Three states could elect a black governor this year. Will they?

Only two African Americans – nor any woman – were elected governor. But this year, Democrats have chosen black men as governor candidates in Florida and Maryland and a black woman in Georgia, creating considerable potential for African Americans at the state level.

It is unlikely that all three candidates will win – and it is quite possible that they will lose all three. In addition, the three candidates have very different chances, according to the forecasts of the governors newly launched by FiveThirtyEight.

In Maryland, Ben Jealous, a former head of the NAACP, is a big underdog, according to our forecasts. He has less than a one in 100 (or less than 1%) chance of winning. A survey released last week found it down 20 percentage points and this was not an exception.

You might be surprised that Jealous is so far behind. After all, Maryland is blatantly blue in presidential elections, its black population is large (about 30% of the electorate) and white voters in the state are not fiercely opposed to voting for Democrats, as in the United States. other States. (More on that in a moment.)

Jealous's problem is simple: incumbent Republican Governor Larry Hogan, elected for the first time in 2014, is really popular. In a recent survey by Goucher College, Hogan's approval rate was 64%; his disapproval rate was 17%. Goucher also found that Hogan was winning about one-third of the state's Democrats in his run against Jealous, a solid Republican performance. Jealous may well lose, but I do not think it says much about him, his campaign or the black candidates of Maryland or the United States. Once again, Hogan is just very popular.

By contrast, Stacey Abrams, former minority leader of the Georgia House, and Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum, have real chances in Georgia and Florida, respectively.

Gillum is in a better position than Abrams, according to our forecasts. Gillum has a 7/70 chance (70%) of defeating Republican Ron DeSantis, a former member of the US House. Gillum has led DeSantis in almost all non-partisan polls of the race, although his leaders are small and generally in the margin of error. Abrams, meanwhile, is an outsider, but very light – she has 3 chances out of 7 (43%) to defeat the Republican Brian Kemp, Secretary of State of Georgia.

Why are Gillum's prospects better than those of Abrams? The mayor has two big advantages over Abrams. First, Florida is a little bluer than Georgia: Obama narrowly won Florida in 2008 and 2012, and Hillary Clinton barely lost it in 2016. Second, Gillum's opponent, DeSantis , has never won a race throughout the state, unlike Abrams' opponent.

A Gillum victory is far from guaranteed, though. The chances of DeSantis, 3 out of 10, are about the same as those of President Trump on polling day in 2016, according to FiveThirtyEight forecasts. Indeed, Democrats tend to struggle in all the state, At the state level races in Florida, compared to federal contests such as those of the US Senate and President. State-level races usually take place in the mid-term election years, when the Florida electorate is generally much smaller than in presidential elections. The last time a Democrat won one of the state's four main constitutional positions was in 2006. Even though Trump obtained disappointing approval ratings in other Obama-Trump states, such as Michigan and Wisconsin, its results have held up relatively well in Florida. This means that it might not be as detrimental to DeSantis as it is to other GOP governors.

The Abrams race is a bit more complicated. Polls show that it is very close; The latest survey revealed that Kemp is 48% ahead of 46%. But it's not too hard to understand why his route is harder than Gillum's. Georgia is redder than Florida. Trump's victory at 5 percentage points was pretty narrow, but Mitt Romney took the state by 8 points in 2012. And the last time the Democrats won a major state-wide race in Georgia – including for the Senate or the President – was in 2006.

An essential difference between the two states: White voters are more Republican-oriented in Georgia. Democratic candidates received less than 25% of the white vote in Georgia in the last election. In Florida, meanwhile, Clinton won 32% of white voters in 2016 and Obama 37% in 2012. And while Georgia has one of the largest minority populations in any state, nearly 60% of its voting age population is white. To win, Abrams probably needs close to 30% of the white vote. This is a real challenge for the Democratic candidates in Georgia.

Finally, since we are talking about black candidates, I should probably say how black being helps or hurts Abrams and Gillum. In their primaries, Abrams and Gillum argued that Democratic voters should be partially open to them because they were non-traditional candidates – the Democrats of Florida and Georgia recruited white and moderate candidates for governorship in the last election cycles and lost each time. And supporters of Abrams and Gillum have argued that these two candidates could increase the participation rate of blacks and millennia, creating an alternative path to victory.

But supporters of white candidates who opposed Abrams and Gillum in the Democratic primaries this year suggested that white candidates would do better in general elections than black candidates. The implication, which is not usually mentioned directly, is that moderate Southern voters in the South might be wary of Trump and support some Democrat candidates in mid-term, but perhaps not an equally dark Democrat . I should note that Gillum was also much more liberal than his main rival in the Democratic primary, former US House member Gwen Graham. So, if he loses the general election, there will be a debate as to whether it was because of race, ideology or a combination of both.

Research on race and eligibility is rather inconclusive. So, trying to see how being black might affect Abrams and Gillum, I've looked at some demographic breakdowns in the polls we've had so far in these two contests. A recent poll revealed that Abrams won about 25% of the votes cast in blank, a standard figure for a Democrat of all ethnic origins in Georgia, but that will make it difficult to win. Gillum, meanwhile, enjoys the support of 35 to 40 percent of Florida's white voters, according to recent polls. This is a fairly typical level for a Florida democrat and suggests that his contest will be very tight. But we're talking about fairly small samples of white voters, so I'm reluctant to draw too much from those polls. Polls also fail to determine whether minority voters or young voters in Florida and Georgia will have higher participation rates for Abrams or Gillum than for previous Democratic candidates.

In other words, you can explain the electoral prospects of the three candidates for the position of black governor without putting their race at the center of the stage. Until now, Abrams, Gillum and Jealous express themselves on the expectation of a democrat in their respective situations. That said, it will be interesting to see the evening of the election if Abrams and Gillum, in highly contested races, are able to generate a higher than expected minority stake, which could suggest a new path for Democrats in competition in the South – focusing more on bringing out non-white voters rather than wooing white centrists. Alternatively, if white voters eventually turn against Abrams and Gillum, even more than white Democratic candidates who previously ran in these states, this could be a sign that the nomination of a black candidate imposes an additional electoral barrier (perhaps because of racism) to Democrats in a region where they are already weak.