Six Gubernatorial Rating Changes in Favor of Democrats, but Republicans May Still Come Out Ahead

KEY POINTS FROM THIS ARTICLE

— We are making six gubernatorial race rating changes this week, all in favor of Democrats.

— The most notable ones come in Arizona, Georgia, and Ohio, while the others are blue state governorships in Minnesota, New York, and Rhode Island moving to Safe Democratic.

— Despite these changes, Republicans may still be better-positioned to maintain an overall advantage in governorships held, and thus defy the usual trend of gubernatorial losses for the president’s party in midterms.

Table 1: Crystal Ball gubernatorial rating changes

Map 1: Crystal Ball gubernatorial ratings

The gubernatorial math

The presidential party’s challenge in midterm elections typically extends to gubernatorial races, the lion’s share of which are elected in midterm years. Since the end of World War II, there have been 20 midterm elections, and the president’s party has lost governorships in 16 of those elections. However, there are a handful of exceptions, including as recently as 2022, when Democrats actually netted a couple of governorships, thanks to a pair of easy flips in blue states with outgoing Republican governors—Maryland and Massachusetts—combined with flipping an open seat in Arizona to make up for then-Gov. Steve Sisolak’s (D) reelection defeat in Nevada at the hands of now-Gov. Joe Lombardo (R)

Despite a litany of gubernatorial rating changes today in favor of Democrats, Republicans may still break the usual pattern of midterm net gubernatorial losses for the president’s party. Meanwhile, Democrats have an opportunity of their own to do something they haven’t done since the 2010 election: hold a majority of the nation’s governorships. But it’s a challenging path.

The 2010 Republican wave not only gave Republicans what has been a lasting edge in control of state legislative chambers, but it also restored a GOP edge in governorships that the party has generally maintained since the watershed 1994 Republican wave, which, among other things, delivered the first GOP U.S. House majority in 40 years. Outside of a period in the back half of the 2000s, Republicans have held a numerical edge in governorships since that 1994 wave.

The edge lately, though, has been small: Since the 2018 Democratic wave, the number of Republican governorships has only been between 26-28, with the Democrats in the 22-24 range. Following the Democratic flip of Virginia last year, the tally is once again 26 Republicans and 24 Democrats. The current party control of the governorships is illustrated in Map 2:

Map 2: Party control of governorships following 2025 elections

Party control of governorships generally mimics federal partisanship, although there are some notable exceptions. Republicans hold 22 of the 25 governorships in states that voted for Donald Trump all three times he was on the ballot (the exceptions are Kansas, Kentucky, and North Carolina), while Democrats hold 17 of the 19 states that never voted for Trump (New Hampshire and Vermont are the exceptions).

Of the half-dozen states that backed presidential candidates from both parties in the last three elections, Democrats hold four (Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin) and Republicans hold two (Georgia and Nevada). So Democrats are competitive with Republicans in the overall count despite there being more red states than blue states because they are doing better in the swing presidential states and they are a little more extended into redder states than Republicans are extended into bluer states.

That one of the outlier states—the Democratic-held open seat in Kansas—is on the ballot this year provides Republicans with the clearest pickup on the board. If our Leans Republican rating there holds, Democrats would have to defend all of their other seats and flip two Republican-held seats to forge a 25-25 tie in governorships or flip three to get an outright majority.

Currently, Georgia—an open seat—is the clearest Democratic pickup opportunity, and we are moving it to Toss-up today. Nevada, another presidential swing state, is also a top Democratic target. Though Nevada Democrats did get a credible recruit in state Attorney General Aaron Ford, we still give the aforementioned Lombardo a small edge there in our ratings. One wild card is Vermont, where popular, moderate Gov. Phil Scott (R) has yet to announce whether he will seek a sixth, two-year term. That would be an obvious Democratic target if it were an open seat, but Scott would be a heavy favorite if he runs again. Gov. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) could eventually be vulnerable as she seeks a second, two-year term in a state where Republicans control state government despite a blue lean at the federal level, but she does not appear to be truly vulnerable at this point.

Beyond those states, Democrats start to run into the same challenges they face in the Senate: The other Republican defensive assignments are in states that voted for Trump by double digits. While open seats in Iowa and Ohio—both now rated Leans Republican—are intriguing, these states may just be too red to elect Democrats these days. Democrats also have to defend some vulnerable governorships of their own beyond Kansas: Toss-up open seats in Michigan and Wisconsin as well as Gov. Katie Hobbs (D-AZ), who gets upgraded to Leans Democratic today but is still very much a Republican target.

We’ll start there, in Arizona, as we go through the rating changes.

— The vulnerable Hobbs and the better-positioned Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA) are the only Democrats seeking reelection in states that Trump carried in 2024 (they are also defending the open Trump-won states of Kansas, Michigan, and Wisconsin). However, Hobbs caught a break when 2022 candidate and former state Board of Regents member Karrin Taylor Robson (R) ended her campaign last month. As it was, Robson’s path to the GOP nomination was already rocky: She was polling behind Rep. Andy Biggs (R, AZ-5) while Rep. David Schweikert (R, AZ-1) was a third wheel. With Robson out, Biggs, who is the sole Trump-endorsed candidate in the race (Trump had also endorsed Robson), is a clear favorite over Schweikert for the nomination.

