alternatehistory.com

Like its presidential elections, American voters in all 50 states have gubernatorial elections every four years (two in New Hampshire and Vermont) to elect their state’s chief executive. Of the 48 states with four-year gubernatorial terms, most are elected during midterm elections instead of during presidential election years and a handful (Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Jersey, and Virginia) elect their governors in odd-numbered years. Governors are almost (but not always, such as with Texas) the most powerful person in their state government and have similar powers to the American president, but on the state level. Most states also allow the governor to appoint people to vacant Senate seats, making them important players on the national level as well. In fact, three of the last four presidents (Pete Wilson, Bob Riley and Deval Patrick) were sitting governors when they were elected, a possibility that voters are beginning to value executive experience over legislative expertise that every president elected from 1960 (John F. Kennedy) to 1992 (Walter D. Huddleston) had in lieu of previous gubernatorial experience.

The shift of the South away from the Democratic Party since the 1960s has resulted in the Republican Party being able to consistently break even with the Democratic Party in the number of governors it can get elected, despite its increasingly worse performance in New England, former stronghold of liberal Republicans. Several states’ internal politics have resulted in one party having a lock on the governor’s mansion for the foreseeable future, while others occasionally elect governors from the opposite party. In the 2014 midterms, for example, solidly-blue Rhode Island surprised pundits by electing former Senator Lincoln Chafee to the governor’s mansion while solidly-red Louisiana elected former Congresswoman Mary Landrieu to lead the Pelican State.