wow. many of these states are not in the south. so much for a regional party.
full story
Republican gubernatorial candidate John Kasich speaks to supporters during a campaign stop in Zanesville, Ohio, on Aug. 4. He leads Gov. Ted Strickland in the polls.
Republicans are on track to control approximately 30 governor seats after the Nov. 2 election, according to the FiveThirtyEight gubernatorial forecasting model. And they are likely to do particularly well in the swing states of the Midwest.
Such an outcome would reverse the current state of the nation’s governors’ mansions, which are now held by 26 Democrats, 23 Republicans and 1 independent.
Thirty-seven states are holding elections for governor this year; an unusually high number, 24, are open-seat races in which the incumbent was either barred from running again because of term limits, or chose to retire. (One incumbent, Jim Gibbons of Nevada, was defeated in the Republican primary.) Many of these open races, including California, Florida, Oregon and Wisconsin, are too close to call. But in 11 of these contests, including Michigan and Pennsylvania, the Republican candidate has at least an 80 percent chance of victory, according to the model. Conversely, Democrats are clear favorites in only four open-seat races — Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii and New York, where Andrew Cuomo is almost certain to become the next governor.
Incumbency — normally a powerful advantage in gubernatorial elections — may provide few protections for Democrats this year. This is especially so in three Midwestern states. In Ohio, Gov. Ted Strickland trails his Republican opponent, former Representative John Kasich, by double-digits in some polls, and with the state’s unemployment rate also in the double digits (10.4 percent), he is running out of time to catch up. Although Iowa, like some other agricultural states, has weathered the recession relatively well, the Democratic incumbent there, Chet Culver, has had poor approval ratings for some time and has run into a challenging opponent in Terry Branstad, who served as the state’s governor from 1983 to 1999. And in Illinois, the Rod R. Blagojevich scandal is still casting a shadow on his successor, Pat Quinn, a Democrat, and seems to be outweighing any influence that President Obama might have there.
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