To Schweikert’s credit, he has come out on the winning end of some tough campaigns in a swingy House seat. Meanwhile, Biggs hails from a safe seat in the eastern Phoenix suburbs and is a former chairman of the House Freedom Caucus—he has a profile similar to some far-right Republicans who cost their party otherwise winnable seats in past cycles (including in Arizona). Either way, Arizona Republicans appear set to nominate a member of the U.S. House as their candidate for governor. This has become a theme in swing-state gubernatorial races: The leading GOP candidates in Iowa, Michigan, and Wisconsin also are all current members of the House Republican Conference. Democrats feel that this dynamic will help nationalize those contests to their advantage. One of our contacts pointed out that even though last year’s Republican nominees for governor in New Jersey and Virginia had backgrounds in state-level politics, Democrats felt they were able to successfully link them to some of the Trump administration’s unpopular policies. In these aforementioned swing states, Democrats appear likely to be running against candidates who actually voted for the relevant legislation in Congress.

A recent Noble Predictive Insights poll that showed Hobbs leading Biggs 42% to 37% and Schweikert by 9 points was not out of line with most recent surveys of the race in giving Hobbs a small lead.

As we give small edges to incumbent governors from opposite parties in these neighboring states, Arizona and Nevada share several dynamics worth watching as their gubernatorial races unfold.

In both states, the incumbent governors must contend with legislatures controlled by the opposite party—a dynamic that has often worked to a governor’s advantage, allowing them to position themselves as pragmatic or independent-minded figures. If anything, that dynamic may be somewhat more pronounced in Nevada, where Lombardo faces a more lopsided Democratic legislature, as opposed to Arizona, where Republican majorities are more modest.

Recent electoral trends also bear watching. In the 2025 gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia, Latino-heavy precincts voted noticeably more Democratic than they did in 2024. If similar shifts materialize in the Southwest, they could have a more pronounced impact in both Arizona and Nevada. For Hobbs, a Latino reversion could lessen the generic GOP edge in Arizona, which reasserted itself in a major way in 2024 as Trump carried the state by 5.5 points after he narrowly lost it in 2020.

We’d also add that sitting governors who lack an obvious scandal are difficult to defeat, and recent party switches in gubernatorial races have much more often come in open-seat races. So we are giving both incumbents the benefit of the doubt for now, keeping Nevada at Leans Republican while moving Arizona from Toss-up to Leans Democratic.

— In 2022, Gov. Brian Kemp’s (R-GA) comfortable reelection victory stood out in a gubernatorial cycle that was, at best, mediocre for his party. With Kemp term-limited, both sides have competitive primaries.

On the Republican side, the May 19 primary is crowded and increasingly expensive. Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, who has Trump’s endorsement, seemed like an early frontrunner, but health care executive Rick Jackson was a later entrant and has upended the primary due to his ability to self-fund. Jackson has already spent at least $30 million of his own money. The Republican primary also features two other sitting statewide officials: state Attorney General Chris Carr and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. Carr and Raffensperger would probably be “safer” candidates who are more in the mold of Kemp himself, but a runoff between the Trumpier Jones and Jackson, who will be well-funded but is unproven, seems likely.

Democrats face a competitive primary that may very well also extend into a runoff. Former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms has emerged as a frontrunner in polling. Of the non-Bottoms candidates, former state Sen. Jason Esteves (D) seems to have cultivated the most institutional support. However, that has not yet seemed to translate into strong poll numbers. Former Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, who served as a Republican during Kemp’s first term before leaving office and switching parties, is probably the most prominent other candidate in the race, but he of course has a long history of conservative policy stances that other candidates can attack (former DeKalb County CEO Mike Thurmond is also running). Though public polling of the race, in both the primary and general election phases, has been scarce, an Emerson College poll released earlier this month showed Bottoms getting nearly half of the Black vote, which could be considered the most important demographic in the primary.

With fluid primaries that each could extend to runoffs on both sides, the open-seat race in this marginal state seems a little more up in the air than when we first looked at it.

At the federal level, we have Sen. Jon Ossoff (D) as a favorite for reelection to the Senate. While it’s easy to see some ticket-splitting benefiting Republicans in the other statewide races, we don’t know that it would be enough to justify keeping the gubernatorial race two categories away, at Leans Republican. We are moving Georgia from Leans Republican to Toss-up.

— A recent poll from the Ohio Environmental Council showing former state Department of Health Director Amy Acton (D) leading 2024 presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy (R) by an eye-popping 53%-43% margin in the open Ohio gubernatorial race is almost certainly way too good to be true for Democrats. However, other surveys over the past several months have shown the race tight, with Ramaswamy or Acton holding tiny leads.

We have certainly seen Democrats sometimes leading polls in Ohio only to be swamped by the state’s GOP lean in the end, and the Republican dominance of state government in Ohio pre-dates its more recent federal jolt to the right in the Trump era: Republicans will have held the governorship for 32 of 36 years at the end of outgoing Gov. Mike DeWine’s (R) term, a streak only broken by former Gov. Ted Strickland’s (D) lone, landslide victory in the 2006 Democratic wave.

