Daily Kos Elections 2016 forecast: Governors' races galore

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Monday October 24, 2016 · 5:31 AM PDT

2016/10/24 · 05:31

You might have noticed there’s been one thing consistently missing from my writeups about the Daily Kos Elections forecast model: gubernatorial races! Or, maybe you haven’t noticed. After all, there’s a presidential race going on, which always vacuums up most of the attention in leap years; and maybe even more so than usual this year, with a presidential race that is, at best, very weird, and, at worst, poses an existential threat to democracy. While that threat is fading in the rear view mirror, now our focus has turned to taking back the Senate and, remotely but tantalizingly, also the House.

On top of that, there just aren’t a lot of gubernatorial races in a presidential year. Most gubernatorial races … and almost all of the ones in the biggest states … take place in midterm elections. The only one of the ten most populous states that has a gubernatorial election in a presidential year is North Carolina. This year, there are 12 gubernatorial elections. There are the nine that regularly occur in presidential years (Delaware, Indiana, Missouri, Montana, North Carolina, North Dakota, Utah, Washington, and West Virginia); the two states where gubernatorial terms are only two years (New Hampshire and Vermont); and Oregon, where Kate Brown faces a special election after having taken over after John Kitzhaber’s resignation in 2015.

Don’t overlook the importance of the gubernatorial races, though. For one thing, governors make up a big part of the bench for future presidential elections. In addition, although you don’t get any sort of policy-related bonus for controlling a majority of state houses (unlike the Senate or House, where a majority is for all the marbles), the states are an important laboratory of policy experimentation. And that can have ramifications at the federal level; the still-too-high number of uninsured persons left in America is, in large part, due to the big number of Republican governors who rejected Medicaid expansion in their states.

Along those lines, we have been dutifully compiling data on gubernatorial races all along. And the eagle-eyed among you might have spotted, at the top of the Daily Kos Elections landing page, in the top bar, along with a projected number of electoral votes in the presidential race and a projected number of Senate seats, we have a projected number of Democratic-controlled governor’s seats. Currently, that number stands at 20. There are currently 18 Democratic governors, so that means we’re expecting a net gain of two.

The main reason I haven’t had much to say about the gubernatorial races, though, is a simple one: until last week, two of the important races had simply no data. There were zero polls of those races (Montana and Vermont, neither of which has attracted any attention at the presidential level, so pollsters have had no impetus to go there), and therefore we had no way of modeling them. Happily, we got polls in both of those races last week. We’re still waiting on a North Dakota poll, but no one has treated that race as competitive, so we’re just leaving it as Safe R.

We don’t have a governors-specific page to go with our President and Senate pages, partly because there aren’t, as I said, a lot of gubernatorial races this year, and partly because there’s no topline number to try and calculate odds for. I suppose we could calculate the odds of whether the Democrats will hold a majority of governor’s seats after the election, but I can guarantee you that those odds are zero, because only four of the 12 seats up for grabs are held by Republicans, so the best possible result is 22. I also suppose we could calculate the odds of whether the Democrats will simply gain seats beyond the 18 they already have … but those odds are probably somewhere between 95 and 100 percent, given current polling.

Since there’s no page to direct you to, what I’ll do is simply highlight all the races, and give you the current polling averages and current Democratic odds. From most likely to least likely Democratic races, we have:

Delaware: Dem-held open seat as incumbent Jack Markell is termed out; >99 percent odds (Carney (D) 57, Bonini (R) 25)

Oregon: appointed Dem incumbent Kate Brown faces a special election for the remainder of her term; 99 percent odds (Brown (D) 45, Pierce (R) 35)

Washington: Dem incumbent Jay Inslee is up for re-election; 97 percent odds (Inslee (D) 47, Bryant (R) 36)

West Virginia: Dem-held open seat as incumbent Earl Ray Tomblin is termed out; 96 percent odds (Justice (D) 43, Cole (R) 36)

Missouri: Dem-held open seat as incumbent Jay Nixon is termed out; 95 percent odds (Koster (D) 47, Greitens (R) 38)

Indiana: GOP-held open seat as incumbent Mike Pence is running for vice-president; 87 percent odds (Gregg (D) 43, Holcomb (R) 38)

North Carolina: GOP incumbent Pat McCrory is up for re-election; 84 percent odds (Cooper (D) 47, McCrory (R) 42)

New Hampshire: Dem-held open seat as incumbent Maggie Hassan is running for Senate; 72 percent odds (Van Ostern (D) 43, Sununu (R) 41)

Montana: Dem incumbent Steve Bullock is up for re-election; 62 percent odds (Bullock (D) 46, Gianforte (R) 42)

Vermont: Dem-held open seat as incumbent Peter Shumlin is retiring; 42 percent odds (Scott (R) 39, Minter (D) 38)

Utah: GOP incumbent Gary Herbert is up for re-election; <1 percent odds (Herbert (R) 61, Weinholtz (D) 24)

North Dakota: GOP-held open seat as incumbent Jack Dalrymple is retiring; <1 percent odds (no polling data)

If I came up to you and told you that the Democrats were very likely to win the governor’s race in West Virginia while the Republicans were likelier than not to win the governor’s race in Vermont, you’d either assume that I was under the influence of some powerful hallucinogens, or else that I’d just arrived in my time machine from the 1950s. However, that’s exactly what it looks like this year.

