
D FLIP |
MINNESOTA |
Walz |
45 |
Johnson |
37 |
+8 |
|
CONNECTICUT |
Lamont |
44 |
Stefanowski |
37 |
+7 |
|
COLORADO |
Polis |
45 |
Stapleton |
39 |
+6 |
|
RHODE ISLAND |
Raimondo (inc.) |
42 |
Fung |
36 |
+6 |
|
WISCONSIN |
Evers |
49 |
Walker (inc.) |
43 |
+6 |
D FLIP |
NEW MEXICO |
Lujan Grisham |
47 |
Pearce |
42 |
+5 |
D FLIP |
FLORIDA |
Gillum |
47 |
De Santis |
44 |
+3 |
D FLIP |
IOWA |
Hubbell |
39 |
Reynolds (inc.) |
36 |
+3 |
D FLIP |
NEVADA |
Sisolak |
43 |
Laxalt |
40 |
+3 |
D FLIP |
SOUTH DAKOTA |
Sutton |
45 |
Noem |
42 |
+3 |
D FLIP |
OREGON |
Brown (inc.) |
43 |
Buehler |
41 |
+2 |
|
KANSAS |
Kelly |
38 |
Kobach |
38 |
0 |
|
MAINE |
Mills |
39 |
Moody |
39 |
0 |
|
GEORGIA |
Abrams |
45 |
Kemp |
46 |
-1 |
|
OHIO |
Cordray |
42 |
De Wine |
44 |
-2 |
|
OKLAHOMA |
Edmondson |
42 |
Stitt |
46 |
-4 |
|
NEW HAMPSHIRE |
Kelly |
42 |
Sununu (inc.) |
48 |
-6 |
|
ARIZONA |
Garcia |
41 |
Ducey (inc.) |
48 |
-7 |
|
SOUTH CAROLINA |
Smith |
40 |
McMaster (inc.) |
52 |
-12 |
|
ALASKA |
Begich |
27 |
Dunleavy |
40 |
-13 |
I TO R |
MARYLAND |
Jealous |
34 |
Hogan |
52 |
-18 |
|
As you can see, the Democratic candidates are on track to pick up eight seats, which would take them from a historically-poor 16 governorships up to near parity at 24. The Republicans would drop from 33 to 26; the reason those numbers seem off balance is because Alaska currently has an independent governor, Bill Walker, who is running for re-election but seems poised to finish third. (He’s polling at 24, behind Republican state Sen. Mike Dunleavy and Democratic ex-Sen. Mark Begich. If you’re wondering what that’s all about, Walker defeated the Republican incumbent in 2014 after the Democratic candidate dropped out and became his Lt. Governor ticket-mate. With Alaska’s economy hammered by low oil prices, Walker has become very unpopular, and Begich ran, perhaps in a game of chicken to get Walker to drop out. Unfortunately, the filing deadline passed in August without either one dropping out, and now Begich and Walker are both sitting in the middle of the road in their collided, burning cars.)
At the very top of the list is another extremely unpopular incumbent, Republican Bruce Rauner of Illinois, who barely won against an unpopular Democratic incumbent in 2014 and has only gotten less popular from there. Rauner has managed to appeal to neither left nor right; he barely survived a primary challenge from Jeanne Ives, a hard-right state legislator, earlier this year, and now he faces a third-party challenge from the right from another state legislator, Sam McCann. While Rauner isn’t quite in danger of finishing third, McCann is helping to keep Rauner polling down in the 20s, an astoundingly bad showing for an incumbent. Fellow billionaire and Democrat J.B. Pritzker is very likely to replace him.
There’s one state that’s even more populous than Illinois that’s poised to flip, though, and that may be the most important of all the competitive races: Florida. (There are two even bigger states up for grabs this year, but we rate California and Texas as Safe Democratic and Safe Republican, respectively … though, amusingly, neither lead in California or Texas is as big as the one that Pritzker enjoys in Illinois!) While his leads have always been in the low- to mid-single digits, Andrew Gillum, the Democratic mayor of Tallahassee, hasn’t trailed in a single poll since unexpectedly winning the primary; currently, the average has him leading Republican Rep. Ron DeSantis 47-44, in what’s undoubtedly the most frequently-polled gubernatorial race in the nation. A win for Gillum is important not just from a policy perspective but a redistricting one; Gillum’s presence would stop a Republican legislature from enacting a new gerrymander in Florida as it likely expands to 29 U.S. House seats.
Maybe even more emotionally satisfying for progressives, though, is the pickup that’s brewing in Wisconsin, where after surviving two elections and a recall, Republican governor Scott Walker’s luck may have finally run out. Walker hasn't led in any poll since June, and the current polling average puts Democratic education superintendent Tony Evers up by a convincing 49-43. After having already dispatched him once in the GOP presidential primary, Donald Trump now appears to be taking Walker down a second time, thanks to his negative coattails (or coatfails?).
Back at the start of the cycle, two races that prognosticators thought might give Democrats the best chance of pickups were New Mexico and Maine — two presidentially-blue states that are open seats where unpopular, term-limited Republicans are leaving office (Susana Martinez and Paul LePage, respectively). Democratic Rep. Michelle Lujan Grisham is indeed winning — though not by quite as showy a margin as Gretchen Whitmer in the ostensibly swingier state of Michigan.
But our polling average is still showing a tie in Maine, which at first glance seems somewhat surprising. Much of the problem in Maine, though, is that we’ve seen almost no polling here; there’s been a total of one poll taken, in August, of the matchup between Democratic Attorney General Janet Mills and Republican businessman Shawn Moody. Compounding the problem is that there are several well-known independent candidates running here (including state Treasurer Terry Hayes); Maine’s innovative move toward ranked-choice voting would seem like it would solve that problem but it only applied to the primary election and not the general election. It’s quite possible Mills is doing better than a tie, but we’re flying almost blind here.
Finally, there are two other states having a similar problem, which explains why they’re in such anomalous-looking positions on the totem pole: Oregon and South Dakota, two states which are very reliably blue/red but also have some of the nation’s longest gubernatorial winning streaks for their respective parties. Oregon’s incumbent governor Kate Brown hasn’t previously been regarded as being in much danger; we have the race rated as Likely Democratic. The only polls on our trendline, however, are from Republican pollsters who’ve seemingly tried to flood the zone here, giving us an average that puts her up only 2 points over Republican state Rep. Knute Buehler (who, it should be noted, is a more skilled candidate than the usual GOPers who’ve run statewide in Oregon in the last few decades). No national pollster has looked at the race, and the last time a nonpartisan local pollster (DHM Research, for Oregon Public Broadcasting) polled here was back in January, outside the scope of our trendlines; they found Brown up 46-29.
South Dakota is rather the mirror image; the only polls we’ve seen here at all of the general election are all from Anzalone Liszt, a good pollster but a Democratic firm who are working for the nominee, state Sen. Billie Sutton, and their most recent poll gave Sutton a small lead. It seems somewhat odd (and encouraging) that his opponent, Rep. Kristi Noem, hasn’t tried to rebut with her own internal polls, but we suspect that a public poll of this race would show somewhat different results (and, accordingly, we still have this race rated Likely Republican for now). The way you’ll really know, though, if anything is truly going on in Oregon or South Dakota isn’t the polls, but if the national organizations — the DGA and RGA — start spending significant money here at the end.
As a bottom line, though … regardless of whether that actually happens, just the very fact that we’re talking about South Dakota (and similarly situated states, like Kansas and Oklahoma) being possibly up for grabs at all, indicates how strong of a year we’re having.