Hawaii · Governor
election 2026-11-03 · forecast as of 2026-10-01 · fundamentals only, no polls
Who is running?
Josh Green (Democratic), Gary Cordery (Republican).
The race, in brief
Hawaii elects a governor on November 3, 2026. The text says Republicans have not won a Hawaii governor's race since 2006; it gives no earlier vote shares or presidential results.
Democratic incumbent Josh Green, governor since 2022, is seeking a second term with Kauai mayor Derek Kawakami as running mate; Green won the August 8 primary with 88.5% against three others, and Kawakami won the lieutenant governor primary with 66.1% after incumbent lieutenant governor Sylvia Luke withdrew. The Republican nominee is businessman Gary Cordery, a 2022 candidate for governor, who beat Ken Fujiyama; his running mate is Daniel Anthony, who won with 37.9%.
All seven raters listed call the race D: Cook, Decision Desk HQ, Fox News, Inside Elections, RealClearPolitics, Sabato's Crystal Ball and Silver Bulletin, with dates from September 2025 to September 2026. The text has no general-election polls and no fundraising figures.
A paragraph quoting a model forecast from the day this brief was written is omitted; the current forecast is at the top of this page.
The facts, each beside its sentence
Democratic incumbent Josh Green is seeking a second term.
Democratic incumbent Josh Green is seeking a second term.
Josh Green, incumbent governor (2022–present)
He is being challenged by Republican businessman Gary Cordery.
Derek Kawakami, mayor of Kauai (2018–present)
Gary Cordery, businessman and candidate for governor in 2022
Green secured the Democratic nomination with 88.5% of the vote against three other candidates.
Silver Bulletin D August 25, 2026
Republicans have not won a gubernatorial election in Hawaii since 2006.
=====Withdrawn===== *Sylvia Luke, incumbent lieutenant governor (2022–present)
candidate: Daniel Anthony party: Republican Party (United States) votes: 16,982 percentage: 37.9
Not in the source: facts.forecast is empty: the model has no nowcast or election-day forecast for this race.; The text has no general-election polling and no fundraising.; The text gives no previous result for Green's 2022 win and no presidential results for Hawaii.; Cordery's primary share is given as 75.9% in the lede but 75.8% in the results table.; facts.candidates marks Josh Green as incumbent: false, but the text says he is the incumbent.; The ratings table gives only the party letter or 'Tossup'/'Flip'; no Lean/Likely/Safe strength is given.
Read from the district's section of Wikipedia's state page (CC BY-SA), archived as d3aef15d245d; written by claude-fable-5-1 (batch reader) on 2026-09-30 and checked mechanically: every quote occurs verbatim in the archived text, every number in the brief occurs in the inputs. No probability here is the reader's.
How it has voted for president
| Two-party margin | 2016 | 2020 | 2024 |
|---|---|---|---|
| President | D+34.9 | D+30.1 | D+23.6 |
A shift of 11.3 points toward the Republicans from 2016 to 2024. county returns summed; MEDSL county file (2016), an MIT-licensed county file (2020, checked against certified state results) and MEDSL precinct returns (2024). For a district split across counties this is an estimate, and where the state published the exact 2024 figure for these lines, that exact figure is the one the model uses.
The state in numbers
| Measure | State | Average state | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bachelor's degree or higher, 25+, 2023 | 35.5% | 34.0% | +1.5 pts |
| White, non-Hispanic, 2023 | 21.1% | 66.3% | -45.2 pts |
| Black, non-Hispanic, 2023 | 1.8% | 10.1% | -8.3 pts |
| Hispanic or Latino, 2023 | 9.8% | 12.9% | -3.0 pts |
| Asian, non-Hispanic, 2023 | 36.7% | 4.4% | +32.4 pts |
| Foreign-born, 2023 | 18.1% | 9.6% | +8.4 pts |
| Median age, 2023 | 40.6 | 39.1 | +1.52 |
| Median household income, 2023 | $98,317 | $77,633 | $+20,684 |
| Median home value, 2023 | $808,200 | $314,132 | $+494,068 |
| Owner-occupied homes, 2023 | 62.5% | 67.4% | -4.8 pts |
| Unemployment (ACS), 2023 | 5.0% | 4.8% | +0.2 pts |
| Federal government workers, 2023 | 6.9% | 3.0% | +3.9 pts |
| Work from home, 2023 | 8.8% | 12.3% | -3.5 pts |
| Households on SNAP, 2023 | 11.2% | 11.1% | +0.2 pts |
| Households with Social Security income, 2023 | 37.2% | 32.1% | +5.1 pts |
| Households with public assistance income, 2023 | 4.2% | 2.6% | +1.5 pts |
| Moved in from another state, past year, 2023 | 4.0% | 2.9% | +1.1 pts |
| Gini index, 2023 | 0.45 | 0.47 | -0.02 |
| Unemployment, latest month (BLS), 2026-07 | 2.9% | 4.0% | -1.1 pts |
| Change in unemployment, past 12 months, 2026-07 | +0.6 pts | -0.1 pts | +0.7 pts |
| Change since the last election (24 months), 2026-07 | -0.1 pts | -0.1 pts | -0.0 pts |
| Per-capita personal income (BEA), 2024 | $71,019 | $70,662 | $+357 |
| Per-capita income growth since 2019, nominal, 2024 | 31.7% | 32.4% | -0.7 pts |
| Government and other transfers, share of income, 2024 | 17.6% | 19.4% | -1.8 pts |
| Social Security, share of income, 2022 | 6.0% | 6.1% | -0.1 pts |
| Medicare, share of income, 2022 | 3.8% | 4.4% | -0.5 pts |
| Medicaid, share of income, 2022 | 3.5% | 3.8% | -0.3 pts |
| SNAP, share of income, 2022 | 1.0% | 0.6% | +0.5 pts |
| Earned Income Tax Credit, share of income, 2022 | 0.2% | 0.3% | -0.1 pts |
| Veterans' benefits, share of income, 2022 | 1.2% | 0.9% | +0.3 pts |
| Federal civilian jobs, share of all jobs, 2022 | 3.8% | 1.5% | +2.3 pts |
| Military jobs, share of all jobs, 2022 | 5.6% | 1.2% | +4.4 pts |
ACS 5-year state tables; BLS county unemployment and BEA county income, transfers and jobs summed to the state. Every figure is a named column of a named public-domain table, archived before it was read.
Has anyone polled it?
We hold no published poll of this general election. A search of aggregators, pollster releases, university polls and local news on 2 October found none (primary polls exist for some races and are not this contest). That is what we could find, not proof that no poll has been conducted. When one is published it enters the poll model and this page gains a nowcast.
Who is ahead, and by how much?
Margins and probabilities are for Josh Green. With no polls, this is the fundamentals forecast alone: the state's own past results for this office and for president, its demographics, economy, religion and government employment, the candidates' incumbency, experience and money, and the national environment for this midterm.
How wide is the range?
In 8 of 10 simulations the margin falls between +15 and +50 points. The spread is the fundamentals model's own measured error (sd 13.4 points), not a guess: a forecast without polls is uncertain and is shown that way.
How accurate is a fundamentals-only forecast?
Tested on past races without letting it see them: across 175 Senate and governor races in 2016-2022 it missed the final margin by 8.3 points on average, and by 6.7 points across 35 races in 2024. Our poll-based forecast missed by 5.4 on the same races. Most races it is used for here are lopsided enough that an 8-point miss would not change the winner.
Where did every number come from?
Run 01a4c098, single_race_latent/0.8.1, as of 2026-10-01 23:02 UTC, basis: ground-up prior only, no polls.