In Brief:
- At least 21 new governors will be elected this year.
- Eighteen incumbents are running for another term.
- Republicans have had the majority of governorships since 2011.
A gubernatorial melee is upon us.
This year, with much of the political money and attention being poured into the historically momentum-shifting congressional midterms, 36 governors’ offices are up for grabs. There’s a decent chance that this time next year, the majority of American governors will be new on the job. The elections will have real consequences for how states handle everything from the affordability challenges defining many of this season’s campaigns to the federal government’s immigration enforcement efforts. The feds under President Donald Trump have been devolving more power and authority to states on everything from education to environmental protection and reproductive rights, giving governors more leeway (though less money) to run the show.
If nothing else, the national political drama will have a new cast of characters.
At least 21 states will have new governors next year, with their incumbents term-limited, like Republican Ron DeSantis in Florida, or opting not to run for another term, like Democrat Tim Walz in Minnesota. Eighteen incumbents are running, however, including some popular figures who’ve been mentioned as 2028 presidential hopefuls, such as Democrat Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania and Republican Sarah Huckabee Sanders in Arkansas.
Some races are still taking shape. At least ten Democrats are running to replace term-limited California Gov. Gavin Newsom, though early polls suggest none of them is especially popular. Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs narrowly edged out Republican Kari Lake in the 2022 election, and polls suggest she’ll face a tight re-election campaign this year, with Congressman Andy Biggs leading the GOP primary field so far. The race to replace DeSantis in increasingly red Florida features contested primaries on both sides of the aisle.
Other contests look set. Ohio voters will likely replace their term-limited GOP governor, Republican Mike DeWine, with either Republican Vivek Ramaswamy, who co-led Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency with Elon Musk, or Democrat Amy Acton, the former director of the Ohio Department of Health. Ramaswamy appeared to be the favorite last summer, but more recent polls show a potentially tight race.
Other questions remain: Will Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar become the Democratic nominee for governor after Walz’s recent decision to bow out? Will Oregon’s Tina Kotek face a stiff challenge amid the collapse of the transportation funding package she championed in the legislature? By what margin of victory will Texas Gov. Greg Abbott claim an unprecedented fourth term?
Republicans currently hold 27 governorships, and have had the majority of them since 2011. In fact, they’ve held the majority of governors’ seats going back to 1995, except for a four-year window of Democratic success from 2007-2010. The partisan split doesn’t, strictly speaking, matter for the way the nation is governed. But it does offer an indication of where the political center of gravity lies. One potential outcome of this year’s elections is an even split between Republicans and Democrats. That hasn’t happened since 1967.
Overall, the political winds favor Democrats, with the party sweeping last November’s elections and most Americans disapproving of Trump’s job performance. They also favor incumbency, says Kristoffer Shields, the director of the Eagleton Center on the American Governor at Rutgers University. Most incumbents have won re-election going back through the decades, and for the last 15 years, their success rate has been especially high.
In some ways, this year’s gubernatorial elections could be a repeat of 2018, when Democrats rode a wave of anti-Trump sentiment to a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives and flipped a big handful of governor’s offices in the process. After 2018, Republicans’ lead on the gubernatorial front shrank from 33 seats to 27.
“That was a big pivot moment,” says Shields. “Here we are eight years later and a lot of those states are back up for grabs.”
