What’s On the 2024 Ballot #3: Governor Races
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This series of posts covers various marquee offices holding elections this year by office type: U.S. Senate, U.S. House, governors, etc. Each post will include an overview of the office itself, some historical data when appropriate, what election forecasters have to say (if applicable), and key races to watch out for.
This week looks at gubernatorial elections, of which there are 11 this year.
An Overview of Governors
The governorship is the highest state-level office in a given state. They’re usually held in midterm elections (e.g., 2022), which 36 states do. Two states have them in the odd-numbered year following a presidential election (e.g., 2021), three states have them in the odd-numbered year prior to a presidential election (e.g., 2023), and eleven states have them in presidential election years.
You may notice that does not add up to 50 states. That’s because New Hampshire and Vermont have two-year terms for governor, meaning their elections are held in both midterm and presidential election years. The other 48 states’ governors have four-year terms.
Also, there are 37 governors subject to some kind of term limit. In most cases, these are two consecutive terms — once you serve that limit, you have to be out of the governor’s office for at least one term. (There may be some exceptions, however, such as if you served a partial term prior to two full terms.) Whatever the term limit may be, this often leads to governors being unable to run for election, making theirs an open seat. Open seats do not necessarily mean they are vacant; it just means that the incumbent is not running.
With this being a presidential election year, we have 11 states that are also voting on their respective governor’s races. The 11 states are Delaware, Indiana, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, North Carolina, North Dakota, Utah, Vermont, Washington, and West Virginia.
Recent Historical Elections for this Year’s Governor’s Offices
This chart shows the party affiliation of those 11 states’ current governors and the last election that the opposing party won the office. For example, Delaware’s current governor is a Democrat and a Republican hasn’t won the seat since 1988.
For a handful of states, there hasn’t been a change in party since the 1980s, around the times when Ronald Reagan began his first term as president or when he was leaving office after his second term. With the exception of Montana and West Virginia, it has been at least three elections since any of these states’ governorships flipped in partisan control.
There isn’t much opportunity for shifts in partisan control this year, either. It has happened in recent presidential election years, however. Below is a chart comparing how many total governors and governorships are up for election this year compared to the last three presidential election years, their party affiliations, and how many Democratic and Republican governors were elected in those previous three elections.
In the last three presidential elections, Republicans have had at least a +1 net gain in gubernatorial seats. The following seats in these years changed party hands:
- 2012: Republicans gained North Carolina.
- 2016: This year saw a ton of partisan changes for governors. Democrats gained North Carolina. Republicans gained Missouri, New Hampshire, and Vermont. Then in 2017, although he won in 2016 as a Democrat, current Governor Jim Justice switched his party affiliation to Republican.
- 2020: Republicans gained Montana.
So, even though they won the presidency in 2012 and 2020, gubernatorial races have been rough for the Democratic Party in those same years — even in some cases where they won the state’s Electoral College votes. (For example, Democrat Joe Biden won New Hampshire in 2020 for president, but the governorship stayed with Republican Chris Sununu.)
What Do Election Forecasters Have to Say?
For predictions, we are going to look at four forecasters. We have the usuals: Cook Political Report, Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball, and Inside Elections with Nathan Gonzales. If you read my pieces on the U.S. Senate and U.S. House, you will notice that I do not have CNalysis or Split Ticket here this time. It seems that those two do not have 2024 predictions for governor available yet, though they have made them for past elections. This time, we are adding Elections Daily to the mix.
Each forecaster has their own internal criteria for how they rate elections, so they won’t fully agree, but you won’t see a whole lot of deviation from each other. They don’t all have the same terminology either. For example, Cook and Inside use the term “Solid” while Sabato uses the term “Safe.”
Therefore, for easy comparison, we are going to rename their categories so we can lump them together. It isn’t a perfect system, but this is simply meant to make it easier for readers to put each forecaster’s ratings side-by-side. Below is the terminology I will use and which rankings from each forecaster correspond to said terminology. The higher the level, the less competitive a seat is.
Below is how each gubernatorial contest is ranked by level by each of these forecasters as of May 14, 2023. For further separation by competitiveness, Levels 1, 2, and 3 have different shades of red and blue.
