6 key governor's races loom in states Biden narrowly won

Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential win depended on tight victories in six states, with margins below three percentage points in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. That same group of key swing states has gubernatorial races set to be decided this fall, and with former President Donald Trump loudly promoting his belief that election results should be overturned in his favor, experts are worried that a single rogue governor could flip the 2024 race. By coordinating with a chamber of the U.S. Congress, state officials could submit a false slate of electors, as some Republicans attempted in 2020.

A number of the Republican candidates running in these races have stated they would not have certified the 2020 results. Currently, they are seeking Trump’s endorsement and the support of GOP primary voters, a majority of whom believe Biden’s victory is not legitimate according to poll after poll. Democrats, meanwhile, will try to hold onto seats in what is expected to be the usual midterm wave by the party that doesn’t control the White House. Here’s a rundown of six key gubernatorial races.

Arizona

Much to Trump’s consternation, his legal team and a number of prominent members of the Arizona GOP, Republican Gov. Doug Ducey certified the 2020 election result showing a Biden victory by 0.4 percent. Maricopa County, the most populous county in Arizona, has been the focal point of unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud, including a poorly run and much decried “audit” that divided Republicans and ending up concluding that the vote count was accurate.

Due to term limits, Ducey is unable to run for reelection, and the leading candidate is former television journalist Kari Lake. Lake has earned Trump’s endorsement and has said she wouldn’t have certified the 2020 election results. Lake also secured the backing of Mike Lindell, the MyPillow founder and a leading conspiracy theorist about the 2020 election. Lake was a guest on Lindell’s podcast last year and celebrated his endorsement, writing on Twitter, “Mike Lindell is one of the Great Patriots of our time. I am so incredibly honored to have his Endorsement. He has put EVERYTHING on the line to restore our Elections.”

The Democratic frontrunner is Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, who has nearly tripled her closest primary opponents in fundraising and has been at the center of the false stolen election allegations in her role as secretary of state. Last year, Lake accused Hobbs of aiding in the imaginary effort to steal the election and has called for her to be “locked up.”

Prior to her election to statewide office, Hobbs served as the Democrats’ leader in the Senate, during which she was involved in the 2015 firing of staffer Talonya Adams. Adams, who is Black, sued for discrimination on the basis of race and gender and in November won a $2.75 million judgment. Hobbs posted a three-minute video apologizing, but Adams has said she should drop out of the race.

"Are we going to continue to allow individuals that engage in and deal with abuse of power and racism to lead this state?" Adams said in December. "Whether it is Kari Lake or Katie Hobbs, I would hope that Arizonans would uniformly say no.”

If Hobbs were to falter, other Democratic competitors include former state Rep. Aaron Lieberman and former Nogales Mayor Marco Lopez.

Georgia

Like Ducey, Republican Gov. Brian Kemp signed off on the 2020 election results showing a tight Biden win, and, like Ducey, he has been targeted by Trump and his allies. Kemp is still eligible to run for another term but is facing a prominent primary challenger in former Sen. David Perdue, who lost his seat in 2020. Perdue has said that he wouldn’t have certified the 2020 results and has called for a new election police force, similar to a plan put forth by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis that has angered voting rights activists. This helped earn Perdue a ringing endorsement from Trump, which the candidate has highlighted in his latest ad. Last spring, Kemp signed legislation passed by the Republican-controlled Legislature making it more difficult to vote, a law that moved Major League Baseball to pull its All-Star game from Atlanta.

Should Kemp prevail in the May primary, the general election would likely be a rematch of 2018, in which Kemp defeated Democrat Stacey Abrams in a narrow, expensive and controversial race. Kemp, who was secretary of state during the contest, purged hundreds of thousands of registered voters from the rolls in 2017, kept more than 50,000 registrations pending in 2018, and made baseless claims just before the election that Democrats had attempted to hack the state’s voter registration files that were disproven.

“I have no empirical evidence that I would have achieved a higher number of votes,” Abrams, a former minority leader in the state House of Representatives, said in 2019. “However, I have sufficient and I think legally sufficient doubt about the process to say that it was not a fair election.”

