Forecasting the 2026 US Midterm Elections
Forecasting Gubernatorial Elections in an Era of Polarized and Nationalized Politics
By Gregory J. Love, University of Mississippi, Ryan E. Carlin, Georgia State University, and Matthew M. Singer, University of Connecticut
Gubernatorial elections are states’ most politically consequential contests; an increasingly polarized and nationalized political landscape forces forecasters to reconsider how to forecast gubernatorial races, including the appropriate training data, predictors, lead time, and approaches to thin samples. In developing forecasts for the 2026 governors’ races, our analyses revealed three key findings: (1) pooling across all available elections beats truncating the training data to the more polarized, nationalized era; the variance cost of a short sample exceeds whatever bias older elections might introduce, (2) the recency premium of governor approval ratings has collapsed; ratings one year from elections now predict as well as ratings measured just six months out. Forecasts can therefore be issued a half-year earlier at essentially no accuracy cost, (3) regularization is what makes thin-sample diagnostics informative: LASSO yields stable coefficients on restricted windows where unregularized estimates swing and change sign. We close with fundamentals-based forecasts for the 36 gubernatorial contests of 2026. No blue Democratic wave is expected despite Trump’s unpopularity in these states, though the forecasts imply a net Democratic gain of one or two governorships. Most races favor the party that has dominated the state’s recent political history.
The editorial team at PS: Political Science & Politics is pleased to announce the release of articles that will make up a Special Issue on Forecasting the 2026 US Midterm Elections.
“Coupled with the unique circumstances of the 2026 election, it’s a tough one to call. Will we see a return to the fundamentals of American election forecasting, or will it prove a challenge to the widespread beliefs about American electoral behaviour?” – Dr Debra Lynn Leiter.
