An election win can feel decisive. But in state government, it’s only the beginning.
In 2026 alone, 36 US states are holding gubernatorial elections, and half are open seats. That means that at least 18 transitions will unfold in a compressed window between November and January.
This roughly 75-day period is also when the real work of governing begins. Between election night and inauguration day, an incoming governor must appoint a new leadership team, assemble a cabinet, prepare a budget, define priorities, and establish how they will run a complex enterprise that may employ tens of thousands of people—and serve millions. That enterprise doesn’t pause while the governor-elect gets their bearings.
In this video Explainer, McKinsey’s Drew Erdmann, Sarah Miller, and Trey Childress—each of whom served multiple state governments prior to joining McKinsey and have direct personal experience navigating transitions—discuss what state government transitions really involve, why leaders often underestimate the cultural shift from campaigning to governing, and how the choices made early on can either build momentum or put an administration on its back foot. While this discussion focuses on US state governments, many of the lessons apply to leadership transitions across the public sector globally.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What is a government transition, and why is it such a high-stakes period?
Trey Childress: When we say government transition, we’re talking about that period between the election in November and the inauguration in January—usually around 75 days.
This is when the governor has a chance to stand up their administration. What’s different about this from the private sector is that, in a gubernatorial transition, the entire C-suite is replaced, along with the heads of all the major departments and agencies.
So you can imagine, in a 75-day period, picking the right people for all those roles, getting them onboarded and oriented, and building your first budget and your agenda to launch on day one—it’s a massive operation.
Drew Erdmann: In the state or local government context, a government transition is the assumption of leadership authority by an incoming governor or mayor.
Why is this important? Things are imprinted at birth. If a team gets off to a very good start—focused, clear in its communications—that bodes well for the future and builds momentum. If a team stumbles on some of the basics, it can put them on the back foot and really slow them down in generating the momentum to achieve their agenda and deliver for their citizens and communities.
Sarah Miller: Government transitions happen all the time. Certainly, it happens when a governor is elected who is different from the incumbent, because many positions in state government are appointed by the governor.
But it doesn’t happen only with governors’ elections. In health and human services agencies, for example, an agency head very often serves less than 24 months in a particular state. Which means that in a four-year term as governor, you might have two different secretaries.
So the staff who support leaders have to care about leadership transitions. And inbound leaders during transitions need to care about how they engage so they can have the greatest impact.
Why is the shift from campaigning to governing so difficult?
Drew Erdmann: The challenges of moving from the campaign to governing are often related to personnel, but also to the culture of how the team is operating.
In some cases, the people who brought you through a successful campaign will not be the ones who sign up for the long term to be part of governing a new administration. That change in personnel is compressed into just a few weeks of decision-making.
But there’s also the mindset of those who continue on. The momentum, rhythm, and habits built up in campaigning—especially around communication—are often not the same things you need for the day-to-day management of state government.
I’ve personally seen leaders struggle with this shift. Some continue operating as if they’re still in a campaign during their first months in office, rather than focusing on building the systems and relationships needed to govern.
Sarah Miller: Campaigns are driven by spontaneous events. They are bursts of activity.
Most state government operations are consistent—24/7, 365 days a year. One of the hardest transitions for leaders coming from a campaign setting is recognizing the ongoing nature of the work.
You’re now leading employees who were there before you arrived and will likely be there after you leave.
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To create change, you have to win over the people doing the day-to-day work. That requires a different posture than campaigning.
Trey Childress: Campaigning is about lean, fast-message discipline. Governing is about sustaining execution across dozens of agencies, with legal constraints and compliance requirements.
And reality sets in quickly. In every administration where I’ve worked, there was some operational or natural disaster challenge within the first two weeks. That’s the reality of governing; you have to deal with realities, not aspirations.
What separates successful transitions from struggling ones?
Trey Childress: Successful transitions had somebody thinking about it before the election happened.
If a transition team is appointed well before the election—sometimes as much as several months prior—they have already begun thinking about how to structure the work. They treat it as a really massive project with timelines, scopes, clear workstreams, and people responsible for each stream. Walking into day one with a clear structure and a plan is critical.
Sarah Miller: The most successful transitions are run by leaders who come in with a desire to learn about the environment they’re leading.
Government services are complex by nature, which means it is virtually impossible for any new leader to have a comprehensive understanding of all the work their organization is responsible for.
Leaders struggle when they show up believing they can fundamentally change the way a state agency operates without first understanding it.
By contrast, the most effective change agents come in with a strong vision and also spend their entry period seeking to understand and learn from the people who have been doing the work day in and day out.
Drew Erdmann: Successful transitions also accept that it’s not just about getting to inauguration day. It’s those first few months—often the first six months in office—when a governor establishes themselves with the legislature and takes control of how they’re going to govern and run a complex apparatus.
Establishing the full operating model—how they’re really running the place—takes longer than 90 or 100 days. The most successful transition teams focus on the six- or seven-month view, not the first 100 days.
Which roles matter in the early days?
Trey Childress: It’s important to remember that most governors were not governors before, so they’re learning on the job. In the early days, the chief of staff is kind of the air traffic controller. The budget lead is the person who really tells you what’s possible. General counsel is there for the legal landmines, which are everywhere—more than you ever realize before you take office.
