There will be three dozen governors races on the ballot in 2022, along with at least two this year. And after chief executives have been under increased pressure and scrutiny with the COVID-19 pandemic — first amid efforts to mitigate the deadly virus's spread and now as focus turns to vaccine distribution and school and business reopenings — these races could take on outsized importance in the upcoming midterm elections.

We've seen Senate races become increasingly parliamentary, with only one race in the past two White House cycles breaking differently than the state's presidential results. But governor races remain a place where we have seen crossover voting at a more regular pace. Currently, there are ten governors from the opposite party of how their state voted in the most recent presidential election. But even that number has sharply dropped over the past decade. In 2008, there were 18 governors of a different party than how their state voted for the White House.

It's still very early in the 2022 cycle, but right now, the competitive map looks fairly

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