President Obama meets with newly elected governors Gina Raimondo of Rhode Island, from left on the couch, Larry Hogan of Maryland and Bill Walker of Alaska. (AP)
Democrat Gina Raimondo of Rhode Island, Republican Charlie Baker of Massachusetts and newly minted independent Gov. Bill Walker of Alaska are part of a trend.
They are among the 10 governors elected in 2014 without majority support of voters in their state — a shift that’s been dominant this decade. The rate of governors being elected with less than 50% of the vote is already higher in the 2010s than in any decade since the 1910s, according to a Smart Politics analysis.
Eric Ostermeier at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs, who conducts the blog’s research, found that 24 of 90 gubernatorial elections since 2010 were won by a candidate who didn’t receive majority support. That 26.7% election rate is the highest in 100 years, when 40% of all the governor elections in the 1910s were won by candidates who didn’t receive a majority.
Writes Ostermeier:
If that sounds like a lot — it is. For it’s just the third time in the last century that the number of governors elected with a plurality of the vote has reached double digits — all since 2002.
The group of governors who won without a majority this year reflects the competition this campaign cycle to be a state’s CEO. At one point, up to a dozen gubernatorial races were considered tossups by political handicappers.
The Smart Politics list of governors elected in 2014 without a majority and their winning percentages:
Walker (48.1%), Democrats John Hickenlooper of Colorado (49.3%), David Ige of Hawaii (49.5%), John Kitzhaber of Oregon (48.9%), Raimondo (40.7%) and Peter Shumlin of Vermont (46.4%), and Republicans Rick Scott of Florida (48.1%), Sam Brownback of Kansas (49.9%), Paul LePage of Maine (48.2%) and Baker (48.4%).
Since Shumlin didn’t win 50% of the vote, the Vermont Legislature will decide next month whether the Democrat or Republican Scott Milne will be the state’s governor.
