2026 Governor Election Betting Odds
Thirty-six states will elect a governor in November 2026, more than any other type of office on the ballot that year. That includes some of the largest political markets on Polymarket and some of the most unpredictable races in American politics, because governors win on rules that don't always look like the rules of federal elections. A state can vote 60-40 for one party at the presidential level and elect a governor from the other party by 10 points. It happens every cycle. Below: live US election odds on every gubernatorial race the prediction markets are pricing, plus the open seats and incumbent fights that are moving the most money right now.
Which states are electing governors in 2026?
Of the 50 states, 36 will pick a governor on Nov. 3, 2026, alongside the rest of the midterm ballot. The list runs the full geographic and political range. New England states like Maine and New Hampshire are on it. So are Southern flagships like Florida, Georgia, Texas and South Carolina. The biggest Midwestern states with gubernatorial elections this cycle are Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Ohio. Out West, California, Oregon, Nevada, Colorado and Arizona all have races, as do mountain states like Wyoming and Idaho. Several smaller-state races, including Alaska, Hawaii and Vermont, round out the cycle.
What's not on the 2026 ballot is just as important. Virginia and New Jersey hold their gubernatorial races in odd years, the only two states that still do. Those races happen in November 2025 and 2029, not 2026. Louisiana, Mississippi and Kentucky also operate on their own off-year cycles. None of those states will elect a governor in 2026 even though they're in the regular cycle conceptually.
The 36-state cycle creates a specific political environment. Roughly two-thirds of these races involve open seats, where the incumbent is either term-limited out or has chosen not to run again. The rest involve incumbents seeking reelection. Open seats are where most of the action happens in prediction markets, both because the outcomes are genuinely uncertain and because the candidate fields tend to be deeper and more interesting than incumbent races. We track the open seats most actively, but every race where the prediction markets have built meaningful volume shows up below.
All 2026 governor races we track
The table below shows every gubernatorial race we currently have live odds for. Each row links to the underlying prediction market, displays current implied probabilities for the leading party or candidate, and updates twice daily at 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. Eastern. We add new state races as they launch on Polymarket or Kalshi, so this list grows through the cycle as more markets come online.
If you're looking for a specific state and don't see it, it usually means one of two things. Either the race is in a state safe enough that no prediction market has formed a meaningful contract on it (most deep-red and deep-blue states fall into this bucket), or the contract exists but hasn't yet crossed our minimum volume threshold for tracking. As more candidates announce and primaries approach, additional state markets will appear here.
The races getting the most attention
Volume tells you which races traders consider most consequential. A handful of states attract the bulk of the action and deserve their own write-up.
Florida is the highest-volume governor race in the country and probably will remain that way through the August 18, 2026 primary and beyond. Term limits ended Ron DeSantis's career in Tallahassee, opening the seat for the first time since 2018. The Republican primary has consolidated faster than most observers expected. Rep. Byron Donalds, who picked up Trump's endorsement in February 2025, has built a commanding lead with 46 percent support in recent Emerson polling against the next-nearest active candidate, Lt. Gov. Jay Collins, at 4 percent. Donalds raised $22 million in the first quarter of 2026, the largest non-incumbent quarterly haul in Florida history. The lingering question is whether Florida First Lady Casey DeSantis enters the race. She has not declared as of this writing, and an investigation into her Hope Florida initiative dented her stock even though it has since closed. On the Democratic side, former Republican Rep. David Jolly leads a thin field that also includes Orange County Mayor Jerry Demings. Democrats lost Florida by double digits in 2024 and are trying to convince themselves the state is still winnable. The market is skeptical.
New York is a different kind of race. Kathy Hochul became governor when Andrew Cuomo resigned and won a full term in 2022 against Lee Zeldin in what turned out to be the closest gubernatorial race the state had seen in two decades. She's running for a second full term, and the field around her has consolidated quickly in 2026. On the Democratic side, Lt. Gov. Antonio Delgado launched a primary challenge in June 2025 but dropped out on February 10, 2026 after Hochul secured endorsements from progressive figures including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Zohran Mamdani, plus 85 percent of the state Democratic Party convention. On the Republican side, Rep. Elise Stefanik formally entered the race in November 2025 but suspended her campaign six weeks later, leaving Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman as the primary GOP candidate. The general election is now Hochul vs Blakeman, with the market giving Hochul a comfortable but not overwhelming lead.
