The typical way to think about how to “keep score” in gubernatorial elections is kind of a dumb one: essentially, it’s one point for each state, so if your party ends up electing the governor in 26 or more states, you’re the “winner.” As I’ve pointed out before, though, you don’t get any sort of bonus for controlling the majority of state houses. The party with 26 governors doesn’t get to tell the governors in the other 24 states what to do. (In fact, the majority party doesn’t even get to elect the chair of the National Governors’ Association, which isn’t much of a prize anyway, policy-wise; the chair simply rotates between the parties every cycle.) And if you’ve elected 26 governors in 26 disproportionately-small states, then your party is still representing only a minority of the country.
Our colleagues at FiveThirtyEight released their governors forecast today, and they did one thing that was really innovative: the topline result, instead of how many states the parties are on track to win, was how much of the population each party is on track to represent. Their answer is: the Democrats are on track to represent 194 million, or 59 percent of the nation, while the Republicans are on track to represent 135 million, or 41 percent. (Beyond that, their predictions are pretty much the same as where we are as of today: Democrats are on track to pick up eight governorships, which would take them up to 24.)