Donald Trump looks increasingly likely to win the Republican nomination and he has the potential to not only lose decisively in November, but bring down his party with him too. Democrats have a solid chance to win the Senate regardless of Trump, because Republicans are defending 24 of the 34 seats up in 2016 after their 2010 wave, while some commentators have even begun debating whether Democrats could regain the House despite widespread Republican gerrymandering. However, Republicans are assured of maintaining their historic control over state governors across the country simply because the vast majority of those offices are not elected in presidential years.
Our flawed electoral system is the root cause of much of our country’s political dysfunction and it is systematically biased against Democrats. 39 of the nation’s governors, representing 88 percent of the 50-state population, aren’t elected in presidential years. In midterms and especially odd-numbered years, turnout falls precipitously and disproportionately among young people, the working class, and minorities, all of whom lean more towards Democrats. Even in midterms when the national environment favors Democrats such as 2006, turnout disparities still hurt Democrats and were likely important enough to cost them some close governor’s races that year.
With only 12 states holding elections for governor this year (including one special election in Oregon), Democrats are realistically only looking at possible gains in Indiana and North Carolina while they are playing defense in several other states such as Missouri and West Virginia. Even if Trump proves to be a historic disaster for Republicans and loses states that even John McCain and Mitt Romney carried, Republicans will keep their stranglehold on many state governments simply thanks to the timing of gubernatorial elections and rampant state legislative gerrymandering.
Imagine for a minute that every single governor were up for election this year instead of waiting until 2017, 2018, and 2019. The impact of such a change would be nothing short of a political earthquake given how many states Republicans hold after their 2014 midterm wave.
Republicans would be playing defense in 12 states Obama won twice, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, Ohio, and Wisconsin, and two more states Obama carried in 2008, Indiana and North Carolina. It is not unreasonable to assume that Hillary Clinton could beat Donald Trump in every single state Obama carried in 2012, if not more, meaning Republicans would be defending many offices in states Donald Trump would likely lose.
Even if modern partisan polarization makes a 1964 or 1972-style landslide of more than 40 states extremely unlikely, Trump could at least plausibly lose by a very decisive margin like McCain did in 2008. If he were to drag down his party to the degree that 2016 became a Democratic wave at least on par with the 2008 election, here is one possible map of how gubernatorial elections could swing if we somehow moved up the 2017 and 2018 elections to 2016.
Obviously several of these state outcomes could reasonably be argued to go either way such as Georgia, Iowa, etc, but the point of this map is to show broadly speaking that Democratic gains could be far more consequential than just Indiana and North Carolina. Key Obama states where Republican governors are deeply unpopular like Illinois and Wisconsin or term-limited like Florida, Michigan, and Ohio would be ripe for a Democratic takeover in 2016. In total, this scenario sees Republicans lose 14 states, taking them from 31 states representing 61 percent of the 50-state population, to just 17 states representing a paltry 27 percent.
Sadly for Democrats, this scenario is a mere fantasy, because 39 states with a staggering 88 percent of the 50-state population do not hold their gubernatorial elections concurrent with the presidential cycle. Unlike for Congress, a 2016 Democratic wave wouldn’t do nearly as much at the state level to overcome the last several years of hard-right governance in places like Kansas, because Republicans will still maintain control in state after state.
Even more problematic is that a Donald Trump-induced Democratic wave it won’t do much at all to improve Democrats’ hand for the 2020s cycle of redistricting. If 2018 follows the pattern of 2010 and 2014 and becomes a bloodbath for Democrats when they hold the White House, many of these state governor offices will remain in Republican hands. Since it’s typically much more difficult for Democrats to win majorities in heavily-gerrymandered legislatures than to win statewide offices, Republicans would likely maintain their dominance over the redistricting process, which would continue to cripple Democrats at the state level for many years to come.
Fortunately, there is a way Democrats could help mitigate this problem in the future. All of the states pictured above elect their governors in non-presidential years, but also allow citizen-initiated ballot initiatives to amend their state constitutions. After the disastrous tenure of governors such as Rick Snyder in Michigan, who were elected in low-turnout midterm elections, there has been renewed talk of using initiatives to move elections for governor to presidential years from midterms.
Even though Democrats won’t always win every presidential election and Republicans won’t always do well in every midterm, moving gubernatorial elections to coincide with the presidential cycle should be a no-brainer because Democrats will do much better on average with presidential-year turnout. Partisanship aside, democracy simply works better when more citizens participate and the electorate is more demographically-representative of the citizenry.