Why Virginia and New Jersey Elect Their Governors in Odd Years
Virginia, New Jersey, Kentucky, Louisiana and Mississippi elect governors on a calendar built, in part, to keep the electorate smaller. It still does.
Five states will send no one to the Electoral College, elect no member of Congress, and cast no vote for president this year or next. They will still elect a governor. Virginia, New Jersey, Kentucky, Louisiana and Mississippi are the only states in the country that hold their marquee statewide races in odd-numbered years, deliberately separated from every federal contest. The tradition looks like a quirk of scheduling. The paper trail behind it tells a rougher story.
One happenstance, one Jim Crow-era firewall
Virginia's version starts almost by accident. The commonwealth's first popular election for governor happened in 1851, the earliest opportunity after a new state constitution was ratified the year before. "I think it was just happenstance that it ended up being put into an odd-numbered year," George Mason University professor John Milliken told Virginia Public Radio. "I don't think it was a conscious decision." After the Civil War, the cycle simply repeated, one year behind every presidential election, and it stuck.
What happened next is where the story stops being an accident. As historian Michael Trotti detailed in Time's account of the practice's origins, Virginia, Louisiana, Mississippi and Kentucky all had the chance, during state constitutional conventions in the late 1800s and early 1900s, to align their elections with the rest of the country. They chose not to. Those same conventions were busy writing poll taxes and literacy tests into law to strip Black citizens, and many poor white ones, of the vote after the Fifteenth Amendment had supposedly guaranteed it. Keeping state elections on a separate calendar was, in Trotti's account, insurance: a hedge against Congress ever using its authority over federal elections to force fairer state ones. At Virginia's 1901-02 constitutional convention, delegate Carter Glass, who later became a U.S. senator and treasury secretary, said the quiet part out loud.
"Discrimination! Why, that is precisely what we propose... to eliminate every negro voter who can be gotten rid of, legally."
Carter Glass, Virginia constitutional convention, 1901-02
Mississippi's registered electorate shrank so fast under the new rules that, per Trotti's research, only 3.5% of the state's population voted in 1912, even as the population itself grew by nearly two-thirds since 1880. The literacy tests and poll taxes are long gone, struck down by the Voting Rights Act and a constitutional amendment. The odd-year calendar they were built alongside never got repealed.
New Jersey's reason was different, and newer
New Jersey didn't join the group until 1947, and for a reason that had nothing to do with Jim Crow. Franklin Roosevelt had just carried the state through four consecutive presidential wins, dragging Democratic governors in on his coattails. Republican Gov. Alfred E. Driscoll pushed a new state constitution that year that, among other changes, uncoupled New Jersey's state elections from the federal calendar entirely, insulating Trenton from whatever national wave was breaking that November. New Jersey has held to it ever since, regardless of which party it happens to benefit in a given cycle.
What the schedule still does to the electorate
The mechanism that once excluded voters by law now excludes them by inertia, and the effect hasn't disappeared. Trotti estimated that Virginia's 2025 electorate ran about 1.3 million voters lighter than its 2024 presidential turnout, and New Jersey's about 1.7 million lighter than its own. Kentucky, Louisiana and Mississippi see comparable drop-offs of roughly 40%. Fewer voters also means a smaller, likely more engaged and more partisan-committed electorate deciding who runs the state government. Virginia Commonwealth University political scientist Jatia Wrighten put the practical consequence directly to Virginia Public Radio: "The trend shows when less people turn out to vote, Republicans do have a higher chance of winning. And so, there is something to be said about having off-year elections where less people participate; it does give Republicans a better chance."
That edge doesn't always show up in the results, which is its own kind of evidence that this isn't simply a partisan trick. Kentucky and Louisiana vote reliably Republican in presidential years, yet both currently have Democratic governors. New Jersey leans Democratic nationally but has cycled through Republican governors twice since 1994. Running separate elections thins out the whole electorate rather than just one party's share of it, which is exactly why, as NPR has noted, the results in these states are treated as an early referendum on whoever just won the White House, even though the electorate casting that verdict looks nothing like the one that showed up thirteen months earlier.
Running two separate election systems isn't free, either. One estimate put Kentucky's extra cost for administering standalone elections at roughly $15 million every four-year cycle, money that in a synced calendar would fund one set of polling places instead of two. Virginia's General Assembly has debated folding its elections into the federal calendar in recent sessions; so far, the idea has drawn more resistance than support. For now, five states keep running their governor's races on a clock nobody designed on purpose to be fair, and nobody with the power to change it has found much reason to.