California is technically open because Gavin Newsom is term-limited, but the Democratic primary is so crowded that the real story has become whether two Republicans can advance to the November general election through the state's nonpartisan top-two primary on June 2, 2026. The Democratic field collapsed in April when former Rep. Eric Swalwell, then a co-frontrunner, exited the race after multiple credible allegations of sexual assault. His departure scattered the Democratic vote across Tom Steyer, Xavier Becerra, Katie Porter, Matt Mahan and Antonio Villaraigosa, none of whom has consolidated above the high teens in polls. On the Republican side, conservative commentator Steve Hilton has Trump's endorsement and leads Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco. With the Democratic vote split four or five ways, the polling has consistently shown Hilton and Bianco as the top two finishers, which would produce a Republican vs Republican general election in the most Democratic state in the country. The California Democratic Party has been openly urging lower-polling Democrats to drop out before ballots are counted. Steyer has spent more than $132 million of his own money trying to lock down the Democratic lane. The prediction markets have priced him as the Democratic favorite, but the race remains genuinely uncertain three weeks out from primary day.
Texas is on the ballot because Greg Abbott has been governor since 2015 and is running for what would be a fourth term. He launched his reelection campaign in November 2025, won the March 3, 2026 Republican primary with 82 percent of the vote, and now faces Democratic state Rep. Gina Hinojosa in the general. Abbott entered the cycle with more than $105 million on hand and has indicated he intends to spend heavily to flip Harris County, the largest Democratic stronghold in the state. The market gives him a strong favorite's position, but Texas is one of the larger gubernatorial markets simply because of the state's size and the cumulative volume that builds up over a multi-month campaign. Hinojosa has campaigned on affordability and small-donor energy but starts the general with a significant cash gap.
Several other races worth watching as the cycle develops: Michigan and Pennsylvania for open seats Democrats have to defend, Arizona and Nevada for swing-state contests with national implications, Georgia for a race that's been talked about for years and is finally happening.
Open seats and incumbent races
What separates a governor cycle from a Senate cycle is the number of open seats. Senators serve six-year terms, retire less often than governors, and have less of an institutional culture of stepping aside after two terms. Governors, by contrast, are pushed out by term limits in 36 states. In 2026, more than two dozen of the 36 races on the ballot involve either a term-limited governor or a sitting governor who has chosen not to seek reelection.
Open seats are where the prediction markets get the most useful. When there's an incumbent running, the market mostly prices in incumbency advantage and tracks news about the incumbent. When the seat is open, the market has to weigh candidate quality, primary dynamics, party strength in the state and national environment all at once. The result is more price movement, more volume and more information per dollar traded.
The biggest open seats this cycle are Florida, California, South Carolina, Tennessee, Oregon, Arkansas, Iowa and Nebraska. Most of these are safe for the incumbent party. Florida matters most because it's the largest in the group. California matters because the top-two primary is going to produce news and movement through November. South Carolina matters because Henry McMaster has been term-limited out after the longest gubernatorial tenure in state history, and the Republican primary on June 9, 2026 is producing real competition. McMaster has endorsed Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette to succeed him, but Rep. Nancy Mace, Rep. Ralph Norman and state Attorney General Alan Wilson are all running competitive campaigns, and the contest for Trump's endorsement has been the most consequential variable. A runoff on June 23 is likely if no candidate clears 50 percent on June 9.
