Last night, America voted (if you didn't vote, that's on you), and we have the results. I never get this article out before work on the morning after a Tuesday election, so we're going to skip much of the preamble here and get to the good stuff as I have to go to my job. Here are five thoughts on last night's elections, which overwhelmingly favored the Democrats heading into a pivotal presidential election next year.
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| Gov. Andy Beshear (D-KY) |
If you look at the top of the ticket, you might be forgiven for assuming that status quo was in order. Both Govs. Andy Beshear (D-KY) and Tate Reeves (R-MS) won their respective reelection races, against two ballyhooed contenders in Attorney General Daniel Cameron and Public Service Commissioner Brandon Presley, respectively. This comes a few weeks after the Democrats got handed a huge defeat in Louisiana, losing their governorship there (this means that the DGA is down one this cycle after netting two seats last year). But beneath the surface, this is an impressive result for the Democrats. For starters, they won in Kentucky, which was no guarantee even with someone as popular as Beshear at the helm; look at the row offices, which they won uniformly...Cameron underperformed most other statewide Republicans by 10-points. Mississippi and Kentucky are states that Donald Trump won by 16-points and 26-points, respectively, in 2020, but the Democrats are going to lose Mississippi by about 5-points when this is finished, and win Kentucky by the same margin. Those are huge swings, and Democrats have to feel pretty happy about it. Headed into 2024, Presley's loss probably takes an outright majority of the nation's governorships off the map for Democrats next year, but given Beshear's win, it's possible if Phil Scott retires that they could get to 25 seats by taking Vermont & New Hampshire (and not losing North Carolina).
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| Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R-VA) |
The bigger headline was in Virginia, though. Republicans had been bullish that they could get a trifecta in the Old Dominion, particularly running off of the back of Gov. Glenn Youngkin's approval ratings. That didn't happen though. The Democrats early in the night held the State Senate, and later in the evening were taking the General Assembly back after losing it in 2021. They did this with a diverse coalition, including electing Danica Roem to be only the second openly transgender state senator in the United States (Youngkin's team funneled hundreds of thousands into this race, but couldn't stop Roem). This is a huge hit for Youngkin's future. Whereas he was touted just a few weeks ago as potentially the 800-pound elephant who could swoop into the Republican presidential primaries, that dream is shattered, and he'll have to limp into 2028 at this point (if he runs for president at all). Combined with gains in New Jersey, Democrats in legislative races were huge victors last night.
One of Youngkin's main campaign themes was around a 15-week abortion ban in Virginia, and Republicans were watching the contest closely to understand if this might be a path forward for them to run on reproductive rights in the future after this cost them a number of contests in 2022. That didn't work in Virginia, and it was underlined in Ohio, where record numbers of women, particularly younger Millennials & Gen Z turned out (it's possible when this is said-and-done that more Ohio women will have turned out to vote in 2023 than in 2022, which is basically impossible to achieve in American politics). As a result, abortion rights (and marijuana rights) won double digit victories in the Buckeye State just less than a year after Republicans swept the statewide offices. There's a lesson here for Democrats in 2024-run on social issues. It would behoove Joe Biden's grandkids to talk their grandfather into supporting legalizing marijuana nationwide (he currently supports this just for medical marijuana), as well as to run on gay rights, abortion, & the Dream Act come 2024, as these are winners with turning out young people.
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| Judge Dan McCaffery (D-PA) |
All of these races probably annoyed Republicans, but those in the know who wanted to actually get scared by last night's election results would have to look to Pennsylvania. The commonwealth was a huge source of good news for the Democrats, and unlike every other state we've listed, is considered one of the seven "swing" states for president next year. It appears that the Democrats have not only won the one open Supreme Court race statewide with Dan McCaffery, but provided Tamika Lane holds her lead, they may well have flipped the Superior Court majority (the state's second highest court) and won a seat on the Commonwealth Court (the state's third highest court), a clean sweep for the judicial races. In county-level races, Democrats swept races in Bucks County in the Delaware Valley, and saw massive turnout throughout the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh metro areas, seeing flips and holds in dozens of row offices (and having both regions drive the judicial victories). These turnout numbers are insane for an election without a traditional major office statewide, and should scare the crap out of Republicans, given that Pennsylvania is a very good bet for next year's tipping point state.
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| President Joe Biden (D-DE) |
It should be said, first-and-foremost, that the election results tonight are important on their own, not just as tea leaves for next year. But this is an elections site, and we have to peak ahead. The results tonight are particularly jarring for a media that has been feeding doomsday reports due to polls showing Donald Trump up from The New York Times and CNN. The problem here is that this juxtaposes pretty uniformly against what we saw last night. There are caveats if you're the media, sure. More people will vote in a presidential election than last night, Biden is clearly less popular than the Democratic brand at large, it's possible Biden is underperforming the rest of the ticket. But if you combine the Democrats' unusually good midterms with a home run of a 2023, and a host of special election over-performances, it's hard not to question if the conventional wisdom around Biden is correct or not. We won't know until Biden either recovers in the polls to match last night (and the past year) or until he starts to lose on election night, but Democrats continue to outperform down-ballot, and none of the telltale warning signs in these polls are coming true. Black voters turned out hard for Democrats in Mississippi, Kentucky, & Virginia (making Louisiana look like the outlier, not the other way around) though it's worth noting that the Democratic candidates made a point of courting Black voters (Biden, take note, a call to Brandon Presley's campaign team would be a smart move), and young people voted in droves in Ohio. Maybe this is a problem specific to Joe Biden, but that would run counter to what we know about presidential politics in the past fifty years, where the party's fortunes come from the White House. Instead, it's possible that polling is missing something that the election results are telegraphing a lot louder.
3 comments:
It still astounds me that you wrote this post BEFORE going to work. You must be incredibly focused and determined to create such great material in the early morning hours!
And I got a workout in as well! Time management is a passion alongside movies and politics. lol
I'm going to have to hire you to be my coach!
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