Who’s Moving into the Governor’s Mansions

On the menu today: Welcome to Election Day! if you have not voted already, you should go out and vote. Good men and women died to preserve that right. (Correction: You should look up who’s running, try to develop an informed opinion, and then vote.)

In my neck of the woods, the only office on the ballot is the U.S. House of Representatives, and incumbent Democrat Gerry Connolly is likely to beat Republican Jim Myles by about a bazillion to one, but I’ll go out and be that one. Yesterday, I made my final predictions for the House and Senate races. Today, I’ll make my final calls in the governor’s races and one key local race.

Gubernatorial Predictions

Just as we are unlikely to know which party will control the Senate as Tuesday evening turns into Wednesday morning, we will likely be waiting a long time for the results in several key governor’s races.

“We won’t have unofficial results from all parts of the state and all valid counting done until Wednesday night,” Jake Rollow, a spokesman for the Michigan secretary of state’s office, told the New York Times in late October. “There may be counties that report far earlier than that, and there may also be races that, you know, therefore, are called prior to that.”

Michigan’s incumbent Democratic governor Gretchen Whitmer does not deserve a second term, but I notice that she’s at 48.7 percent in the RealClearPolitics average, usually a sign of an incumbent being right at the threshold. (One ominous indicator for Whitmer: Turnout in Detroit is projected to be down significantly from 2018.) I think Republican Tudor Dixon comes close but no cigar, but apparently, we won’t know who won for a while.