How Do Governors Do Running For Senate?
It’s become a recurring meme among people that follow elections that a party recruits a former governor to run in a Senate election to get crossover support and then loses when the race becomes federalized. It’s even been popularized like the meme below from Drew Savicki usually with the caption, “Come join us.”
But a lot of these candidates do end up doing well and get recruited in the first place so I wanted to check out what sort of advantage a former or current governor brings when running and if there is a reason that the meme has become so popular. With Whitmer ruling out a Michigan run, and Beshear doing the same in Kentucky, Senate recruitment for governors has focused on three big races: Brian Kemp in Georgia, Roy Coper in North Carolina, and Chris Sununu in New Hampshire. All three most recently won their seat in a state where the opposing party had carried the state in the presidential election at the same time or immediately preceding their election and all make for formidable opponents.
To do this, I collected every instance starting in 2000 where a Senate candidate in the general election was most recently a governor. This ruled out Bob Kerrey and Evan Bayh who were governors but then became Senators pre-2000. Jim Risch was temporarily elevated to governor before being appointed to the Senate but never formally elected and Angue King was an Independent so both have been left off this dataset. The first plot below is just the most recent gubernatorial margin plotted against Senate. Ted Strickland was the only one to run for Senate after losing his race but there’s not a clear trend here.
Where there is much more of a relationship is when you look at the performance against the top of the ticket in each race. To do this, I took the margin for the Senatorial race against the presidential margin most recently before or during that and subtracted the same measurement for the gubernatorial race from that. For example, Larry Hogan’s 2018 gubernatorial margin was 10% while the 2016 race saw Republican Donald Trump lose it by 26%, so a 36% overperformance. When he ran for Senate in 2024, he lost by 12% while Trump lost the state by 29%, which is a 17% gap. The difference on the y-axis is now 17–36 = -19%.
This is a much clearer trend for performance and does show the nationalization of the race. The more crossover support the governor has before, the more they lose. But underperforming governors like Pete Ricketts or Jim Justice actually see their margins get stronger than before.
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I then tested out a few different factors I had collected to see if they made a difference. The first was to see if the race was open or if they were challenging an incumbent. For 2026, right now North Carolina and Georgia would be challenging an incumbent but New Hampshire is open. It turns out that is important and the intercept difference between the two is worth about 4% on the margin. This is also a pretty good measure for estimating Senate incumbent advantage generally.
Splitting this up by year and looking at the 2000–2014 pre-Trump era against 2016 on shows why this meme is maybe more popular now than it was before. It includes a lot more people who lost their race but in parties are also more successful at getting them to run as a challenger. Before 2016, only 2 of the 11 races saw a governor challenging an incumbent, usually they just waited for the previous senator to retire. But since then, 5 of the 9 races were challenging an incumbent making it a relatively new trend which is why people may only have started noticing it now.
I also took a look at things like the cycle and how many years apart between the gubernatorial and senatorial elections but couldn’t find any real differences there. Generally people run within 6 years but going into the double digits seems like it doesn’t lead to an underperformance unless you’re Jim Gilmore.
Taking this trendline, looking at the more recent set of data, and plugging in whether it’s an open or challenger, I did a rough model with a giant upper and lower bound of error and modeled out what the big three races looked like. Sununu’s monster 2022 win means that he is predicted to win by about 7 points vs. Pappas, but interestingly both Kemp and Cooper are projected to lose by about a point after similar recent performances.
Of course, none of this is close to being set in stone. There are a ton of factors to this, and this regression is run using only a n of 20, which also include half of the data set from the pre-Trump era. It also has wide error bars of 7 points on either side, so each one is certainly winnable for either party. There also isn’t a high enough n to really study what happens when we transition between cycles, like an out-party midterm to an in-party midterm like Kemp would be doing. This also takes the most recent gubernatorial election but while Kemp and Cooper did similarly in both of their races, Sununu has won four elections ranging from a 2% to a 32% win.
Additionally, we’ve seen the effect of spending matter a lot. The chart below looks at the 2024 Senate races that saw some spending and compares the spending advantage per voter to the difference between the presidential and Senate margins and we can see a money effect at play which will have an impact.
I also only looked at margin. In 2020, Roy Cooper won 51.5 to 47 for a 4.5% victory. And at the same time, Tillis won his gubernatorial race by 1.7%. But Cooper had a lot less third party defection while there were more voters willing to break from Tillis and it might be that this measure thinks Cooper get a losing margin but if it was vote share, would predict something like 49.5% which could be enough to win the race.
Overall, this is more of a fun measure to look at how candidates adjust from a state-level to a federal race more than a predictive model, but I think it does show that these are good candidates generally and do retain some level of crossover support that a new candidate might not necessarily bring, like when a candidate from a lower level with a base of support tries to move up and outperforms in that region.
