Senators who were once governors often highlight their accomplishments in their previous roles. Wistful tales of trade missions abroad to drum up business for their states and enacting legislation on a bipartisan basis pepper Senate floor speeches, stray comments to reporters, and other remarks.
It’s often a direct reaction against Congress’s accelerating slide into irrelevance, through legislative gridlock and lawmakers’ willingness to cede their powers on matters such as trade and foreign affairs, even though the framers designed the federal government’s legislative branch to be the most important.
So, it should be of little surprise that in the 2026 election cycle, three senators are ready to bolt Capitol Hill and are running for governor. That’s the most in any year since 1797.
Not every senator’s gubernatorial bids have the same political dynamics. Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) has the most political skin in the game because he’s leaving the Senate after a single, six-year term to run for governor. Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO), another 2026 gubernatorial aspirant, can fall back on his Senate job if he loses — nearly 3 1/2 years remain in his current term. And Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), an all-but-declared gubernatorial candidate, just won reelection to the Senate in 2024.
Going from the Senate to a statehouse is relatively rare in the 21st century. Gov. Mike Braun (R-IN) in 2024 took the route Tuberville now seeks — forgoing reelection to seek the governor’s mansion. And in 2010, then-Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KS) declined to run for reelection to the Senate after nearly 14 years there, and instead won the governorship.
A pair of senators won their states’ governorships with time left in their Senate terms — Alaska Republican Frank Murkowski in 2002 and New Jersey Democrat Jon Corzine in 2005. However, each had reason to regret those decisions, as they both lost gubernatorial reelection bids.
Two others returned to the Senate after losing gubernatorial bids — Texas Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison, a 2010 primary loser, and Louisiana Republican David Vitter, suffered a 2015 defeat for governor. Both soon retired from Congress.
Two current chief executives were previously senators, and neither left those jobs voluntarily. Gov. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) lost a Senate reelection bid in 2016 but staged a 2024 political comeback to claim the Granite State’s governorship. And Gov. Mike DeWine (R-OH) lost his reelection bid in the 2006 Democratic wave. He took a political demotion of sorts by being elected state attorney general, but he then won the Ohio governorship in 2018.
It’s all a marked inverse of the traditional political route of governors seeking election to the Senate because 12 current senators were previously governors of their states: Sens. Maggie Hassan (D-NH), John Hickenlooper (D-CO), John Hoeven (R-ND), Jim Justice (R-WV), Tim Kaine (D-VA), Angus King (I-ME), Pete Ricketts (R-NE), Jim Risch (R-ID), Mike Rounds (R-SD), Rick Scott (R-FL), Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), and Mark Warner (D-VA).
Ditching DC
There are a number of practical reasons that governors in modern times were the ones to make the move. For one, governors in many states are term-limited while senators are not. Senators get a longer term in office, four versus six years, and they get to play on the national and international stage. They are assured of dealing with the most exciting issues of the day. And, as a practical matter, there are twice as many Senate seats as governorships.
On the other hand, in the past, governors were long seen as having an advantage in seeking the presidency. It was the governor who controlled the machinery of the state and was responsible for hiring thousands of government employees, which was particularly important in the pre-1972 era when party bosses had great sway over who emerged as a party’s presidential nominee. It was no surprise that only three presidents were directly elected from the Senate, and one House member, as opposed to 12 governors. At one point in relatively recent political history, 4 in 5 presidents won the White House as a sitting or former governor: Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush.
That advantage has waned in recent years, as senators seem to have as much of a chance of getting a nomination as a governor, and both far less than the vice president. Similarly, as the federal government has grown in importance, states are frequently overshadowed by federal laws, and governors seem to have less ability to affect national policy.
It may seem like having both the executive and legislative experiences in the Senate and the governor’s mansion on the resume would be a boost for a presidential run. In the early days, that was true, with five such presidents, one of whom was simply the governor of a territory. However, the fact that the last one was Andrew Johnson in the late 1860s, and the most recent major party candidate who had been in both roles was Martin Van Buren, from 1837 to 1841, suggests that this is not the career rocket fuel that it may appear.
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What may be attracting the senators is simply the hope of accomplishing something. Republicans have focused on the Executive Branch as the locus of political change. Executive orders have been looked at as the way to revamp laws and regulations, with Congress putting very little weight into actually changing the laws themselves. As we’ve repeatedly seen, senators now seem to believe that their main role is simply ratifying or blocking presidential judicial picks. The courts, barely discussed in the Constitution, have also leapfrogged ahead of Congress in importance. Even the debate over the budget, first-order tasks in the Constitution, seems to be an annoyance for senators, best left to the executive branch.
In the very early days of the republic, the Senate, members of which were appointed by the state legislatures until the 17th Amendment was adopted in 1913, was not seen as a particularly important body. Many senators left after a year or two, and some chose to be legislators in the statehouse over making the arduous trip to Washington. Travel is now easier, and the amenities are undoubtedly nicer than before, but as we are now witnessing, perhaps the lack of interest in actually doing the job of legislating and maintaining its role against the other branches of government will lead others to see staying closer to home as a more appealing option.
Joshua Spivak is a senior research fellow at UC Berkeley Law’s California Constitution Center and a senior fellow at the Hugh L. Carey Institution for Government Reform at Wagner College. He is the author of Recall Elections: From Alexander Hamilton to Gavin Newsom.