Election 2026 Offers Another All-Woman Gubernatorial Ticket

For the first time in New York state, voters will see an all-woman gubernatorial ticket on their ballots. Incumbent Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul announced earlier this month that former New York City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams would be her running mate in the 2026 election. If successful, New York would become the fifth state to have women serve concurrently as governor and lieutenant governor and just the second state to elect an all-woman gubernatorial ticket. It will also be the first state to elect an all-woman ticket formed by a woman gubernatorial candidate selecting her running mate – and doing so at the start of the campaign prior to winning her party nomination – indicating a particular boldness to challenge both the status quo and concerns that an all-woman ticket is not strategically sound. 

Women have simultaneously held the governor and lieutenant governor roles in four states.

• In 2022, Governor Maura Healey (D) and Lieutenant Governor Kim Driscoll (D) were elected on a joint general election ticket in Massachusetts after winning separate primaries.
• The same year, Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R) and Lieutenant Governor Leslie Rutledge (R) were elected separately to hold Arkansas’ top two statewide executive offices.
• In December 2024, Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds (R) appointed state Senator Chris Cournoyer (R) as her lieutenant governor to fill a vacancy.
• In 2025, Governor Abigail Spanberger (D) and Lieutenant Governor Ghazala Hashmi (D) were elected separately to make Virginia the fourth state with women holding the top statewide executive roles.

This list does not include cases where a woman served in a temporary “acting” role as lieutenant governor, as happened between April and May 2022 in New York; during that time, Senate President Andrea Stewart-Cousins (D) simultaneously served as acting lieutenant governor until Antonio Delgado was sworn in to the role.

States vary in their methods of selecting lieutenant governors. Twenty-seven states select their governors and lieutenant governors on a single ticket, whether in both primary and general elections or after separate primary elections for each office. Candidates and nominees for governor and lieutenant governor run separately in 17 other states, meaning that they do not make up a “ticket.” In six other states, there is either no lieutenant governor or the role is held by a member of the state’s legislature and thus not selected as part of a gubernatorial ticket. New York represents one of the 27 states where candidates for governor and lieutenant governor run together. 

While only four states have seen women hold the offices of governor and lieutenant governor at the same time, all-woman gubernatorial tickets have a history more than two decades long. In 1994, then-Comptroller Dawn Clark Netsch and state Senator Penny Severns ran together but unsuccessfully as the Democratic ticket in Illinois’ general election. Since then, major-party all-woman gubernatorial tickets have run in general elections in Kentucky (1999), New Jersey (2013), South Dakota (2014), Hawaii (2018), Massachusetts (2022), and Ohio (2022). In four of these seven cases (Kentucky, New Jersey, South Dakota, and Ohio), the woman gubernatorial candidate chose a woman running mate either at the primary or general election stage. In the other cases, the all-woman ticket was a result of separate primary elections of women for governor and lieutenant governor of the same party. 

For much of U.S. history, all-men gubernatorial tickets have been the norm. Over time, we have seen an increase in mixed-gender gubernatorial tickets, so much so that over three-quarters of major-party gubernatorial tickets in 2022 included a man and a woman. Of the 40 gubernatorial tickets across 20 states that year, seven (17.5%) were all men and two (5%) were all women. The Hochul-Adams ticket might signal further disruption of the historical norm and recognition that choosing an all-woman ticket is not an electoral risk.