From the get-go, what stands out is most is the lack of competitiveness in most gubernatorial elections this year. The four forecasters uniformly see Republicans as a shoe-in for Indiana, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, Utah, and West Virginia, and Democrats as a shoe-in for Delaware. There is some slight disagreement as to how definitively Republican or Democratic they see Vermont and Washington as, but they have a lot of confidence that those two states’ governorships will stay with their respective parties.
Key Races to Watch
It’s those races that have a lot of uncertainty, or even a little bit of it, that are most notable to watch. Those four races are New Hampshire, North Carolina, Vermont, and Washington. Links to the Ballotpedia profiles on each governor’s race are in the subheaders below for each state.
New Hampshire
Incumbent Republican Chris Sununu, who won the first of his four gubernatorial elections in 2016, is not running for re-election, making his an open seat. His 2020 and 2022 victories were blowouts, winning by 21.7 and 15.5 percentage points respectively. Without the incumbency advantage, however, election forecasters are generally skeptical of Republicans’ potential for keeping the seat (although Election Daily seems to be confident that Republicans will retain it, ranking it as a Level 2 race favoring them).
On the one hand, Democrats have recently dominant at the federal level for New Hampshire. Both U.S. Senators and both U.S. House members for the state are Democrats. On the other hand, Republicans control most of the elected state executive offices. They’ve held the governorship since 2016 and have won four of the five seats of the State Executive Council in each election since 2018 (two-year terms). And as of March 29, 2024, Republican voters outnumber Democrats by about 44,000 (though independents are the plurality of the nearly 900,000 voters registered in the state).
New Hampshire has one of the latest statewide primary dates in the country — occurring on September 10, 2024 — so we don’t know who the candidates are yet. When the Republican and Democratic Parties have their nominees, there is a good chance we see a shift in ratings from election forecasters. Notable candidates in the race include Republican Kelly Ayotte, a former U.S. Senator, and Democrat Cinde Warmington, a member of the State Executive Council.
North Carolina
Of the 11 state governors up for election this year, North Carolina’s is one of the most recent to flip parties, when current Governor Roy Cooper, a Democrat, defeated then-incumbent Republican Pat McCrory in 2016. It was an especially close call as Cooper won by only 0.2 percentage points. In 2020, he won by a more comfortable 4.5 percentage points. But Cooper is now term-limited, leaving the seat open and mitigating the incumbency advantage that would be particularly beneficial for Democrats this year.
North Carolina politics, as a whole, have been somewhat mixed party-wise. The state has picked a Republican for U.S. Senator all five times it has voted on them since 2010, both chambers of the state legislature have been controlled by Republican majorities since 2010 (part of a nationwide surge in Republican representation in state governments that year), and Republican presidential candidates have won the state since 2012.
But with the exception of the 2012 election of Pat McCrory, North Carolina has not chosen a Republican for governor since 1988. It’s the only governor’s office that went Democratic in 2020 in a state that Trump won. And in 2022, Democrats pulled even with Republicans in U.S. House representation at seven members each. (Contrast that with 2018, when there were nine Republicans and three Democrats in the U.S. House for the state.) Finally, as of May 14, 2024, there are 2,404,273 Democrats compared to 2,233,991 Republicans (though Unaffiliated voters outnumber them both with 2,742,683 total).
The general election was set back in March and the two most prominent contenders duking it out are current state executives: Democratic Attorney General Josh Stein and Republican Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson. In North Carolina, lieutenant governors are elected separately from governors instead of on the same ticket, so North Carolina has demonstrated plenty of willingness to choose a Democrat for one statewide elected office and a Republican for another statewide elected office in the same year.
Vermont
Sabato and Elections Daily currently are the only forecasters in this article that see some level of competition in this state’s governor’s race, rating it as a Level 2 contest favoring Republicans. It’s easy to see why the predictions are so heavily on the Republican side: Phil Scott, the incumbent since 2016, won electoral beatdowns of his competition the last two gubernatorial elections (remember: Vermont’s governor has two-year terms). His last two main opponents were endorsed by both the Democratic and the Vermont Progressive Parties, but he won by 41.1 percentage points in 2020 and 47.0 points in 2022. Scott’s 2018 margin of victory was comparatively small . . . at 14.9 points.
Phil Scott continues to enjoy enormous popularity across the political spectrum, so it’s hard to imagine that the 2024 election results will tell a much different story. So, why would the race be worth paying attention to at all? It’s less about who will win the governor’s race — it’s highly likely Scott will win reelection — and more about 1) the margin of victory and 2) how it may impact other races or be affected by them.
