Kansas Governor 2026
Election day is November 3, 2026. A statewide contest in Kansas.
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About this race
The 2026 Kansas gubernatorial election is scheduled to take place on November 3, 2026, to elect the next governor of Kansas. The primary elections took place on August 4, 2026. Incumbent Democratic governor Laura Kelly is term-limited and ineligible to seek a third consecutive term. This will be one of five Democratic-held governorships up for election in 2026 in a state that Donald Trump won in the 2024 presidential election and the only one of those states that Trump won by a double-digit margin.
Background
Kansas has a long tradition of ticket-splitting at the gubernatorial level: despite the state's consistent support for Republican presidential nominees, Democratic candidates have won the governor's office for the majority of years since the late 1960s, reflecting a pattern of voters distinguishing between state executive and federal races. This competitive tradition continued in the 2018 election, when Laura Kelly won the open seat in a favorable national environment during the 2018 midterms and benefited from widespread dissatisfaction with the outgoing administration of Sam Brownback, who had departed mid-term after being nominated by President Donald Trump to serve as United States Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom in 2017. Kelly won re-election in 2022 on the strength of her own personal popularity, with the negative reaction to the overturning of Roe v. Wade providing additional tailwind, amplified by the presence of an abortion referendum on the ballot a few months prior. Since her re-election, Kelly has seen a continued rise in personal popularity, and as of 2024 ranks among the ten most popular governors in the country, which some commentators have attributed to her frequent use of her veto powers and extensive travel across the state.