Ohio Democrat Richard Cordray and Republican Mike DeWine are among the candidates in crazy-close governor’s races this year. Photo: Paul Vernon/AP/REX/Shutterstock

The pre-midterm obsession with trends in close House and Senate races is so powerful at the moment that elementary school kids in metro Washington can probably cite Beto O’Rourke’s quarterly fund-raising haul or the latest polls from California’s 48th district. But an unusually large number of gubernatorial barn burners may have a more immediate and practical effect on the 260 million or so Americans who live in the 36 states whose governorships are at stake on November 6.

Democrats are almost sure to make some kind of net gains in total governorships, given a landscape in which Republicans are defending 26 seats in the midle of a midterm pro-Democratic trend. Indeed, according to the Cook Political Report, Democrats are favored to hold onto their own states and take back GOP governor’s offices in Illinois, Michigan and New Mexico. (Republicans are favored to oust Alaska’s independent Governor Bill Walker).

But Cook has an amazing 11 gubernatorial (nine in states currently held by Republicans, two by Democrats) races rated as toss-ups. Let’s go through them briskly, in order of their likelihood to go Democratic. After each, we will note how each race is rated by Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball and RealClearPolitics, along with the more specific projections made by FiveThirtyEight.

Lean Democrat

1) Connecticut — Can Democrats overcome the shadow of Dan Malloy? This race is Open D (the incumbent governor is a Democrat, but is not running for reelection). The deep unpopularity of outgoing Democratic Governor Dan Malloy has made this race in deep blue Connecticut competitive. But Republican nominee Bob Stefanowski has been endorsed by Donald Trump, which is not very helpful in a state where the president’s approval ratio is 39 to 56. Democrat Ned Lamont is best known for his nearly successful Senate race against Joe Lieberman in 2006. Both candidates are wealthy and have opted out of the state’s public campaign financing system. Lamont has had a steady high-single-digit lead in the limited polling in the race. It looks like the state’s partisan lean and the national environment could keep Democrats in charge in Hartford.

Sabato’s Crystal Ball: Leans D

RealClearPolitics: Leans D

FiveThirtyEight: Democrat Lamont has 5 in 6 chance of winning.

2. Oregon — Will Partisanship Trump Kate Brown’s Unpopularity? Incumbent D. This is another deep blue state where an incumbent Democratic governor is in some unexpected peril. Kate Brown ascended to the governorship when scandal-plagued veteran Governor John Kitzhaber in 2015. She won a special election for the remainder of his term, but not by an impressive margin for a Democrat in a presidential year. After signing major tax increases. her approval ratio is underwater (39 to 46, according to Morning Consult) and Republicans were able to come up with a moderate opponent for her in state legislator Knute Buehler. Brown has maintained a narrow lead in the polls, but Democrats are nervous.

Sabato’s Crystal Ball: Leans D

RealClearPolitics: Toss-up

FiveThirtyEight: Democrat Brown has 6 in 7 chance of winning.

3. Maine — Can Democrats finally overcome independents and win in this state? Open R (incumbent is term limited). Maine may be suffering from fatigue over the two-term reign of its fiery conservative Governor Paul LePage, whose current approval ratio is a sour 40 to 54. That should help the Democratic candidate to succeed him, Attorney General Janet Mills, against Republican Shawn Moody, a LePage ally. But just as LePage won both his elections with a plurality as independents siphoned off more moderate voters, Moody could as well, thanks to the presence on the ballot of two independents, including current state treasurer Terry Hayes. There has been no public polling of this race since August.

Sabato’s Crystal Ball: Toss-up

RealClearPolitics: Toss-up

FiveThirtyEight: Democrat Mills has an 11 in 12 chance of winning.

4. Iowa — Is This Big State for Trump in 2016 ready to flip? Incumbent R. Kim Reynolds became governor when longtime incumbent Terry Branstad was appointed ambassador to China last year. She is a staunch conservative, probably best known nationally for signing the nation’s most restrictive abortion law. Her approval ratio is a tepid 43 to 38 according to Morning Consult. Her Democratic opponent, Fred Hubbell, is a classic midwestern “fiscally conservative, socially liberal” centrist Democrat, and a self-funder. The context of this race is a red-hot environment in which Democrats are battling to reverse two straight heavily pro-Republican election cycles in the state (capped by Trump carrying the state by nine points in 2016 and the GOP finally winning total control of the legislature). Hubbell has maintained a small, but steady, lead in recent polls.

