Michigan has had 46 gubernatorial elections featuring an incumbent officeholder. Of those elections, the incumbent won 36 times and lost 10.

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The numbers don’t include governors who ran for a non-consecutive term. They also doesn’t include governors who lost their primary election or convention fight.

The data only includes governors who were in office at the time of their re-election and tried for another term.

These numbers aren’t unusual when compared to the rest of the country, according to research conducted by the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University.

The Eagleton Center on the American Governor found that between 1948 and 2013 all governors in every state running for re-election were victorious 72% of the time.

“It’s very tough to knock off an incumbent governor, anytime, anywhere,” said Bill Ballenger of The Ballenger Report.

It was particularly difficult in Michigan, where Republicans essentially ran state government for 75 years.

Between the founding of the Michigan Republican Party in 1854 and the start of the Great Depression in 1929, Michigan had 21 governors. Three of them were Democrats.

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Also, governors and state elected officials, in general, had an unwritten rule that they would only serve two, two-year terms. The defeat of an incumbent typically was due to some catastrophic event.

In 1882, corruption scandals crushed the Republicans across the country. In 1890, the Republicans took a bath because of an economic panic that swept the country.

Democrat Woodbridge Ferris won in 1912 and 1914 after the Republican Party split nationally between Teddy Roosevelt Progressives and traditional William TAFT Republicans.

With the coming of the Great Depression and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, things began to change.

Six of the 10 incumbent losses in Michigan came in a 12-year period between 1932 and 1944, when Franklin Roosevelt was president during the Great Depression and World War II.

“Roosevelt was such a titanic figure that when he was on the ballot, the Democrats mopped it up,” Ballenger said. “When he wasn’t on the ballot, the Democrats ate their own. They had weak candidates and no bench.”

Once the modern labor unions got better organized politically in the late 1940s, Democrats found their footing and started having success, Ballenger said. When they did, incumbents were rarely tossed.

The Eagleton Institute looked at all 50 states during a 65-year period between 1948 and 2013 and found Michigan re-elected their incumbents at an 80% clip. Only 10 states had higher percentages.

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is seeking her second term under this strong history for incumbents. If she were to lose to Tudor Dixon, it would be historically rare.

Since FDR has been out of office, incumbent Michigan governors have run for re-election 17 times. They’ve won 15 of those elections.

We show our work below:

Governors re-elected 

Stevens T. Mason (1837) – (D)

John Barry (1843) – (D)

Robert Mcclelland (1852) – (D)

Kinsley Bingham (1856) – (R)

Austin Blair (1862) – (R)

Henry Crapo (1866) – (R)

Henry Baldwin (1870) – (R)

John Bagley (1874) – (R)

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Charles Croswell (1878) – (R)

Cyrus Luce (1888) – (R)

John T. Rich (1894) – (R)

Hazen Pingree (1898) – (R)

Aaron T. Bliss (1902) – (R)

Fred Warner (1906, 1908) – (R)

Woodbridge Ferris (1912, 1914) – (D)

Albert Sleeper (1918) – (R)

Alexander Groesbeck (1922, 1924) – (R)

Fred W. Green (1928) – (R)

Harry F. Kelly (1944) – (R)

G. Mennen Williams (1950, 1952, 1954, 1956, 1958) – (D)

George Romney (1964, 1964) – (R)

William Milliken (1970, 1972, 1974) – (R)

Jim Blanchard (1986) – (D)

John Engler (1994, 1998) – (R)

Jennifer Ganholm (2006) – (D)

Rick Syder (2014) – (R)

Governors Defeated In Re-election 

David Jome (1882) – (R)

Josiah Begole (1884) – Fusion

Wilber Brucker (1932) – (R)

Frank D. Fitzgerald (1936) – (R)

Frank Murphy (1938) – (D)

Luren Dickinson (1940) – (R)

Murray VanWagoner (1942) – (D)

Kim Sigler (1944) – (R)

John Swainson (1952) – (D)

Jim Blanchard (1990) – (D)