The incumbent races are mostly less interesting but with notable exceptions. Hochul in New York is the highest-profile incumbent facing real reelection risk, though her primary challenge from Lt. Gov. Antonio Delgado collapsed in February 2026 and the Republican field around her narrowed to Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman. Tony Evers in Wisconsin is running for a third term in a state where Republicans have been gaining ground at every level. Maura Healey in Massachusetts isn't in trouble but is the kind of incumbent the markets watch because a bad year for the party could put even a safe state in play. Spencer Cox in Utah and Brad Little in Idaho are running for second terms in deep-red states where the only real threat is a primary challenge. Compared to the 2026 Senate election, which has produced an unusual cluster of incumbent retirements, the gubernatorial cycle is mostly the standard mix of term-limited governors handing off to new nominees.
A useful pattern to know: incumbent governors win reelection at about 75 percent in a normal cycle. The exceptions are governors who've been hit by scandal, governors in states that have flipped politically since their first election and governors who've alienated their own party's base. If you're looking at a market price on an incumbent and trying to decide whether it's accurate, those are the three questions to ask.
How split-ticket voting affects governor races
The single thing that makes governor races different from federal races is the survival of split-ticket voting at the state level. Federal politics has polarized into something close to pure partisanship, where most voters pull the same party's lever for everything on the ballot. State politics hasn't fully gotten there yet, and gubernatorial races are where you still see voters making different choices.
Phil Scott in Vermont is the iconic example. He's a Republican who's won four straight statewide elections in a state Joe Biden carried by 36 points. He does it by being moderate on the national flashpoints, focusing relentlessly on state-specific issues and being personally well-liked. Larry Hogan did the same thing in Maryland from 2014 to 2022. Chris Sununu in New Hampshire was that kind of Republican until he termed out. On the Democratic side, Laura Kelly in Kansas, Andy Beshear in Kentucky, John Bel Edwards in Louisiana before him, and Roy Cooper in North Carolina all won statewide in red or red-leaning states by running cycle after cycle as state-issue Democrats.
The implication for prediction markets is that they're pricing different things than presidential markets price. A market on whether a Republican wins the Florida governorship in 2026 is not the same market as one on whether a Republican wins Florida's electoral votes in 2028, even though both look like the same kind of question. The first market is about whether the Republican nominee runs a good enough campaign on state-specific issues to overperform the partisan baseline. The second is about national environment, candidate quality at the top of the ticket and turnout. Different questions, different prices.
What this means for traders is that you can't just take presidential polling and assume it predicts gubernatorial outcomes. The states where polls and prediction markets diverge most are exactly the states where split-ticket voting is most likely to happen. Vermont is a Democratic state that will probably elect another Republican governor, until Scott retires anyway. Kansas is a Republican state with a Democratic governor through 2027. Kentucky has been electing Democratic governors regularly even while voting Republican for everything else. The prediction markets price all of this into their numbers in a way that simple state-partisan-lean models do not.
Why governor races are harder to forecast
There's a structural reason gubernatorial polling tends to be less reliable than national polling. State-level pollsters work with smaller budgets, smaller samples and less academic infrastructure than national outfits. Some states get one or two quality polls per cycle. Others get a dozen, but with wildly varying methodologies. The result is that the public polling average for a gubernatorial race can be dominated by a single pollster's house effects in a way the presidential polling average never is.
Prediction markets pick up the slack in two ways. First, they aggregate not just polls but also the fundamentals that pollsters can't capture cleanly: how the candidate's fundraising looks, what party operatives are saying off the record, what the early ground-game numbers indicate, what national momentum is doing. Second, they're updated continuously, which means a single bad poll doesn't dominate the price for weeks the way it can dominate a polling average. The market absorbs the new information, weighs it against everything else it knows and prices accordingly.
The places this matters most are mid-tier races in mid-tier states. A presidential race or a major Senate race has dozens of pollsters and millions of dollars in market volume. The price reflects deep consensus. A gubernatorial race in, say, Iowa or Oklahoma might have three polls all cycle and $200,000 in market volume. The market's signal there is weaker than the national markets, but it's still typically better than the polling alone, because the market can incorporate the fundamentals the polls miss.
The other thing about governor races: they often turn on a single issue that the prediction market starts pricing before the polls catch up. A state policy fight that becomes a national story. A budget crisis. A specific local issue that defines the campaign. Traders pick up on these faster than the polling industry, which is on a slower release cycle and tends to ask generic questions rather than issue-specific ones. The result is that prediction markets often move first when something local goes national.
