Elections often leave me apprehensive until the final votes are tallied, but by all appearances yesterday was a good day for Democrats as they regained total control of the Virginia General Assembly in a major rebuke to Glenn Youngkin, saw an abortion rights initiative in Ohio pass by a wide margin, and a Democrat reelected as governor of Kentucky and beating Mitch McConnell's protégé. One way to view the results is that the majority of voters are tired of the Republican agenda of giving special rights to extreme minorities - think Christofascists an white supremacists - and disingenuously talking about "freedom" as they seek to control women's bodies, ban books, and seek to erase gays and oppose accurate history courses in public schools. Here in Virginia the results are especially sweet in that the new Democrat controlled General Assembly will be able to block Governor Youngkin's extreme agenda that would have restricted abortion rights, sought to give public school funds to private "Christian" schools, rolled back protections for LGBT Virginians and basically signaled that not everyone is welcome in the Commonwealth. The added bonus is that with the Republican losses, Youngkin may find it harder to hold himself out as a last minute presidential candidate. Indeed, yesterday's results suggest Younkin's own win two years ago was a fluke and not the beginning of a new kind of Republican campaign strategy. A piece at Politico and another at at CNN look at yesterdays election results. Here are highlights from Politico:
Joe Biden has had a very bad few days. His party just had a banner year.
In Tuesday night’s off-year elections, the incumbent Democratic governor in Kentucky — a state President Joe Biden lost by 26 points — handily won reelection. Democrats not only rebuffed Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s bid for total control of the state legislature by keeping the state Senate — they flipped the state House, too. And the party held a state Supreme Court seat in the nation’s largest Electoral College battleground of Pennsylvania.
None of these wins guarantee success for the party in 2024. . . . But for now, the results on Tuesday — taken together with a string of special elections throughout the year that showed Democratic candidates outperforming Biden’s vote shares in districts across the country — serve as a powerful counterpoint to the party’s doom-and-gloom over the president’s poll numbers.
Democrats’ victories won’t make those polls go away, but they should prompt a rethinking of the current political moment, with a year to go until the next general election.
Going into Tuesday night, Democrats were already having a strong 2023. Compared to Biden’s 2020 victory, Democratic candidates in special elections this year had been running about 8 percentage points better, on average.
There were a couple marquee victories, too, like flipping control of Wisconsin’s state Supreme Court and stopping conservatives from trying to make it more difficult to pass the abortion-rights amendment in Ohio.
Tuesday added to the winning streak: Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear won reelection. Democrats held the Virginia state Senate and flipped the state House. The party was the driving force behind a ballot measure to enshrine the right to an abortion in the Ohio state constitution. And Democrats added to their Wisconsin victory by winning a similar race in Pennsylvania.
They also won by muscle-flexing margins. Beshear beat state Attorney General Daniel Cameron by 5 percentage points; his first victory four years ago was by less than half a point. The Ohio abortion amendment passed by 12 points. Daniel McCaffery, the Democratic candidate in Pennsylvania, won by 8.
Republicans can point to a few victories this year. They easily flipped the open governorship in Louisiana last month, and Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves won reelection on Tuesday. But their successes were few and far between a year after also underachieving in the 2022 midterms.
The Ohio result marked the latest in a series of major victories at the ballot box for reproductive rights advocates in the year since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
Democrats also campaigned heavily on abortion in Virginia — and even in Kentucky, where Beshear portrayed the lack of exceptions in the state’s abortion ban as too extreme.
Youngkin bet it all on the Virginia legislative races. And it looks like he is coming home empty-handed.
The wins are a rebuke to Youngkin’s efforts to consolidate power in the state by removing a Democratic roadblock to his agenda, on everything from taxes to abortion. Youngkin, unusually, launched a strategy to have Republicans run on abortion in these elections. Youngkin pushed candidates to coalesce around a 15 week ban in the state, trying to cast Democrats as extremists on the issue and Republicans as the party with the reasonable position.
Voters rejected that.
Youngkin’s loss will likely stretch beyond the commonwealth. Some Republican donors have been publicly pining for the Virginia governor to jump into the presidential race as a last-minute challenger to Trump.
That was always logistically infeasible. But, the argument went, Youngkin could build up political momentum — and the support of key donors — with a show of strength in Virginia that would catapult him to the top of the primary field.
Youngkin pointedly never ruled out a presidential run, only saying he was focused on these legislative races when asked. But Tuesday’s results will likely put an end to that talk.
But it was New York City, not Kentucky, that may have delivered the most symbolic rebuke of Trump Tuesday. Yusef Salaam, a member of the exonerated Central Park Five, won a city council seat. Trump had called for the death penalty for those five, who were wrongly accused of raping a jogger. He has refused to apologize for it. “Karma is real,” Salaam said of his win.
No comments:
Post a Comment