No two states voted more alike and closer to the national average in last year’s presidential election than the two states that have gubernatorial elections in this odd-numbered year: New Jersey and Virginia. New Jersey voted 51.8% for Kamala Harris and 45.9% for Donald Trump. Virginia voted 51.8% for Harris and 46.1% for Trump. Aside from the seven target states and Democratic underperformance in New Hampshire and Minnesota, these were the two closest states in the country.

They have other similarities. Large percentages of their voters live in metropolitan areas centered on cities outside the state, such as New York City and Washington, D.C. Both of those metro areas have populations far above the national average in education credentials and income.

That has tilted them toward the Democratic Party in this era when upscale voters, in line with their liberal stands on cultural issues, trend that way. It’s a time when million-plus metro areas, evenly divided in the 1980s, have become heavily Democratic, while the half of Americans living outside those big metro areas have, often despite historical Democratic allegiances, been delivering increasing margins for Trump’s Republicans.

It comes as second nature to political writers to seek omens in the results and trends of off-year elections. Virginia has provided plenty of grist for their mills, having elected governors of the party that lost the presidential election the year before in 11 of the last 12 contests starting in 1977.

That would seem to give an advantage to Democrats in two states carried by Harris. It helps that Democrats have managed to nominate candidates with attractive biographies and reputations, despite their generally party-line voting records, as centrists. Both are women with national security experience who were first elected to the House of Representatives in the Democratic year of 2018.

Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D-N.J.) was a Navy helicopter pilot and later worked as a lawyer. After her military service, she went to graduate school, earning a law degree and an Arabic language certificate. She captured an exurban, traditionally Republican New Jersey district when the incumbent retired. She won her first primary easily and has won general elections with 53% to 59% of the vote.

Former Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.) also earned a graduate degree, taught at northern Virginia’s Islamic Saudi Academy, and was an intelligence officer in the CIA for six years. She won her suburban House seat, stretching from Richmond to Fairfax County, against an incumbent Republican by 2 points, twice won reelection — first by 2 points, then by 5 — and stepped down in 2024, with the governor’s race in mind.

Current RealClearPolitics polling averages have Sherrill ahead of 2021 nominee Jack Ciattarelli by a 48% to 44% margin, and Spanberger leading Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears by 50% to 44% — margins not that far from the virtually identical margins by which Harris carried both states.

Republicans hold out some hope in both races. Ciattarelli lost by only 51% to 48% against incumbent Democrat Phil Murphy in 2021, campaigning against the high taxes that have helped Republicans win four of eight New Jersey elections starting in 1993, despite the state’s Democratic lean in presidential politics. And Sherrill, Republicans say, is on the defensive for having been required not to appear at her graduation from the Naval Academy, apparently for not having reported another cadet’s violation of the honor code.

In Virginia, Spanberger was set back by the revelation on Oct. 3 that Democratic attorney general candidate Jay Jones sent messages in 2022 expressing a desire to shoot the then-Republican House speaker and see his children murdered in their mother’s arms. Spanberger expressed abhorrence but refused to call on him to step aside and announced her early vote for him. October polling shows Jones trailing incumbent Attorney General Jason Miyares 47% to 43%.