Analysts are carefully parsing the results from Tuesday’s off-year elections. The truth is that these are an odd collection of races: Elections in two heavily red states that will sometimes elect Democratic governors, an abortion referendum in Ohio, and Virginia legislative races. It’s hard to read too much into them.
That doesn’t mean that there is nothing we can read into them, and here are some thoughts on the four headline elections from yesterday. Note that results are current as of November 8, 2023; votes will continue to be counted for a while, and a few races in Virginia are still undecided.
Virginia Legislative Elections
Probably the most prominent elections on the ballot last night were the Virginia legislative elections. Democrats have held the Virginia state Senate for some time, after drawing themselves an advantageous gerrymander in the 2010 redistricting. Virginia Republicans did the same for themselves in the legislature’s lower body, called the House of Delegates.
The state enacted a redistricting commission, and after it deadlocked, the Supreme Court of Virginia appointed two special masters to draw the maps. I was one of those special masters, along with University of California, Irvine political scientist Bernard Grofman, so there are court-imposed limits to how much I can discuss. At the same time, there are two lengthy, publicly available memoranda explaining our process, and I can draw upon those here.
Our hopes for the maps were that they would reflect Virginia’s Democratic lean, but also the fact that Republicans had just swept all three of the Commonwealth’s statewide offices. We initially drew without respect to politics, and as it turned out, the districts that we produced were consistent with that goal. These maps were supposed to be hard for the GOP to win a trifecta under, but not impossible in a perfect storm.
Let’s discuss the House of Delegates first. We should first look at the distribution of districts that were at least theoretically in play for the parties. To take a very rough cut, let’s examine districts where former president Donald Trump won more than 40% of the vote, but less than 60% of the vote.
There are not enough Trump/Youngkin districts for the GOP to win control of the House of Delegates. At the same time, neither are there enough Biden/McAuliffe districts for the Democrats to seize the House. Instead, both parties must be able to perform well in the Biden/Youngkin districts, although the GOP has a longer haul here.
Unsurprisingly, these Biden/Youngkin districts are concentrated in suburban Virginia, particularly in the Tidewater area.
How did they do on Tuesday? The following table looks at Trump’s performance, Youngkin’s performance, and the Republican candidate’s 2023 performance in these districts (sorted by Trump vote share):
As you can see, the GOP performed well in the Trump districts, outpacing the former president in every district. Likewise, the Democrats held serve in every district Youngkin lost. There were some mildly surprising results here: Democratic candidates were held under 60% in Districts 10, 20, and 27, all places Biden had won by 30 points or more (and all on the Fairfax County border), and the 21st District (Biden + 26, Youngkin +2) was a four-point affair. But these candidates did well.
The GOP also held up well in the Biden/Youngkin districts. They lost three: The aforementioned 21st District (centered on Haymarket), the 65th District (Fredericksburg), and the 97th District (Virginia Beach). All told, it was a quite respectable showing for Republicans. It just wasn’t enough to carry the day under these maps.
What of the state Senate? This was a tougher haul, as the Republicans would have had to sweep the Biden/Youngkin districts.
The pattern is familiar, with most of the competitive races concentrated in the Tidewater area and in the DC exurbs. Note also that there are relatively few Biden/Youngkin races. This is a function of Virginia’s political geography and redistricting rules, which prioritize keeping counties intact (but not ensuring competitive races).
Once again, Republicans swept the Trump-carried districts (these are raw percentages, not two-party vote, so a sub-50% number doesn’t mean a candidate lost), while Democrats swept the McAuliffe districts. Louise Lucas was surprisingly held under 60% in her heavily Democratic district, but otherwise, everything went according to expectations here. Given that these districts split evenly between McAuliffe-carried districts and Youngkin-carried districts, Republicans needed to sweep the Youngkin/Biden districts in order to achieve a tie in the chamber; they came up short in the Loudoun-based 31st.
What does it all mean? Democrats are obviously happy to have blunted a bit of Republican political momentum in the Old Commonwealth, and they’ll make life a lot more uncomfortable for Youngkin by passing popular bills that are radioactive with the Republican base and daring him to veto them.
At the same time, Virginia is a blue-ish purple state, and these maps reflect that. Democrats are supposed to win under them. That they did so doesn’t really tell us much about the national mood. If one must find deeper meaning, I might note that the Republican candidates ran ahead of Trump but somewhat behind Youngkin, which is more-or-less consistent with a Democratic environment that is less favorable than 2020, but where things have cooled off a bit from 2021.
