In 2025, two governors are retiring — Republican Glenn Youngkin in Virginia and Democrat Phil Murphy in New Jersey, and their seats are up for grabs. Both Virginia and New Jersey are similarly blue: Kamala Harris won them both by 6. Yet, at the time of writing, Virginia’s race looks like a Democratic blowout, while New Jersey’s is deemed more competitive.
Why?
Countless factors shape any governor’s race, but one dynamic stands out in these. In Virginia, the outgoing governor is a Republican, while his counterpart in New Jersey is a Democrat. And, popular or not, the trend in recent elections is clear: when governors leave, voters often seek change.
METHODOLOGY
If you’d rather skip the details, feel free to jump straight to the data. But the methodology is really quite simple: for any open gubernatorial election, the baseline expectation is that it mirrors the last presidential result, adjusted for the national environment. Thus, we can gauge performance by comparing the actual result to what was expected.
For example, let’s take 2022 Arizona. Since Arizona was Biden+0.3, and 2022’s national environment was ~6% redder than 2020’s, we’d expect Republicans to win its open governor’s race by ~5.7%. However, Democrats ended up winning that race by 0.6%. Thus, we’d consider that a D+6.3% overperformance.
Obviously, this obscures nuances like downballot tendencies, or if a disaster like Doug Mastriano was running. But taking the median over a large dataset generally sorts all of this out.
THE DATA
I put the table of all forty open gubernatorial elections, from 2017-2024, at the end of the article. But here are the statistics:
The results here are certainly eye-popping.
Over the last eight years, there have been forty open gubernatorial races. Yet, whenever voters are replacing a Democrat, the median result is 3% redder than expected (1.4% redder on average). Conversely, whenever voters are replacing a Republican, the median result is 1.5% bluer (2.7% bluer on average). That’s a whopping 4%–5% difference, based solely on which party is leaving office. And notably, the effect appears to persist even when the outgoing governor is popular — just look at Jim Justice (WV), John Bel Edwards (LA), Charlie Baker (MA), and Larry Hogan (MD).
Conceptually, this dynamic makes sense. After all, a similar pattern exists for the White House. In the eight open presidential elections since World War II, the incumbent party has prevailed only once (1988). Meanwhile, voters routinely express frustration with politics and politicians, telling pollsters they’d rather “give someone else a chance.” In a country that majorities consistently say is headed in the wrong direction, it’s not hard to see why, all else being equal (i.e. without incumbency appeal), swing voters tend to prefer something new.
It’s important to emphasize that these are medians and averages, and so divergences will always exist. Of the 40 races in the dataset, the incumbent party actually outperformed in 17. In other words, this pattern isn’t destiny, and plenty of candidates from the incumbent party will outperform despite it. But the headwinds described are very real — though whether the actual campaigns can overcome them is another matter entirely.
TAKEAWAYS FOR 2025 AND BEYOND
Returning to Virginia and New Jersey, this dynamic is on full display. Polls consistently find Glenn Youngkin (R) to be a popular governor in Virginia. Yet those same polls show his lieutenant governor, Winsome Sears (R), trailing Abigail Spanberger (D) by double digits. And despite Youngkin’s support for Sears’s campaign, Sears rarely features the popular governor in her ads. It’s clear their research finds his endorsement to not be of particular help.
In New Jersey, the picture is almost the reverse. Governor Phil Murphy (D) has decidedly middling approvals — polls disagree if he’s slightly above or below water. Yet Jack Ciattarelli (R) has eagerly tied Mikie Sherrill (D) to Murphy, casting her as a “third term” of a failed administration, and promising change in an unhappy state. Sherrill, for her part, seems to recognize the danger. While she promises little change from Murphy’s agenda, her ads emphasize her one notable point of divergence: a day-one emergency declaration to freeze utility costs.
Despite the two states’ similar partisanship, analysts and pollsters widely expect Virginia to vote bluer than New Jersey this fall. There are many different factors that contribute to this, including state-specific conditions and individual candidate strengths. Still, it’s hard to miss Youngkin’s inability to keep Virginia Republicans competitive, as well as Murphy’s drag on the Democrats of New Jersey.
In the last midterm, in 2022, gubernatorial retirements helped Democrats flip Arizona, while Republicans came close to flipping Oregon. Looking forward now to 2026, many key governorships will be open, giving both parties opportunities to compete in each other’s states. Even in a likely blue-leaning midterm, Democrats could struggle to hold Michigan, Wisconsin, and especially Kansas as popular incumbents step aside. For Republicans, the same mix of open seats and a blue-leaning midterm may give Democrats a strong shot at flipping redder states, such as Georgia, Ohio, Iowa, and Alaska.
Ultimately, the national environment and individual campaigns will likely still matter most. Challengers cannot rely solely on the pendulum effect to win. But ignoring it comes with just as much risk — no candidate wants to be nailed as the failed status quo when voters are eager for change.
APPENDIX
The data source for the analysis is available in this spreadsheet. For reader convenience, we will include a screenshot of all races considered in this piece.
Just another election data guy from New Jersey. Proudly competent at predicting the midterms. You can find me tracking special elections and other election-related data/nonsense on Twitter at @ECaliberSeven.