Sabato’s Crystal Ball: Toss-up

RealClearPolitics: Toss-up

FiveThirtyEight: Democrat Hubbell has a 6 in 7 chance of winning.

5. Florida — Andrew Gillum on the edge of matching his primary shocker with another in the general election. Open R (incumbent Republican Rick Scott is running for the U.S. Senate). Democratic mayor of Tallahassee Andrew Gillum was the upset winner of his party’s primary, defeating heavily favored Gwen Graham on the strength of a powerful urban vote. An African-American and a self-identified progressive (he was endorsed by Bernie Sanders and received major financial backing from Tom Steyer and George Soros), Gillum offers a sharp contrast to Republican nominee, Representative Ron DeSantis, who got an early endorsement from Donald Trump (though the president has reportedly been angry at DeSantis for failing to back up his weird claims about the Hurricane Maria death toll in Puerto Rico). The campaign was all but frozen for a couple of weeks by Hurricane Michael, which was good news for Gillum, who had opened up a narrow lead in most polls. DeSantis has tons of money remaining, and the two parties are as usual slugging it out over early voting (a huge factor in the state). It’s possible DeSantis will lose crucial votes in the storm-battered Panhandle region, though Rick Scott is using his emergency powers to provide special voting opportunities there.

Sabato’s Crystal Ball: Toss-up

RealClearPolitics: Toss-up

FiveThirtyEight: Democrat Gillum has a 5 in 7 chance of winning.

6. Wisconsin Scott Walker in deeper trouble than ever — but we’ve heard that before! Incumbent R. This is a race that has a strong sense of either déjà vu or chickens coming home to roost. That’s because conservative lightning rod Scott Walker is running for his third term as governor. Counting the recall he survived in 2012, this is his fourth tough race in eight years. And the relatively small slice of Wisconsin voters who don’t intensely like or dislike him could be getting a little tired of him by now. His Democratic opponent, state school superintendent Tony Evers, is well positioned to capitalize on disgruntlement with Walker’s public education budget cuts. In fact, Walker himself has echoed Evers’s own proposals to reestablish a state commitment to pay for two-thirds of total school costs. In the end this race will probably come down to an expensive voter mobilization effort. Walker and his allies have outspent Evers and his friends on TV by about a 2-to-1 one margin during the general election campaign. But then again, Evers has led in most of the polls (though the latest version of the gold-standard Marquette Law School poll gave Walker a one-point edge among likely voters). A wild card is Democratic Senator Tammy Baldwin’s big lead in the U.S. Senate race, which could serve as a drag on Walker — or could enable either or both parties to divert resources to the governor’s contest.

Sabato’s Crystal Ball: Toss-up

RealClearPolitics: Toss-up

FiveThirtyEight: Democrat Evers has a 5 in 8 chance of winning.

True Toss-ups

7. Nevada — It’s a crapshoot in Nevada. Open R (incumbent is term limited). Nevada’s gubernatorial race is one of two statewide contests (the other involving Republican Senator Dean Heller and Representative Jacky Rosen) that are dead even in a battleground state where voter mobilization is a fine art. While Democrat and Clark County (Las Vegas) Commission Chairman Steve Sisolak is a fairly conventional representative of his party, Republican Attorney General Adam Laxalt has a personal background that often overshadows his very conservative ideology. His mother was the daughter of legendary Nevada Republican Senator Paul Laxalt, and his father (as publicly acknowledged fairly recently) was the late New Mexico Senator Pete Domenici. He was the product of an affair between his parents. He grew up and lived in the Washington, D.C., area (working for John Bolton at the State Department and then serving as a JAG officer in Iraq) before moving to Nevada and soon running successfully for attorney general. His single biggest problem in the general election is his estrangement from popular incumbent Brian Sandoval, who has refused to endorse him, in part because Laxalt has threatened to repeal an education tax he championed as governor. Polls have gone both ways. A peculiar factor is the independent candidacy of militia icon Ryan Bundy, who could siphon votes from Laxalt.

Sabato’s Crystal Ball: Toss-up

RealClearPolitics: Toss-up

FiveThirtyEight: Republican Laxalt has a 5 in 9 chance of winning.

