A Monte Carlo simulation of all 36 gubernatorial races on the 2026 ballot. For each race, we pool polling, fundamentals, fundraising, candidate strength (weighted more heavily toward incumbency than our Senate model, since governors run further ahead of their party's lean), and our own expert call into a single projection, then run 20,000 simulated election nights to get win probabilities, projected margins, and a national topline.
Republicans currently hold 26 governorships; Democrats hold 24. Of the 14 not up this cycle, 8 are held by Republicans and 6 by Democrats. There's no national "control" at stake, unlike the Senate. This is a projection of the national governor count after the 36 races on the 2026 ballot.
Ratings: Toss-up under 60% · Lean 60–75% · Likely 75–99% · Safe over 99%.
In plain terms: for each of the 12 genuinely competitive races, we treat polling, fundamentals, money, candidate strength, and our own judgment as separate, independently uncertain readings on the same race, then combine them into one projection weighted by how reliable each reading is. Governors run further ahead of their party's lean than senators do, so candidate strength and incumbency carry more weight here than in our Senate model, and a couple of races (New Hampshire, Vermont) skip the partisan-lean input entirely since the generic state lean barely matters against a well-defined personal brand. The 24 remaining seats get a single fundamentals-based projection since they aren't realistically in play. From there, we simulate the whole map 20,000 times, letting a national mood, a regional mood, and race-specific luck all move independently, to see how the national governor count shakes out.
Polling average, structural fundamentals, fundraising and ad-reservation signal, candidate strength, and our own expert rating, each with its own uncertainty, pooled DerSimonian-Laird style with outlier dampening.
Every simulation draws a national environment shock, a regional shock, and race-specific noise, scaled by how elastic each race is to the national mood.
Each run produces a full map. Across all runs, we get each race's win probability and margin distribution, plus the national governor-count topline.