Abrams has risen to prominence in Democratic circles since her loss, promoting voting rights and delivering the 2019 response to Trump’s State of the Union. The increased stature has proven to be a fundraising boon for Abrams: Despite not declaring her entry in the race until December, her campaign announced this week she has already raised $9.2 million.

Michigan

Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer won her seat in 2018 by 10 points after previously serving as a county prosecutor and state senator. Since the start of the pandemic in March 2020, Whitmer has faced threats of recall, attacks from Trump and a complicated kidnapping attempt, but has found success in her fundraising. A recent poll showed Whitmer at plus-eight on favorability with 56 percent approving of her work as governor, but with only 40 percent saying they’d definitely vote to re-elect her.

Former Detroit Police Chief James Craig is considered the leader in the sprawling Republican field in the primary set for August. Craig has said he would accept the endorsement of Trump and met with him in September. Conservative radio host Tudor Dixon has courted Trump’s endorsement, stating that there was fraud in the 2020 election, calling for more election security and holding a fundraiser Wednesday evening at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida resort. The other candidates include two Oakland County businessmen, Kevin Rinke and Perry Johnson, who have donated millions to their own campaigns, and chiropractor Garrett Soldano, who made headlines this week for saying that victims of rape should not receive abortions if they become pregnant.

Nevada

Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak won his 2018 campaign by four points after previously serving as chair of the Clark County Commission. The latest fundraising numbers show Sisolak having more cash on hand ($8.3 million) for his reelection effort than all of his Republican opponents combined.

Which opponent will he likely face? Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo has led in both fundraising and sparse polling, but former Sen. Dean Heller, who also served as secretary of state, has entered the race, as well as North Las Vegas Mayor John Lee, attorney and former boxer Joe Gilbert (who was at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6), venture capitalist Guy Nohra and Las Vegas City Council member Michele Fiore. Showing the importance of a potential Trump endorsement, Fiore is running a 60-second ad touting her endorsement of the former president on Fox News in the Palm Beach, Fla., market where he resides.

Recent polling from the Nevada Independent showed Sisolak with a 4-point lead over Lombardo, and a 9-point lead over Heller, both improvements over his September numbers against the same potential challengers. Heller said Tuesday he believed Biden was an “illegitimate” president, while Lombardo said last June he hasn’t seen any indication of fraud but if anyone has evidence they should bring it forward.

Pennsylvania

After a comfortable win in the 2018 midterms, Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf is leaving office due to term limits. The clear frontrunner to replace him on the Democratic ticket is state Attorney General Josh Shapiro, who was involved in dealing with the multitude of challenges to the 2020 results by Trump’s legal team in the Keystone State. Shapiro’s campaign reported this week that it had raised a record $13.4 million, and faces little opposition in the Democratic primary, having secured the endorsement of the state party and major unions. In his statewide victories in 2016 and 2020, Shapiro ran ahead of the Democratic presidential candidates.

Shapiro’s general election opponent is still unclear, with 11 candidates declared for the Republican primary. Some of the early fundraising leaders include State Senate President Pro Tempore Jake Corman, former U.S. Rep. Lou Barletta, HVAC and plumbing firm owner Dave White, former U.S. Attorney Bill McSwain and Pittsburgh-based attorney Jason Richey. State Sen. Doug Mastriano, who attended the Jan. 6 protest at the Capitol, is also running. Barletta has called for a “full forensic audit” of the 2020 election, while Mastriano attempted to create his own Arizona-style review in the state.

Wisconsin

Democrat Tony Evers, then serving as the state's top education official, defeated Republican incumbent Scott Walker four years ago. During his tenure, Evers has been consistently undercut by the Republican-controlled Legislature, which voted to strip the governorship of power in the weeks following Walker’s loss and along with the Republican-controlled state Supreme Court limited attempts to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. A November poll by Marquette Law found only 40 percent of respondents saying they would vote to reelect Evers, although 53 percent approved of his handling of the pandemic.

Evers’s likely opponent in the general election is Rebecca Kleefisch, who served as Walker’s lieutenant governor and reiterated her support for election audits last month. The race was potentially shaken up last month by the entry of Kevin Nicholson, an activist and former Marine who has billed himself as the anti-establishment candidate and has the backing of one of the nation’s biggest political donors. The primary is set for Aug. 9.