But those past, recent two-term Republican governors—George Voinovich, Bob Taft, John Kasich, and now DeWine—were all more traditional Republicans than Ramaswamy, and each had previous elected experience to boot. Ramaswamy is more in the mold of Ohio’s two most recent elected senators, Trumpier Republicans JD Vance (now vice president) and Bernie Moreno (who unseated Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown in 2024). Both Vance and Moreno had rocky moments in their campaigns but didn’t come particularly close to losing (Vance won by 6 points and Moreno won by about 3.5). One can see a similar path for Ramaswamy, who is very well-funded and is beginning what he says will be a continuous television campaign through the November election. He is starting off running what amount to positive ads featuring his wife and another featuring a county sheriff. And yet, we also have to take into account the political environment, which is certainly shaping up to be less favorable to Republicans than when Vance and Moreno ran in 2022 and 2024, respectively, as well as Ramaswamy’s penchant for provocative or controversial comments and proposals that provide fodder for his opponents, such as telling the New York Times’s Ezra Klein back before the 2024 election that creating Medicare and Medicaid was a mistake.

Looming uncomfortably over the race is the possibility that Ramaswamy might face some sort of racist electoral penalty for being an Indian-American candidate in a whiter-than-average state, something that comes up when we discuss this election with sources. Ramaswamy himself has pushed back against bigotry on the far-right, including in a New York Times op-ed in December. One wild card for the November election is whether Ramaswamy loses any votes on his right to Libertarian Don Kissick, who is running for governor and who got nearly 3.5% of the vote as a Libertarian in the 2024 Senate election. It’s a lot easier to imagine Acton getting to 47% or 48% in Ohio than 50% or 51%, but perhaps a plurality, as opposed to a majority, will be enough to win this race.

Acton has challenges of her own—as a face of the state’s 2020 Covid response, she provides Republicans with natural lines of attack concerning what they believe was the public sector’s overreaction to the pandemic. At a basic level, Acton may just remind voters of a time they do not want to remember. While Acton does have state government experience, this is her first campaign. She likely has appeal to the suburbanites who have left the GOP in the Trump era, but even with a potentially favorable midterm electorate, Acton is going to need to win some Trump voters to her side in a state where realignment has subtracted many more voters from the Democratic column than it has added. Acton is probably helped by the fact that the concurrent U.S. Senate special election is likely going to be a competitive and highly expensive affair, and it has been interesting to sometimes see Acton polling a little bit better in her race than Sherrod Brown is in his challenge to appointed Sen. Jon Husted (R). That may just be a blip, or it may speak to Ramaswamy having more work to do in shoring up his own base than Husted, who is much more of a generic Republican. There is also the possibility that the governor’s race may be less tied to national partisanship than the Senate race.

We’re moving this race from Likely Republican to Leans Republican, matching our rating of the Senate race. Ohio joins Iowa, another Midwest state that was much more competitive in the pre-Trump era, in the Leans Republican column. However, we can more easily imagine Iowa eventually becoming a Toss-up—indeed, we considered making that rating change today—as likely Democratic nominee Rob Sand, the state’s auditor, has already won statewide and should have a resource advantage over the Republican nominee, probably Rep. Randy Feenstra (R, IA-4). Outgoing Gov. Kim Reynolds (R-IA) also appears to be less popular than outgoing Gov. DeWine in Ohio, so there may be more of an argument for change there. But the biggest challenge for Democrats in either state is simply a pronounced overall Republican electoral lean—it’s easy to imagine competitive races in both states, as the 2018 contests in each were. But actual Democratic victories require more imagination. Just as the challenge of flipping double-digit Trump states confronts Democrats in their quest to flip the Senate, so too does it confront them on the overall gubernatorial map.

— Finally, three blue state governorships move from Likely Democratic to Safe Democratic. In New York, Gov. Kathy Hochul’s (D) positioning has solidified to the point where she is in no real danger, either in a primary or a general election. Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s (D-MN) entrance into the open Minnesota race combined with the lack of an obviously top-tier Republican challenger means that state is probably an easier hold than if Gov. Tim Walz (D) had sought a third term, given his greater proximity to a welfare fraud scandal that has made major news in the state. Gov. Dan McKee (D-RI) is in serious danger of losing a primary, but that may actually make it even harder for Republicans to compete in that blue state.

Kyle Kondik is a Political Analyst at the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia and the Managing Editor of Sabato's Crystal Ball.

J. Miles Coleman is the associate editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball, the University of Virginia Center for Politics’ authoritative, nonpartisan newsletter on American campaigns and elections. He also serves as the Center’s Media Relations Coordinator. Follow him on Twitter @jmilescoleman.

See Other Political Commentary by Kyle Kondik.

See Other Political Commentary by J. Miles Coleman.

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Views expressed in this column are those of the author, not those of Rasmussen Reports. Comments about this content should be directed to the author or syndicate.