Bellwether Tuesday Elections for Democrats
Today voters in Kentucky, Mississippi, Virginia, New Jersey, and Ohio will head to the ballot box to make determinations in gubernatorial elections and state legislative elections, and decide whether a state constitution will protect abortion rights. While these races each have different stakes, with their own localized ramifications, and off-year elections tend to yield lower voter turnout, the results today will be a prime opportunity to gauge the strength of Democrats moving into the 2024 election cycle.
A factor that will play into today’s election will be the recent release of battleground state polls from The New York Times and Siena College published one year before Election Day 2024. In a hypothetical rematch between Biden and Trump, these polls have Biden losing five of the six states polled — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania — states that were all won by the president in 2020. In another poll released on the same day by CBS News/YouGov, Biden would hypothetically lose the 2024 race nationwide to Trump by 3 percentage points.
The largest factor playing into these low polling numbers for Biden is his age, which will be a hurdle for Democrats to overcome in the next year as Biden only continues to get older. What continues to balance out that concern for voters, is the overwhelming majority support for abortion right protections that now need to be enshrined in state laws, thanks to the Supreme Court ruling last summer. While polls often hold little value in predicting the exact outcome of an election, the results of today’s votes will be a good way for the Democratic Party to measure their current level of success and define voter temperament headed into next year’s Presidential Election.
Today’s elections will also reveal what we can expect voters in more suburban areas to do headed into the 2024 race. Trump was able to win in 2016 thanks to voters in small-town and rural areas, so the real question will be how some swing states with large suburban populations vote in today’s election. Results for Republicans in the 2018, 2020 and 2022 elections have shown the GOP losing steam in these geographical areas, and in the anti-abortion movement’s defeat since the 2022 Supreme Court decision.
Today’s election is one that should favor the Republican Party, as voters in these states have been expressing dissatisfaction about both the economy and President Biden’s job performance. But, these same conditions existed in the 2022 midterms, where Republicans vastly underperformed. Voters in more populated cities and well-educated suburbs, intent on opposing restrictions on abortion, were the catalyst for keeping Republican success at bay in 2022. This is something that can easily happen again today.
Kentucky Governor
Democratic Governor Andy Beshear is running for reelection against Republican state Attorney General Daniel Cameron in Kentucky, a state which favors the conservative candidate. Beshear is relying on his success in bringing jobs to Kentucky, supporting public education, expanding healthcare access and setting strict policies to curb the spread of COVID-19. Cameron is focusing on public safety, fallout from school closures during the COVID pandemic and on the culture war issues created by the national Republican Party, such as opposing gender-affirming care for transgender children.
Mississippi Governor
Republican Governor Tate Reeves is running for re-election against Democrat Brandon Presley, a former small-town mayor and current utility regulator for Northern Mississippi. While Reeves is leading in the polls in the deeply conservative Southern state, Presley, the second cousin of singer Elvis Presley, has out-raised him over the course of the campaign, with strong backing from the Democratic Governors Association.
Reeves has produced political ads accusing Presley of being backed by out-of-state liberals and opposing bans on gender-affirming care for transgender youth like the one Reeves signed into law in February. Presley has said he does not support gender-affirming care for minors, or transgender girls playing girls' sports, and is running on the promise of tax cuts and expanding Medicaid. Both candidates are anti-abortion and support the state's ban on all abortions except in cases of rape, incest and to save the mother's life.
Virginia Legislature
Voters in Virginia will determine the outcome for all 40 seats in their state senate and all 100 seats in the House of Delegates. Democrats are fighting to maintain their four seat Senate majority and possibly widen it slightly, and to win back a House majority, where Republicans currently have a four seat edge.
There are two key things to remember about Virginia: it is a state that is rarely in one party’s complete control, and it is the only state in the south that has not enacted further limits on abortion since the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last July. Republicans have campaigned on a promise to pass a 15-week abortion ban, which has been supported by Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin, in the event that they are able to take control of the state legislature. This makes today’s election in Virginia the perfect precursor for what we can expect in swing states nationwide in 2024.
Ohio Abortion Rights
A ballot question in Ohio asks voters whether or not to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution, a move that would render moot a six-week limit signed into law by Republican Governor Mike DeWine. That law is on hold pending litigation at the conservative state Supreme Court, and early mail-in voting on the issue began on October 11. While Democrats are hopeful that Ohio will be the next state they can add to their abortion-related ballot measure wins for 2022, the outcome on this issue alone could signal what level of strength Democrats will have as they attempt to fight off criticisms of Biden over the economy and his age.
Be sure to stay tuned to SHERO for election results, and you can follow me across most social media platforms (Twitter, Post, Spoutible, Threads, and Bluesky) as I cover the returns in real-time. There will be several other smaller races to watch — mayoral races in Philadelphia and Houston; New Jersey Legislature races, a ballot referendum on marijuana legalization in Ohio, and a Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice race that will have implications for abortion rights. See you tonight!
Amee Vanderpool writes the SHERO Newsletter, is an attorney, published author, contributor to newspapers and magazines, and an analyst for BBC radio. She can be reached at avanderpool@gmail.com or follow her on Twitter @girlsreallyrule.
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In words I never thought that I’d write, I’m more confident about Kentucky than I am about Virginia.