Sam Wang provides “final polling snapshots for gubernatorial races that are either close or likely to switch party control”:
Enten explains the lay of the land:
There are a lot of tight races. Five seats are forecasted to flip from Republican to Democratic or independent control: Alaska, Florida, Kansas, Maine and Pennsylvania. Two seats are projected to flip from Democratic to Republican control: Arkansas and Massachusetts. If all the FiveThirtyEight favorites win, Republicans will have 26 governorships in 2015, Democrats will have 23 and independents will have one.
Dickerson wonders about the lessons taken from the results:
Drawing a conclusion will be more complicated than simply waiting to see if Republican governors are re-elected.
If Gov. Scott Walker wins in Wisconsin and Gov. Sam Brownback holds on in Kansas, they will both be able to argue that they survived even after taking political risks to govern as proud conservatives. If, on the other hand Ohio Gov. John Kasich cruises to a big victory, that might show something different. Kasich, and Gov. Rick Snyder of Michigan, opted to take the federal Medicaid money as a part of the Affordable Care Act. Doing so was once considered heresy in conservative ranks. But now people like Newt Gingrich point to Kasich as a model for expanding the Republican Party with black voters. In Gingrich’s election-eve predictions, he cites that Kasich won the endorsement of a black newspaper. The Ohio governor won that endorsement because he took the Medicaid money. Almost all of the vulnerable Republican governors this cycle did not. Will their victories or defeats render a verdict on that decision?
Larison cautions against over-hyping the Walker result:
If Walker does end up losing, as I am predicting he will, it shouldn’t come as a great shock, nor should it be treated as such a huge setback. Let’s remember that Walker was first elected in an unusually good year for Republicans in a state that had not made a recent habit of electing Republicans to statewide office. In that extraordinarily Republican year, Walker won with 52% of the vote. In a less lopsided election year, it’s possible that Walker might not have won the first time. Considering the controversy in his first term and the attempted recall, it wouldn’t be so strange if the electorate of a normally Democratic-leaning state grew tired of Walker and chose someone else to replace him. It does Republicans no favors to exaggerate the importance of any one governor’s race, and it would be a mistake for anyone to read too much into a Walker loss.
The Dish 