Partly, that’s because the West Virginia Democrats and Vermont Republicans managed to scrape up well-known, well-liked candidates: wealthy businessman Jim Justice in West Virginia (who made his money in coal but is currently the owner of the Greenbrier Resort), and Lt. Governor Phil Scott (well-known from his previous career as a stock car racer) in Vermont. But it’s also because those states tend to behave differently at the state level than at the federal level.

They’ve firmly sorted out into the blue and red columns at the federal level where the ideological lines are clearer, but West Virginia is still willing to go for a socially conservative, pro-coal Democratic governor, while Vermont is still willing to go for a socially liberal, good-government-oriented GOP governor. (Many other states fit that same pattern. Massachusetts, for instance, has a Republican governor, while Louisiana has a Democratic governor, in keeping with their historic tendencies … though both were helped along by their awful opponents in their most recent elections.)

Meanwhile, the Democratic candidates are ahead in the two other theoretically difficult retentions they face in red states. In Missouri, Attorney General Chris Koster has a solid lead against Eric Greitens, who won a convoluted GOP primary with only 35 percent of the vote, mostly thanks to a series of ads that showed him shooting things and blowing things up. In Montana, incumbent Steve Bullock had a narrow lead over wealthy businessman Greg Gianforte, at least in the one poll that came out (from Mason-Dixon, who notoriously undersold Jon Tester’s chances in Montana’s 2012 Senate race).

And the Democrats are on track to pick up two seats: in North Carolina, GOP incumbent Pat McCrory … who was known as a forward-looking moderate when he was mayor of Charlotte … has floundered after getting swept up in the controversy over HB2. Most polls find Democratic Attorney General Roy Cooper with a lead. In Indiana, GOP incumbent Mike Pence was already in trouble against state House speaker John Gregg (who lost a close race to Pence in 2012) before he dropped out to join the Republican presidential ticket; Lt. Governor Eric Holcomb filled in at the last minute for Pence, but while Holcomb doesn’t have Pence’s baggage, he also doesn’t have any name recognition.

Interestingly, the most frequent result in our simulations is 20 Democratic seats. This would require a gain of two seats, which would have to mean that the Democrats gain both Indiana and North Carolina while holding Vermont (as well as Montana and New Hampshire), essentially the best possible result unless things go completely haywire in North Dakota or Utah. Vermont is close enough to a tossup, though, that even though our model gives Sue Minter (the former state transportation secretary) less than 50-50 odds, it’s still basically a coin-flip.

Before we go, let’s turn to the presidential and Senate races. The presidential race is the same-old-same-old, which is a very good thing, since it’s nearly certain that Hillary Clinton will be the next president. She’s been at 95 percent overall odds for an entire week now. The only states that seem up in the air right now are Arizona (48 percent Democrat odds), Georgia (38 percent Democrat odds), Iowa (35 percent Democrat odds), and Ohio (60 percent Democrat odds). If you’re waiting for Texas to start showing up as grey on our map … basically the opening of the seventh seal of the apocalypse for the Republicans … you’re unfortunately going to have to keep waiting, even after three polls in the last week showing the race in low single digits. The GOP lead there is narrow but consistent enough to keep it at 2 percent Democrat odds for now.

And finally, we have some good news on the Senate front. The Democrats’ odds of hitting 50 seats or more have risen to 66 percent, the highest they’ve been all cycle (the previous high was 62 percent, in mid-August). I’ve been warning you that it often takes weeks for the widening leads at the presidential level to trickle down to the downballot races, and it looks like that’s finally happening ... especially in New Hampshire, where Maggie Hassan has pulled into a 46-44 aggregate lead, giving her 66 percent odds of winning. That’s thanks largely to a poll from late last week from the Univ. of New Hampshire giving Hassan a 9-point lead.

Catherine Cortez Masto has also sustained her newly found lead in Nevada, holding steady at 55 percent odds. Of the big three races, Katie McGinty in Pennsylvania is the one that’s still closest to being truly a tossup, currently at 49 percent odds (after spending a number of weeks with the best odds out of those three races). Deborah Ross’s odds in North Carolina have also ticked up to 42 percent, while Jason Kander’s odds in Missouri are holding steady-ish at 40 percent. That gives the Democrats five different options with near-even odds, where they only need to win two of those five … which is why their overall odds are getting near the two-out-of-three mark. (That’s assuming that they pick up Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin, as expected.)

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Daily Kos Elections 2016 forecast: Governors' races galore

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