The state is otherwise heavily Democratic.
- Vermont hasn’t chosen a Republican candidate for president since 1988, when George H. W. Bush won his only term.
- The state legislature has big Democratic supermajorities in both chambers.
- Voters have chosen Democratic candidates (or in the case of Bernie Sanders, an independent who caucuses with Democrats) for U.S. Senate in each election for that office since 2006.
- The lone U.S. House seat has been won by a Democrat every time since 2006. Before that, Sanders won each election to that seat from 1990 through 2004.
- All of the elected non-governor state executive offices from 2016 onward have been won by Democrats. And at least in 2012 and 2014, the only one of them not won by a Democrat was the lieutenant governor — who at the time was Phil Scott.
In an era where split-ticket voting has generally declined, Vermont electing a Republican in Phil Scott is particularly noteworthy — even more so given how highly popular is with his constituents. The 2024 election will once again show just how much Phil Scott is an exception to the rule of split-ticket voting. Perhaps the turnout for his election might even have a critical impact on other statewide races. That may be unlikely, though, given how Scott has been the only statewide Republican candidate who has been able to win an election in Vermont in the past decade or so.
Washington
The Evergreen State’s governorship is highly resistant to change in its highest state government office: The last time a Republican won it was in 1980, when songs like “Call Me” by Blondie, “Another One Bites the Dust” by Queen, and “Funkytown” by Lipps Inc. were topping the music charts. Current Governor Jay Inslee is the second governor in the state’s history to win three consecutive terms to the office, doing so in 2012, 2016, and 2020. He won by 3.1, 11.0, and 13.5 percentage points in those elections, respectively.
But Inslee announced last year that he would not seek reelection in 2024, giving Republicans a slight opening. It certainly won’t be easy, though: Washington routinely votes for Democrats in statewide elections. It hasn’t voted for a Republican presidential candidate since 1984. The state also votes for all its elected statewide executive offices in presidential election years. That inevitably has some impact on statewide races further down the same ballot, especially as straight-party voting (i.e., choosing candidates of the same party) has increased overall across the country.
And rarely does Washington pick a Republican for the statewide offices. Of the eight elected statewide partisan offices, there were only four times it picked a Republican since 2012, and three of those times it was the same person:
- Kim Wyman for secretary of state in 2012, 2016, and 2020
- Duane Davidson for treasurer in 2016
One aspect of the race that makes things more unclear for both Democrats and Republicans, however, is the fact that Washington employs top-two primaries. In this format, all of the candidates for a particular race will be listed on the same primary ballot. The two candidates that receive the most votes, regardless of how many they get, move on to the general election. That makes it possible for both general candidates to be Democrats or for both to be Republicans.
Right now, there are nine Democrats, seven Republicans, three candidates with no party preference, and nine candidates labeled as independent or a third-party. How the overall vote splits is anyone’s guess. But it may be that Democrats split up the vote enough amongst themselves that two Republicans are the top two-vote getters and vice versa. You can expect both the Democratic and Republican Parties encouraging some of their own candidates to drop out of the race to avoid that possibility.
Possibilities for Governor’s Races in 2024
If Republicans are to keep their streak of having a net gain of at least one governorship in presidential election years, it will most likely be done by keeping New Hampshire and flipping North Carolina. Those two states’ governorships are by far the likeliest to flip parties. Washington has an outside chance of becoming fairly competitive depending on how the top-two primary plays out, but for now it’s likely to stay in Democratic hands.
In North Carolina’s case in particular, there is a fair chance that voting for the governorship and for president could have a reciprocal impact on each other. It split-ticket voted in 2016 and 2020 for president and governor, voting for Republican Donald Trump for the former and Democrat Roy Cooper for the latter. But Trump’s margin of victory in the state decreased from 3.66 percentage points in 2016 to 1.34 points in 2020. How well North Carolina Democrats tie Republican gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson to Trump, and how well North Carolina Republicans tie Democratic gubernatorial candidate Josh Stein to Biden, may make the difference in who wins both the governorship and the state’s Electoral votes for president.
There were be at least a little bit of a shift in race ratings by the elections forecasters listed here with about six-and-a-half months to go. But you can almost guarantee that most of the governor’s races this year will be won by Republicans. Republicans have exerted dominance in state politics in many states since 2010. The gubernatorial contests this year may give a sense as to just how much that is still the case.