Ohio Abortion Referendum
Put simply, pro-lifers got walloped in Ohio. The voters overwhelmingly rejected the state’s strict abortion ban, 57%-43%. At the same time, the state polarized badly; the initiative carried the urban and suburban areas but was overwhelmingly rejected in rural areas (particularly in western Ohio).
As someone who resides in the Buckeye State, I’m a bit surprised the margin wasn’t wider. Pro-life ads were nonexistent, at least on the media my family consumes. Pro-choice ads hit themes that would resonate with all but the most hardened pro-lifer, concentrating on the lack of a rape exception and centering the messages on the family. One ad featured a father asking, “What if my daughter were raped,” while another emphasized that Issue 1 put the abortion decision where it belonged, “with my family.”
Of course, Issue 1 was a wide-ranging measure, overriding the state’s parental notification law and hampering the state’s ability to place any restrictions on the procedure at all. Future legislation or court interpretations may nibble away at this outcome, but overall, given a choice between an amendment with almost no restrictions and a law with almost no exceptions, Ohio voters overwhelmingly rejected the latter.
What does this tell us? Nothing we didn’t already know. Americans, even in fairly red states, are basically pro-choice, if only pragmatically. They do not like first-trimester abortion bans and definitely don’t like them without exceptions for rape and incest. This issue is not going away any time soon, and a lot of Republicans who had the luxury of staking out extreme positions on abortion while the Supreme Court protected them from the blowback of those issues now find themselves without cover. Republicans won control of the House after the Dobbs decision and held their own in Virginia. But they, and their pro-life allies, need to give some serious thought to what half-loaves they are willing to accept here.
Kentucky
Republicans had become optimistic that they could win this race as a last-minute Emerson College poll showed Attorney General Daniel Cameron narrowly besting incumbent governor Andy Beshear. As it turned out, Beshear won reelection by five points, building on his 2019 win over incumbent Matt Bevin.
How did Beshear do it? This map shows the swing in vote share from 2019 to 2023 in Kentucky. Notably, the Louisville and Cincinnati areas don’t change that much from 2019 to 2023. The swings came in metro Lexington – a smaller city that hadn’t realigned quite as much as Cincy and Louisville during the 2010s, and then Southeastern Kentucky.
This area – rural, poor, heavily white, and heavily conservative – is the core of the old Democratic coalition in the state. Democratic strength here only collapsed in the past decade, but Beshear appears to have harnessed a resurgence there. It may not be entirely coincidental: Like John Fetterman did in Pennsylvania, Beshear made a point of campaigning in rural areas, something Democrats often don’t do.
What does this mean for the future? Likely not much. Going into the race, Beshear enjoyed job approval ratings in the mid-to-high 50s. He is also the scion of a Kentucky political family whose father had served two terms as a popular governor, winning both of his election bids by double digits. Notably, in the elder Beshear’s first bid for governor, his best showing was in those southeastern Kentucky counties. The younger Beshear is also a relatively powerless governor, as Kentucky requires just a majority vote to overturn a veto. This gives Beshear a great deal of flexibility in which fights he picks, and ensures that any popular legislation he vetoes won’t become law.
Finally, the Democratic Party resurgence in southeastern Kentucky seems candidate-specific. The movement toward Democrats in the Lexington area is more consequential, but Kentucky is a state with three genuinely rural/small-town congressional districts that will compensate the GOP for urban slippage for quite some time.
The other Republican candidates on the ticket found more success. All won with between 57% and 61% of the vote, and only one lost a county other than Jefferson (Louisville), Franklin (Frankfort), and Fayette (Lexington). GOP treasurer candidate Mark Metcalf lost rural Rowan County by less than a point.
Overall, the Bluegrass State is unlikely to turn blue anytime soon.
Mississippi
Finally, Mississippi.
Democrats had hoped that they might pull off the upset in the state’s gubernatorial race, and they made it closer than Republicans would have liked. Tate Reeves won by just 4.6% over Brandon Presley, his Democratic opponent, whose most notable feature was being Elvis Presley’s second cousin. He ain’t no hound dog, but it wasn’t enough. Reeves prevailed over Presley by roughly the same margin he won by in 2019.
Once again, the relative closeness of the Mississippi gubernatorial race was somewhat about the Republican candidate, as down-ballot Republicans performed better. They won between 59% and 62% of the vote. Once again, those searching for a deeper meaning may well be able to find one, but overall, the story in Mississippi is that red-state voters elected Republicans to statewide offices.