Gubernatorial primary odds
Primary markets in gubernatorial races are interesting precisely because they're harder to predict than primaries for federal office. A governor's primary is fought on state-specific issues, with state-specific candidate networks and state-specific media coverage. National media usually doesn't pay attention until the primary is decided. Prediction markets fill the information gap.
The Florida Republican primary is the most actively traded gubernatorial primary market in the country right now. Byron Donalds has been the prediction-market favorite for over a year, but the field includes a state insider, an outsider businessman and a former Trump cabinet figure, which keeps the contest from being a coronation. The Democratic side of the Florida primary is wide open and the markets are pricing it as such.
The New York Republican primary for governor was the most-watched contest in that state through late 2025 because the party hadn't fully sorted out whether it wanted to run a Long Island Republican who could compete in the suburbs or an upstate Republican who could excite the base. That question resolved when Rep. Elise Stefanik suspended her campaign in December 2025, leaving Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman as the consolidated Republican option. With the primary effectively settled, the larger market on the New York governor's race now prices the Hochul-Blakeman general election rather than a competitive primary.
California's nonpartisan top-two primary in June 2026 is the most structurally complex governor primary in the country. Every candidate from every party competes on the same ballot, and the top two finishers advance to November regardless of party. If the Democratic vote splits enough, a Republican can theoretically advance, even in a state where Democrats hold every statewide office. The prediction markets have been pricing that scenario as unlikely but real.
Other primaries worth watching as they develop: South Carolina Republican, where the McMaster-endorsed lieutenant governor faces a deep field including two House Republicans and the state attorney general. Michigan Democratic and Republican, both open seats. Pennsylvania Democratic, also an open seat. Texas is no longer in this group because Greg Abbott swept his March 3 primary with 82 percent of the vote.
How to bet on the next governor
Betting on gubernatorial races in the United States is legal in more places than most people realize, but the practical landscape is different from betting on a presidential or Senate race. Here's how to think about it.
What's legal and where
Kalshi, the CFTC-regulated exchange we've referenced throughout this site, hosts contracts on most major gubernatorial races. The same federal court ruling from October 2024 that established its right to host election markets covers state-level federal races as well as state-level governor races. You can sign up as a U.S. resident, deposit dollars from a bank account and trade governor markets directly.
The state-by-state legality question is more complicated for gubernatorial markets than for federal ones. Some states view election betting on their own governor's race as a different category from betting on a federal race held in their state, and the regulatory posture differs accordingly. Arizona has been the most aggressive, charging Kalshi with running illegal gambling under state law. Several other state attorneys general have signaled they're watching. The federal court ruling protects Kalshi's right to operate the market, but it doesn't preempt all state law in all contexts. If you live in a state with a hostile regulator and you're trading on your own state's governor race, the situation is genuinely unclear.
Polymarket lists more gubernatorial markets than Kalshi does, particularly for smaller states, but the platform technically prohibits U.S. residents under its CFTC settlement. Using it from the United States is a gray area.
Some states allow regulated sports books to take wagers on political events, though most don't, and the rules change frequently. If you have a state-regulated sportsbook account, check whether they offer governor markets in your jurisdiction. The list shifts cycle to cycle.
What governor markets look like
Most gubernatorial markets are binary contracts: will a specific candidate win the election, yes or no? On Kalshi, you'll typically see a market structured around the question "Will the Republican win the [state] governor's race in 2026?" with a Yes contract and a No contract. Each is priced between zero and 100 cents, representing the implied probability. Buy Yes at 58 cents and the Republican wins, you get a dollar back. Buy Yes and the Democrat wins, you get nothing.
Polymarket structures things a little differently for races with multiple candidates. The Florida governor's race, for example, lists a single market with many outcomes, one for each named candidate plus a generic "other" option. Each outcome has its own price, and the prices add up to one dollar across all options. This is useful for primaries with deep fields or general elections that may include independents.
