Democrats sweep the ballot on Super-ish Tuesday
The results provide some hints about November 2024
This post is part of an ongoing series on the 2024 election - read the first one, about how Democrats are losing ground with non-white voters, here. Please consider subscribing to America Explained in order to support our work and to enable access to all posts and the full archive.
Yesterday was what I dub “Super-ish Tuesday” - a set of off-year elections which allow us to take the political temperature in about 40 states a year before the 2024 presidential contest.
The main takeaway from Super-ish Tuesday is that Democrats had a great night:
Andy Beshear retained control of the governorship of Kentucky, expanding his margin of victory significantly over last time;
Democrats won a State Supreme Court race in Pennsylvania, a key swing state which could see some attempted legal shenanigans during the 2024 election;
Democrats took full control of the statehouse in Virginia , a solidly blue state whose demographic composition nevertheless gives hints of Democratic strength in the suburbs;
An abortion rights amendment in Ohio passed by a large margin, seeming to indicate that the issue still motivates a part of the electorate;
The one disappointment came in Mississippi, where Brandon Presley (yes, he’s a cousin of Elvis) failed to dislodge a scandal-plagued Republican governor.
Before turning to the implications for 2024, I think it’s first important to note that if you believe in liberal governance and American democracy, these are good results. Thanks to the result in Ohio, the people living there will continue to have access to abortion rights. Democratic wins in Virginia prevented Governor Glenn Youngkin from gaining a pliant legislature which would enable him to implement right-wing policies. Republicans didn’t get a step closer to using the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to try to overturn the legitimate results of the 2024 election. And Beshear’s victory in Kentucky is a ray of hope for Democrats in the South, showing that they can still notch up victories there with the right candidates and don’t have to submit to one-party rule.
What this all means for 2024 is much murkier. Joe Biden has had a spurt of particularly bad polls recently, and while they don’t mean much this far out from the election, they’re provoking near panic in some Democratic Party circles. But if trying to derive a lesson from swing-state polls a year before an election is a bad idea, trying to derive lessons from an off-year election is even worse. The simple fact is that the electorates which turn up in off-years are just different to the electorates which turn up in presidential years. For instance, higher-educated and better-informed voters are much more likely to vote in off-years, which favors Democrats.
Off-year elections are also more likely to be driven by local dynamics rather than national ones. Beshear enlarging his vote share in Kentucky doesn’t mean that it’s on the brink of becoming a swing state - it just means that Beshear has a unique local political profile which allowed him to escape the usual forces of partisanship. Trump won Kentucky by nearly 25% in 2020, and when the choice is Trump vs. Biden, there’s little reason to think that the result will be much different next time.
But while you can’t simply extrapolate the results from yesterday to 2024, there are some conclusions that can be drawn:
Democrats are performing better than either Biden’s polls or general polls like the right track/wrong track measure or economic sentiment would lead us to expect. Yesterday wasn’t some mass explosion of grassroots anger, even though Biden’s approval ratings are lower than Obama’s were during the Tea Party wave of 2010. On the one hand, that’s good news - but on the other hand, it leads us to question why Biden himself doesn’t seem to be benefiting from the electorate’s generally favorable views of Democrats. This is going to fuel more speculation about his weakness as a candidate in the coming months.
That said, the results make it very unlikely that any effort to replace Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket will succeed. Had there been a red wave then the murmurings about Biden’s viability would have become shouts. As it is, the party is going to stick with him - for better or worse.
Abortion rights seem to still be a highly motivating issue for a substantial part of the electorate. Republicans have lost basically every electoral contest on this issue since Roe was overturned. That’s not automatically going to benefit Biden in 2024, though, because some of these people voting to uphold abortion rights are Republicans, and it’ll be hard to persuade them to base their presidential vote on the issue. What Democrats can do is try to get pro-choice measures onto the November 2024 ballot in swing states, hence juicing liberal turnout and netting Biden more votes that way.
The results in Virginia are a moderately strong positive signal for Democrats. Many of the seats that the party won in the statehouse have a similar demographic composition to the swing states that will decide the 2024 election. A massive collapse in Democratic support there would have been a big red warning sign. Nevertheless, as stated in the first point above, it’s not entirely clear that this will translate to support for Biden. You can tell a good story about how it will (after all, what have Republicans done to win back suburban centrists?), but you can also tell a good story about how it won’t (in 2020 Biden was more popular than the average generic Democratic lawmaker - now every piece of evidence says that he’s less popular).
It’s not much surprise that Brandon Presley lost in Mississippi, but it’s a shame. He’s a very compelling candidate who could have boosted the profile of Southern Democrats and pointed a way for the party to win races down there. The Democratic dream of creating a winning Southern coalition of African-Americans, other voters of color, and liberal whites is slowly becoming a reality in Georgia - a win in Mississippi would have demonstrated it had more general reach, and perhaps quicker than we expected.
The results in the Virginia statehouse are a blow to Glenn Youngkin, who some people have suggested represents a more moderate vision for the future of the GOP. There were even murmurings from some donors that he should replace Trump in 2024, which probably wasn’t going to happen - but it’s even less likely now.
I think when you start reaching beyond these points in order to make other claims about what this means for 2024, you run into trouble. The results are not a clear antidote to Democratic bed-wetting about Biden, but they also didn’t bring up any big new warning signs. One year out from the election, that has to be good enough for now.