Hello, this is Erin Wren, contributing editor at City Journal, and I'm joined today by my colleague's senior editor, Steve Malanga, to talk about his new piece for City Journal on the results of the election from the standpoint of the state houses.

It's a big midterm election.

There's been a lot of talk about the Democrats capturing the House, the Republican, adding to their majority in the Senate.

But there were a large number of governor's races out there as well, and they haven't gotten as much attention.

And that's the focus of Steve Newpeace.

So Steve, thanks for joining

me. So I wanted to just maybe walk through a few different categories of governors and talk about

some of the races and specific and just get your take out of them. One of them is some of these

states that did flip from red to blue. Illinois was one where Republican Governor Bruce

Bounder lost his reelection bid to Democrat J.B. Pritzker. What's the story in Illinois?

Seems like a blue state to me.

Well, of course, it's a very blue state. The thing is that there have been a governor,

reformers who've won in Democratic states as Republicans.

Rounder, however, basically took a very tough position with the democratically controlled state legislature.

It was essentially his reforms were all or nothing.

As a result of that, the state went several years without a budget, was complete gridlock

in Springfield.

And in 2017, members of the Republican state legislature actually kind of voted with Democrats

to override a rounder's rejection of the latest budget.

So there was really gridlock and rounder's approval rating declined. I think

it was always, it was always going to be a tough re-election, but he was significantly unpopular and he

didn't even come close to winning re-election. So that was no surprise at all at all.

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