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.
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