Primary markets work the same way as multi-outcome general election markets. A field of, say, eight Republicans competing in a primary becomes eight separate contracts, each priced at the implied probability that the specific candidate wins. These markets get most active in the two months before the primary date and tend to be quiet outside that window.
What you need to know before betting on a governor's race
Three things specifically about gubernatorial markets that you should internalize before putting real money down.
First, governor markets are smaller than federal markets in almost every case. The largest gubernatorial markets in the country, including the Florida and California governor races, have aggregated into the eight figures in cumulative volume. That sounds like a lot, but it's still a tiny fraction of what flows through the Senate control market or the presidential election market, which run into the hundreds of millions. Most other governor races have less volume than Florida or California. The prices you see on a smaller-state race are based on thinner trading than the prices on a national market, which means they're more vulnerable to single-trader moves and less reliable as consensus signals.
Second, gubernatorial races move on different news than federal races. A federal race responds to national-environment shifts, the president's approval rating and macro political events. A governor's race responds to state-specific issues that may not generate national news. The result is that the moments when a governor's race price moves significantly are often moments when there's been a state-specific development that didn't show up in your normal political news feeds. If you're betting on a governor race, you have to follow local news from that state. National news isn't enough.
Third, the candidate quality variable matters more in gubernatorial races than in any other type of election. A weak presidential nominee still gets 40-something percent of the vote because of partisan polarization. A weak gubernatorial nominee can lose by 15 points in a state that should be 50-50. Prediction markets price candidate quality, but they don't always get it right, especially in primaries where the eventual nominee hasn't been vetted yet. The biggest mispricings in gubernatorial markets in recent cycles have been markets that didn't adequately discount a candidate who turned out to be a worse campaigner than expected. Watch the candidates, not just the partisan lean of the state.
A note on betting on your own state
One thing that's specific to gubernatorial markets and doesn't apply to federal races: there's a meaningful chance you have private information about your own state's race that the broader market doesn't have. A New Yorker following the Hochul-Blakeman general election closely on local news sources knows things the national prediction market is slow to price in. A Floridian who pays attention to state politics knows things about Donalds or his rivals that don't show up in national coverage.
This is not insider trading in any legal sense, but it does mean that betting on your own state's race may put you in a position where you have a real informational edge. It also means the opposite: if you're betting on a state you don't follow, you're at an informational disadvantage to traders who do. The smart play for most bettors is to focus on states where you have actual knowledge, either because you live there or because you follow them carefully, and avoid markets in states where you're just guessing.
Responsible betting in thin gubernatorial markets
The standard advice on responsible betting applies here as it does everywhere: only put up money you can afford to lose, treat it as entertainment rather than income, and don't chase losses. The governor-specific version of that advice is about market depth. The thinner the market, the more you should treat your bet as a manual prediction with extra steps rather than as a position in an efficient market.
If you're trading a $50,000-volume Wyoming governor's race, the price you see is not telling you what informed consensus thinks. It's telling you what two or three people who bothered to place a trade thought when they placed it. That price can be wrong by a lot. If you're trading a million-dollar Florida governor's race, the price is closer to the kind of efficient consensus signal that prediction markets are supposed to produce. Adjust your bet size to the depth of the market. Confidence should scale with liquidity.
The other governor-specific risk: races can move on a single piece of state-level news that you didn't see. A primary debate, a candidate gaffe, a state-budget fight that becomes a campaign issue. These move governor markets in ways national markets don't move. If you're holding a position on a governor's race, watch the state's news on a regular basis, not just on election day. Information moves faster than you expect.
How we source this data for governor races
The governor's page on this site has some specifics worth explaining because they differ from how we handle other pages.
We track every gubernatorial market that has meaningful trading volume on either Polymarket or Kalshi. For most major-state races, that means we pull from Polymarket first because Polymarket lists more individual gubernatorial races and structures them with cleaner candidate names than Kalshi does. Kalshi's gubernatorial markets sometimes use placeholder identifiers in their multi-candidate markets that don't display well. Where Polymarket has the market, we use it. Where it doesn't, we fall back to Kalshi if available, and where neither has built a market, we don't show one.
