Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.
The 2026 gubernatorial map is not great for the Democrats.
The party simultaneously hopes to hold on to power in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Maine, Kansas, Oregon, New Mexico and Colorado, and to flip Georgia, Nevada, Iowa and Ohio. All states have a DGA staffer on loan, and the group says it has plans to expand to more states.
The majority of those states went to President Donald Trump in 2024. But the DGA says it is investing personnel in all of these races because it believes that antipathy toward Trump — who has a negative approval rating that has declined steadily in recent months — will hurt Republicans. There is also hope that crowded primaries in states such as Arizona, Georgia and Kansas could yield Republican candidates with little appeal to general-election voters.
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At the moment, 26 governors’ seats are held by Republicans, compared with 24 by Democrats. That’s up from the decline in the wake of President Barack Obama’s time in office. Democrats controlled 28 governors’ mansions after Obama was first elected in 2008, but the number fell to 20 after the 2010 midterms. After the 2016 election, the figure was in the teens, a low point for the party. Now, the DGA hopes to recapture the majority. (Unlike Congress, there is no reward that comes with controlling a majority of governor’s seats, though it can help parties execute agendas they are unable to enact on the national level.)