8. Georgia — A racially polarized slugfest could go either way. Open R (the incumbent Republican governor is term limited). This contest is often discussed as a matched set with Florida. As in the Sunshine State, Democrats are represented by an African-American progressive while Republicans are running an abrasively conservative Trump loyalist. The contrast has been particularly sharp because Republican Brian Kemp, the longtime secretary of state and election supervisor, has a reputation as a skilled vote suppressor, while Democrat Stacey Abrams has staked her campaign on registering and mobilizing underrepresented voters, especially African-Americans. Abrams is not as conspicuously progressive on the issues as Florida’s Gillum, but she is significantly to the left of past Democratic statewide candidates in Georgia (where no Democrat has won the governorship or a Senate race in 20 years). Demographic change has made Georgia more competitive, though. There’s a wrinkle, though: Georgia law requires a December runoff if no candidate wins a majority. With a Libertarian candidate likely to win about 2 percent of the vote, that could definitely happen. Every poll taken since the primaries has shown a race within the margin of error.

Sabato’s Crystal Ball: Toss-up

RealClearPolitics: Toss-up

FiveThirtyEight: Republican Kemp has a 4 in 7 chance of winning.

9. Ohio — Another 2016 Trump state with buyer’s remorse. Open R (incumbent is term limited). In the early running this race to succeed John Kasich looked like former Senator Mike DeWine’s to lose. A bruising Democratic primary was won by former Consumer Financial Protection Bureau director Richard Cordray, who has fought his way into a toss-up. Like Nevada’s Laxalt, DeWine has not been endorsed by the Republican he wants to succeed. And like Laxalt, DeWine is being hit for his participation as the state’s attorney general in a lawsuit that would bring down Obamacare and its protections for people with preexisting conditions. Cordray has gone after DeWine for waffling on Republican plans to pass an antiunion right-to-work law. They’ve been relatively even in fund-raising during the stretch run to the election. And the background is that Ohio is another Rust Belt state that trended heavily Republican in 2016, but seems to be experiencing buyer’s remorse. Incumbent Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown is running away with his reelection race.

Sabato’s Crystal Ball: Toss-up

RealClearPolitics: Toss-up

FiveThirtyEight: Republican DeWine has a 4 in 7 chance of winning.

Lean Republican

10. Kansas – Kobach may be saved by indie Orman. Open R (incumbent was defeated in a primary). Much as Donald Trump is the dominant figure in American politics, his friend and ally Kris Kobach dominates Kansas politics at present. Having narrowly defeated incumbent Governor Jeff Colyer (who assumed the governorship when Sam Brownback took a diplomatic appointment) in a primary, the famous nativist and voter-suppressor drove a lot of prominent moderate Republicans to endorse his Democratic opponent Laura Kelly. Kobach would probably be losing if it were not for independent candidate Greg Orman, who is a convenient vehicle for Republicans who can’t stand Kobach but won’t defect to the other party. As it is, polls show the Kelly-Kobach race as dead even.

Sabato’s Crystal Ball: Toss-up

RealClearPolitics: Toss-up

FiveThirtyEight: Republican Kobach has a 5 in 8 chance of winning.

11. South Dakota – A Competitive Race Out of the Blue. Open R (incumbent is term limited). South Dakota’s gubernatorial election has been one of the sleeper races in the country. It was assumed to be an easy hold for Republicans (incumbent Dennis Daugaard’s approval ratio is a solid 59 to 27) under at-large Representative Kristi Noem. But Democrat Billie Sutton, a ranch-bred banker and a former rodeo star before an injury in an event left him with paraplegia) has run an effective campaign aimed at state government corruption, and federal officeholder Noem’s background in the Swamp hasn’t equipped her to respond very well. Sutton is also pro-gun and anti-abortion. There’s been scant public polling in the race, but a lot of national buzz of late. If Sutton pulls off the upset, he’d be the first Democratic governor of his state in 40 years.

Sabato’s Crystal Ball: Leans R

RealClearPolitics: Safe R

FiveThirtyEight: Republican Noem has an 8 in 9 chance of winning.

In an election cycle as wild as this one, a gubernatorial contest not among these 11 could be surprisingly close. And the implications for day-to-day governance — and for redistricting after the 2020 census — could be formidable.