A lot of governors also have what’s called a chief operating officer model. About half the states have some version of this. That’s the person who wakes up every day and cares about how you run the machine of government, outside of setting policy direction and dealing with political constraints.
Drew Erdmann: But coming to good governing, one of the critical questions is: Who on your staff is going to wake up every day and go to sleep every night focused on the management and performance of the state government itself?
Often, that’s given to the chief of staff. But the chief of staff has to juggle politics, communications, policy, and legislative outreach. And the urgent inbox sidelines the longer-term priorities. So often, the most successful teams create a chief operating officer role or assign a deputy chief of staff. This addition to the team is often critical to the transition from campaigning to governing.
Trey Childress: I was appointed as a COO in the late 2000s. There were no state governments at that time that had COOs. The role started to emerge in the early to late 2000s and has proliferated over time. Having operational expertise and focus in the governor’s office is becoming increasingly important, especially as technology becomes core to delivery.
Before that, the closest proxy was something called a cabinet secretary. But most of what a cabinet secretary did was act as the gateway for communications between the cabinet and the administration. They didn’t have true operational levers.
How should governors prioritize their agendas?
Drew Erdmann: Fresh out of the gate, for any governor, you need to hit the ground running with big themes. What do you stand for?
That requires a careful review of what was promised in the campaign and sequencing those priorities. You usually can’t do everything all at once. So you have to prioritize and communicate what those big themes are.
Usually, there’s a budget to be submitted in the first few weeks, and at the end of the day, it’s about resources. Strategy is about resource allocation.
At the same time, the best leaders maintain what I would call a bifocal vision. They appreciate the need for quick wins. They need to put wins on the board publicly to demonstrate progress. But they’re also willing to invest time in the stuff that’s not glamorous—the grinding away of making government better, changing the way government works.
Trey Childress: It would be unrealistic to think you’re going to transform anything in the first 90 or 100 days. You can set the course. You can set the direction. You can send signals. But the reality of governing is that there will be more things that come your way that have nothing to do with your agenda than things that do.
Getting those things right, small and large, builds confidence in your team and in the public so that you can earn the right to do the bolder, transformational things.
Sarah Miller: Governors are most successful at balancing quick wins within a transformational agenda when they have built coalitions. It is very rare that a single lever can accomplish any one thing in government service delivery. There are people impacts, process impacts, technology impacts.
If stakeholders say, “Maybe we don’t get everything we want, but we get 80 percent of advancement by partnering,” you’re much further ahead than if everybody argues about the 20 percent and no progress gets made at all.
What are the broader consequences of getting a transition right?
Sarah Miller: The most successful transitions involve ensuring that the people who live in the state can see the immediate benefit.
That could be direct socioeconomic impact on residents’ pocketbooks, because I’m a governor who champions economic development and people in my state have the opportunity for higher-paying jobs as a result of my work.
Or it could be prioritizing affordable housing to ensure that people have safe and secure places to live and raise their families.
It might be prioritizing education, because we know that every dollar spent on early-intervention education yields ten times the savings in government benefits that are not needed when those individuals become adults.
If you can enable effective delivery of initiatives, you can create positive momentum that increases trust in government services, which results from delivering on campaign promises.
Trey Childress: It’s enormously important. I joined one administration late in the transition—about a week before the inauguration. There was a significant structural imbalance in the budget. Had they started earlier, they could have closed it. But at this late point, they had inherited what the prior administration was putting on paper.
What that meant was running a significant multibillion-dollar deficit. And the domino effect was that the following year, the structural deficit hadn’t been solved; it was only compounded.
The depth of necessary service reductions was traumatic. That affected everybody who delivered or received government services, whether you’re talking about Medicaid recipients, veterans’ homes, or any number of services across the board.
Getting this right at the beginning can have a huge impact. The failure to do so can be even worse.
Drew Erdmann: The implications for a successful transition are profound. If you look at economic development or workforce implications—particularly in this era of generative AI—some states and occupations will be affected differently. How can the states support that?
There are also changes resulting from new federal policies that affect the delivery of services, often to the most vulnerable in our communities. State governments control the actual processes, and from state parks to environmental safety and prisons, these are things that affect millions of Americans.
The question is, how can that be done in the easiest, most efficient, most effective manner? That’s determined by state governments.
How is AI shaping the next generation of transitions?
Sarah Miller: Technology and AI is going to be a real game changer in the next transition cycle. In general, I would say state government is not usually on the bleeding edge of technology deployment. Government services are essential, so you can’t risk deployment of untested technology.
There are so many legacy systems that operate core state government services. AI is going to have to be deployed, because states are no longer in a position to hire COBOL [common business-oriented language] programmers to support mainframe applications that make all bill payments for a state, for example, or that the state’s HR system depends on.
Governors and agency heads are going to have to be more open to using technology in ways they have not been—while also paying attention to ethical and responsible deployment in a way that does not have unintended consequences on the people who rely on those services.
Trey Childress: It’s on governors’ minds in a number of dimensions. One is, what does it mean for their state’s economy if there is displacement at any meaningful level in the near term—and what do you do for retraining? What do they do about this from a regulatory standpoint? What safety precautions need to be in place for the public?
Drew Erdmann: This year’s elections are going to be fascinating because it really is the first generation in the generative AI era. One important element is the implications for how state governments run the “business” they operate every day. Governors will confront what this means in the campaign and then in governing.
