As analysts assess the results of Tuesday’s off-year elections in some states, they’re concluding that the outcomes were disappointing for Republicans — and for one prominent GOP figure in particular, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin.
Youngkin had been saying he wouldn’t hit the presidential campaign trail this year because of the elections for his state’s legislature, but he appeared to leave the door open for a 2024 White House run.
A late entry by the Republican governor now looks unlikely, as Virginia Democrats on Tuesday managed to maintain their slim majority in the state Senate and to take control of the House of Delegates from Republicans.
“There was a stunning repudiation of Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin,” said the chief U.S. policy strategist at AGF Investments, Greg Valliere, in a note on Wednesday. “His presidential prospects have plunged.”
Virginia Democrats had sought to make abortion rights a top issue in their 2023 campaigns, warning that GOP victories would limit access. Youngkin had said he planned to pursue restrictions on abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy, with exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother, if Republicans won control of both chambers of the state’s legislature.
“There are still some issues where Republicans have political traction — urban crime, illegal immigration, food and gasoline
RB00,
inflation, etc. But the inevitable post-mortem between now and Thanksgiving will focus on the GOP’s inability to gauge public opinion on abortion,” Valliere said.
Five Republican presidential candidates are due to debate on Wednesday night in Miami, while the frontrunner in the 2024 GOP primary, former President Donald Trump, is again slated to skip the debate and hold his own event instead.
Analysts at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics said they were watching six contests on Tuesday, and five of them went to Democrats.
“Strong night for Ds,” wrote Kyle Kondik, an analyst and managing editor at the center, on social media.
The six key contests, according to Kondik and his colleagues, were those for Virginia’s state Senate, Virginia’s House of Delegates, the governor positions in Kentucky and Mississippi, an open seat on Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court and an Ohio ballot measure in support of abortion.
Republicans won only in Mississippi, where Republican Gov. Tate Reeves beat Democratic challenger Brandon Presley, who is Elvis Presley’s second cousin.
In Kentucky, a state that Trump won in 2020 by a wide margin, Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear was re-elected, defeating his Republican challenger, Attorney General Daniel Cameron.
TD Cowen Washington Research Group’s Chris Krueger offered an assessment of Tuesday’s results that was similar to Kondik’s.
“Democrats won nearly all the 2023 proxy battles in the suburbs & over abortion from KY and OH to VA and PA,” Krueger said in a note.
Governor’s races are “one of the last refuges, I think, for candidates mattering,” said Jessica Taylor, editor for governors and the U.S. Senate at the Cook Political Report.
“For governor’s races, people are voting for a candidate really, and I just think that ultimately everything that Cameron and Republicans threw at Beshear never really seemed to stick,” she told reporters during a briefing on Wednesday. “His approval ratings remained high, and he improved on his margins in many of these counties across the state after just eking out a win four years ago.”
Taylor also said: “One of the biggest takeaways for me is that it’s just very hard to beat an incumbent governor.”
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another key contest was in Ohio, where voters backed a ballot measure to legalize adult recreational use of marijuana.
Dwayne Yancey, executive editor at Virginia media outlet Cardinal News, said the results were encouraging for President Joe Biden, who was hit earlier in the week with a poll showing he trails Trump in five key battleground states in the 2024 White House race.
“Biden is undoubtedly unpopular, but that didn’t stop Democrats from winning Tuesday,” Yancey wrote in an op-ed.
“Republicans can explain away the Virginia results by saying that Virginia is a state that’s been moving left and they held back an even bigger Democratic tide. That’s certainly a plausible argument, but it doesn’t explain how Democrat Andy Beshear won reelection in Kentucky, or how well the Democratic candidate for governor in Mississippi did (he lost, but came close), or the wide margin in Ohio to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution. These results all belie the argument that Biden is leading Democrats to an electoral disaster.”
U.S. stocks
DJIA
COMP
were little changed Wednesday, struggling for direction after a rally that’s pushed the S&P 500 index
SPX
up more than 6% over seven sessions.
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