Despite governors’ crucial roles in shaping important policies, including abortion, education, and infrastructure, forecasters have paid little attention to gubernatorial elections. We posit that institutional idiosyncrasies and lack of public opinion data have exacerbated the classic problem facing all election forecasts: there are too many predictors and too few cases, leading to overfitting. To address these problems, we combine new governor and state-level presidential approval data with a machine-learning approach, LASSO, for variable selection. LASSO examines numerous variables but retains only those that substantively improve model performance. Results demonstrate the efficacy of gubernatorial and presidential approval ratings measured two quarters preelection in predicting both incumbent-party vote share and election winners in out-of-sample predictions. For 2022, our approach outperformed the Cook Political Report’s Partisan Voting Index and compared well with 538’s Election Day prediction. For 2024, our LASSO-Popularity model predictions indicate that it will likely be a difficult year for Democrats in gubernatorial contests.

This goal of this article is to improve our understanding of Morocco’s instrumentalization of migration and border management to pressure Spain. We analyze the literature on critical security studies and North–South relations. This study’s contribution, resulting from the theoretical approach of the Beirut School of Critical Security Studies and the Spanish–Moroccan border-crisis case study, is twofold. First, it decenters the study of security and international relations from the dominant concerns with Western interests and policy priorities. Second, it documents a paradigm shift in the study of North–South relations, highlighting the agency of the Global South. This agency, evident in the case of Morocco, indicates that smaller state actors have the capacity to gain leverage over bigger state actors and that they are not merely recipients of the policies of the Global North. Proof of this is Morocco’s successful instrumentalization of the border crisis to obtain Spain’s explicit recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over the Western Sahara.

At first glance, the political-theory classroom can seem like a “philosophy class in disguise.” How can we make our text-based classes more “political”? This article considers how three teaching formats—debate, fishbowl, and forum theater—enact different types of power in the classroom and how those enactments necessitate political judgments. In addition to creating the need for political analysis, each of these formats embodies a particular rhetorical strategy often used by political theorists. By physicalizing the argumentative, introspective, and descriptive devices that writers of political theory use, students become better readers of these often old and usually dense texts.