How abortion boosted Democrats, and more lessons from Tuesday’s election

The political potential of abortion rights proved more powerful than President Biden’s negative influence in the off-year elections, when Ohioans enshrined the right to abortion in their state’s constitution and Democrats gained control of both chambers of the General Assembly of Virginia, while moving on to become governor of Kentucky.

The evening’s results demonstrated the durability of Democrats’ political momentum since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and ended the constitutional right to abortion in 2022. It could also put an end, at least temporarily, to the latest round of democratic anxiety over a series of conflicts. Polls show Mr Biden’s political weakness.

After a strong midterm performance last year, a big win in the Wisconsin Supreme Court race in April and a string of special election victories, Democrats are heading into Biden’s reelection contest with the wind at their backs. The question for the party is how to translate that momentum to Mr. Biden, who remains unpopular while others who follow his agenda have prevailed.

These are the most important conclusions from Tuesday:

There’s nothing like abortion to help Democrats and Biden.

Democratic officials have said for months that the fight for abortion rights has become the issue that best motivates Democrats to vote and is also the issue that convinces most Republicans to vote for Democrats.

On Tuesday, they found new evidence to bolster their case in victories by Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky, who criticized his opponent’s defense of the state’s near-total ban; legislative candidates in Virginia opposing the 15-week abortion ban proposed by Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin; and especially the referendum in Ohio that established the right to access abortion. Daniel McCaffery, a candidate for the Pennsylvania Supreme Court who ran on behalf of abortion rights, also won, giving Democrats a 5-2 majority.

Abortion is now so powerful as a Democratic issue that Everytown, the gun control organization founded and funded by Michael Bloomberg, used its TV ads in Virginia to promote abortion rights before discussing gun violence.

Anti-abortion Democrat running for governor of Mississippi, Brandon Presley, underperformed expectations and lost by twice the margin of his party’s 2019 candidate.

It is a sign that, as weak as Mr. Biden’s position is, the political climate and issues are still strong for Democrats committed to abortion access and Republicans who defend a ban.

The last six gubernatorial elections in Kentucky have been won by the same party that won the presidential election the following year. The president may not be able to do what Mr. Beshear has done — discuss Biden’s policies without ever mentioning the president’s name — but he now has examples of what a winning road map for 2024 could look like.

In Virginia, a Republican rising star faces a solar eclipse.

Governor Youngkin had hoped that a strong night for his party would greatly elevate his standing as a Republican who turned an increasingly blue state back to red. That would at least bring him into the conversation about the Republican presidential nominee in 2028, if not 2024.

But Youngkin’s promise to introduce what he called a moderate abortion bill — a ban on abortions after 15 weeks with exceptions for rape, incest and to save the life of an endangered mother — gave Democrats an effective counterbalance when he took full control across the state. government.

The Democratic argument won the day, at least in part. The party seized the majority in the House of Representatives, retained control of the Senate, and finally spoiled Mr. Youngkin’s evening. The results offered nervous national Democrats yet more evidence of the power of abortion as a motivator for their voters, while upending Mr. Youngkin’s plans for his final two years in office and possibly beyond.

A Democrat can win in deep red Kentucky if his name is Andy Beshear.

If you want to get re-elected, being the most popular governor in the country turns out to be a good thing.

Mr. Beshear spent his first term and his re-election campaign hyper-focused on local issues like teacher salaries, new road projects, guiding the state through the pandemic and natural disasters and, since last summer’s Supreme Court decision upholding Roe v .Wade was overturned, he opposed his the total ban on abortion in the state.

That made him politically bulletproof when his Republican challenger, Attorney General Daniel Cameron, who was backed by former President Donald J. Trump, tried to nationalize the campaign and undermine the Republican Party’s rise by selling Mr. Beshear to Mr. Biden bind and attack him in the area of ​​crime and crime. LGBTQ issues. (Mr. Beshear vetoed new restrictions targeting transgender youth, though Republican lawmakers voted to override him.)

It’s not that Republican voters stayed home; all other Republicans running for statewide office won with at least 57 percent of the vote. Mr. Beshear has just had enough of supporting him for governor. A Democrat who can win over Republican voters without compromising on issues important to liberal voters is someone the rest of the party will want to emulate in red states and districts across the country.

Attacks on transgender rights didn’t work.

With access to abortion becoming the main issue motivating Democrats, and with same-sex marriage widely accepted in America, Republicans who focused on an issue to motivate social conservatives ended up limiting rights for transgender people . That didn’t work on Tuesday.

In Kentucky, Mr. Cameron and his Republican allies spent more than $5 million on television ads attacking LGBTQ rights and Mr. Beshear for defending them, according to AdImpact, a company that tracks political ads. Gov. Tate Reeves in Mississippi spent $1.2 million on anti-LGBTQ ads, while Republicans running for House seats in Virginia spent $527,000 in TV time on the issue.

In Virginia, House of Representatives member Danica Roem will become the South’s first transgender senator after defeating a former Fairfax County police detective who supported banning transgender athletes from competing in high school sports .

In Ohio, voters support both abortion and marijuana.

Ohioans once again demonstrated the popularity of abortion rights, even in reliably Republican states, when they easily passed a constitutional amendment enshrining the right to abortion.

The vote in Ohio could be a harbinger of the upcoming presidential election season, as supporters and opponents of abortion rights try to bring the issue to the attention of voters in the critical battleground states of Florida, Nevada, Arizona and Pennsylvania.

And by a margin nearly identical to the vote on abortion, Ohioans also legalized recreational marijuana use. That makes Ohio the 24th state to do so.

Where abortion was not an issue, a Republican won easily.

Mississippi’s gubernatorial race was the exception to the off-year abortion rule: the incumbent governor, Mr. Reeves, and his Democratic challenger, Mr. Presley, were staunch opponents of abortion rights.

And in that race the Democrat lost.

Mr. Presley hoped to close the race in Mississippi by tying the incumbent to a public corruption scandal in which $94 million in federal funds meant for Mississippi’s poor were misspent on projects such as a college volleyball facility, pressured by retired superstar quarterback Brett Favre. He also pushed for the expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act to save Mississippi’s collapsing rural hospitals.

But in Mississippi, Mr. Reeves had three advantages that proved impenetrable: his position, the “R” next to his name on the ballot, and the approval of Mr. Trumpwhich won the state by nearly 17 percentage points in 2020.

In Kentucky races among the major gubernatorial contests, Democrats also did not support abortion, and lost, as did Mr. Presley.

Rhode Island sends a Biden aide to the House.

Rhode Island is hardly a swing state, yet the heavily Democratic enclave’s election of Gabe Amo for one of its two House seats likely brought a smile to Mr. Biden’s face. Mr. Amo served as deputy director of the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs and as such becomes the first Biden White House aide to serve in Congress.

The son of African immigrants, Mr. Amo will also be the Ocean State’s first black representative.

White House officials said the president congratulated his former aide on his victory. The special election will fill the seat vacated by David Cicilline, a Democrat who left the seat to run a nonprofit.