Primary markets are pulled separately from general election markets. The same state can have an active Republican primary market, an active Democratic primary market and an active general election market simultaneously, and each gets its own row on the race list above. Once a primary resolves, the market closes and the winner becomes the named candidate in the general election market.
We update twice a day at 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. Eastern time, the same cadence as the rest of the site. Gubernatorial markets typically move slowly outside of major news events, so the half-day update is plenty. The exceptions are primary night, debate nights and the days following a major candidate announcement, when prices can shift several points within hours. On those days the displayed numbers can be slightly stale, and we recommend checking Polymarket or Kalshi directly if you're trading on near-term news.
The volume figures shown on each race are total cumulative volume on the underlying market, not 24-hour volume. We chose this presentation because cumulative volume is a better proxy for how much information is priced into a market than 24-hour volume, which can spike on any given news day. A market with two million dollars in cumulative volume and zero recent activity is still telling you more than a market with $50,000 cumulative and lots of recent action.
Frequently asked questions
How many governors are elected in 2026?
Thirty-six states will hold gubernatorial elections in 2026, on Nov. 3, alongside the rest of the midterm ballot. The states not on the 2026 ballot are New Hampshire and Vermont, which elect governors every two years and last held their elections in 2024, plus Virginia, New Jersey, Louisiana, Mississippi and Kentucky, all of which operate on odd-year or off-cycle schedules.
Which 2026 governor races are most competitive?
Florida, New York, Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Wisconsin and Maine are typically the states traders price as the most competitive. The list shifts as candidates announce and primaries develop. California's general election is usually safe for Democrats, but its primary is one of the most actively traded markets because the top-two structure produces real uncertainty about which candidates advance.
Are governor races easier or harder to predict than Senate races?
Generally harder. Governor races have less national polling, smaller state-level pollster operations, and a stronger element of candidate-specific factors that polls don't capture well. Prediction markets tend to outperform polls in gubernatorial races by a larger margin than they outperform polls in Senate races, precisely because the polling baseline is weaker.
Can I legally bet on a governor's race?
Yes, on Kalshi, the CFTC-regulated U.S.-based exchange that offers governor election contracts to American residents under federal authority established by an October 2024 federal court ruling. State-by-state legality varies, with Arizona having taken the most aggressive regulatory stance and several other states' attorneys general signaling interest. Polymarket lists more gubernatorial markets but prohibits U.S. residents under its CFTC settlement. Some state-regulated sportsbooks list political markets in some jurisdictions.
Why are gubernatorial primary markets so volatile?
Primary markets are smaller than general election markets, with fewer participants and thinner liquidity, which makes them more sensitive to news and trader sentiment. They also resolve faster than general election markets, since the primary date is typically months before November, which means traders are weighing nearer-term factors. Both of these features add volatility relative to the long-running general election markets.
How do you decide which races to show?
We show every gubernatorial market with meaningful trading volume on Polymarket or Kalshi. As of this update, that includes the open-seat races traders are most actively pricing plus the incumbent races where there's genuine competition. As more markets launch on either platform, they appear here automatically.
Where do the candidate odds in primary markets come from?
The candidate-by-candidate odds you see are derived from the prices of the individual outcome contracts on Polymarket or Kalshi. A candidate trading at 25 cents has, in the market's view, a 25 percent implied probability of winning that primary. The percentages across all candidates in a primary add up to 100, the way contracts in a multi-outcome market do.
Why do governor races sometimes go the opposite way from the presidential vote?
Split-ticket voting. Governor races are won on state-specific issues, candidate quality and personal political brands that don't reduce neatly to national partisanship. Vermont elects Republican governors while voting Democratic at the national level. Kansas, Kentucky and North Carolina have elected Democratic governors in recent years while voting Republican for president. The pattern is shrinking over time but still exists, and it's the single biggest reason gubernatorial markets are sometimes worth betting differently than presidential markets.
We don't operate Polymarket or Kalshi. We aggregate their public data twice a day and present it in one place, for free, with no affiliate spam.