Could Mississippi Really Elect a Democratic Governor? We’re About to Find Out.

Off-year elections suck up much less media oxygen than midterm or presidential years, and largely for good reason. Only a handful of states hold regular elections on this cycle, and most of them are strongholds for Democrats or Republicans, making it challenging to assess any meaning in the results. But there are always a few races with national attention, and perhaps national implications. Can the backlash to Dobbs sustain itself more than a year after the decision was handed down? Will President Joe Biden’s woes cost Democrats a critical state legislative battle? Can red-state Democrats survive in an era of ever-deepening partisan polarization? If nothing else, Tuesday should resolve which conflicting signal about 2024—Biden’s deepening unpopularity or ongoing Democratic overperformance in special elections—is the right one. Here are the races to watch.

Just three states hold gubernatorial elections in 2023, and one of them is already over. Republican Jeff Landry secured a majority in the open primary round of Louisiana’s election, a flip for the GOP that means incumbent Democrat John Bel Edwards was unable to move the state’s politics meaningfully away from its status as a Republican stronghold. It’s hard to pin down how this race differed from past years, but certainly a vote total of less than 30 percent for Democratic candidates in the state’s bizarre electoral system was not what party leaders were hoping for.

Also holding a gubernatorial election is Mississippi, a state that Democrats have long hoped might inch toward competitive status given its highest-in-the-nation share of Black voters (about 40 percent) and their overwhelming preference for Democrats. Biden won 94 percent of Black voters in Mississippi, according to 2020 exit polling. But as in other states in the Deep South, Democrats remain wildly uncompetitive with Mississippi’s white population, with even college-educated white voters remaining steadfast in their support for the GOP. Donald Trump won an astounding 70 percent of college-educated white voters in the state in 2020, a group that Biden won nationally 51–48.

If a Democrat is ever to win statewide here (no Mississippi Democrat has won a governor’s race since 1999), the path will have to run through significant gains with educated white voters. The party’s nominee this year, Brandon Presley, is running a surprisingly competitive race against unpopular and scandal-ridden incumbent Republican Tate Reeves, who leads by an average of just 9.5 points in the two nonpartisan polls released in August and September. Trump won Mississippi by more than 16 points in 2020. A survey from Democratic-aligned firm Public Policy Polling last week had Reeves up just 1 point. A victory or even near-miss by Presley in this race against an incumbent would be a worrisome sign for Republicans.

And in Kentucky, Democrat Andy Beshear is a slight favorite, according to polls, to hold the office in a landslide Republican state. If he can hang on to his office in a much different national landscape than the 2019 one he won it in, his brand of quiet, cooperative progressivism could work in other red states where Democrats have struggled to keep their heads above water this century. But given that nearly three-quarters of incumbent governors win reelection, it’s not clear that there would be a broader lesson from Beshear’s triumph.

Because they will take place this month, 2023’s two House special elections should be seen as perhaps the clearest indicator of where national Democrats and Republicans stand heading into the 2024 cycle. Rhode Island Democrat David Cicilline resigned, scandal-free, in May, opening up a seat he won by 28.2 points in 2022. If Democrat Gabe Amo can’t reproduce or exceed that margin against Republican Gerry Leonard, it will cause panic at the Democratic National Committee. And in Utah, Democrat Kathleen Riebe will square off against Republican Celeste Maloy to replace six-term GOP incumbent Chris Stewart, who resigned last month to care for his wife. Stewart beat his Democratic opponent by 25.7 points in 2022, and if Riebe can put any kind of scare into Maloy, Democrats will treat it as a victory. (However, that vote won’t wrap until Nov. 21.*)

Another battle with major national implications is the one for Virginia’s state Legislature. It is currently one of just two states (along with Pennsylvania) with split partisan control of the bicameral state Legislature. When Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin scored his upset victory in 2021, he brought a Republican House of Delegates with him by flipping 7 of 100 seats, while Democrats remained in control of the state Senate—possibly only because members of the latter serve four-year terms (instead of two in the House) and weren’t facing voters.

Youngkin’s election halted a decadelong slide for the state GOP and might have put the state back in play for 2024 after Biden carried it by 10 points. Does Youngkin’s culture-war battle plan have legs for Republicans hoping to keep the state purple, or was he just a crack in the new blue wall that Democrats can caulk up? If Republicans win one or both chambers, expect the state to see a lot more attention next year than it did in 2020. Of much more immediate concern is the status of reproductive rights in the state. If the state House falls, Virginia might become the 22^nd state to partially or completely ban abortion since the 2022 Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade.

The stakes aren’t quite as high in New Jersey, where Democrats hold a trifecta and are expected to keep it. But if Republicans can follow up on nearly taking down incumbent Gov. Phil Murphy by eating into Democratic margins in either chamber, it will be more evidence that the 2021 GOP off-year wins weren’t a fluke—but a harbinger of a potential red renaissance in the mid-Atlantic, especially after the dismal performance of New York Democrats last year was perhaps the biggest factor in the Republican takeover of the U.S. House. And one explanation is likely to be that the overwrought Republican message about taking back parental control in schools from “woke” teachers and staff is working. However accurate, this was certainly the media message after the 2021 elections.

That’s why there are also a number of school board elections that are drawing enormous interest and wild spending, including in the Central Bucks School District in suburban Philadelphia, and Virginia’s Prince William County School Board, south of Washington, D.C. Those are the kinds of places Republicans desperately need to win back to remain competitive, and the school board contests will serve as a useful barometer of whether the GOP strategy is working, or if 2021’s losses were just a mild correction for Democrats before they resume their conquest of the suburbs.

Virginia isn’t the only place where abortion will be on the ballot, directly or indirectly. Ohioans will trudge to the polls to vote on a constitutional referendum to make abortion legal in the state. In August, voters defeated a GOP-hatched scheme to make it harder to amend the state constitution, making the pro-choice side in this battle the favorite. A victory for the Democratic-backed constitutional amendment will be a huge boost for beleaguered reproductive rights activists and organizations (who have also poured money into a Pennsylvania state Supreme Court election that will be seen as a referendum on Dobbs). It will also be a sign that anywhere Democrats succeed in getting abortion directly in front of voters in 2024, including planned ballot measures in Florida and Arizona, could have huge benefits. Party strategists hope that the issue can do for Democrats what anti-gay-marriage ballot initiatives are perceived to have done for Republicans in 2004—the difference-maker in a close election that brought party stalwarts and independents around to supporting the incumbent president—a narrative that is hotly contested by political scientists who weren’t all convinced that was the case.

There’s far more to politics than what something means for the 2024 horse race, but the very real policy consequences of these elections will likely be eclipsed by day-after narrative-building by the two parties and their media surrogates. Maybe the results will be so mixed that no one can declare victory, but if not, the losing party is going to have to endure one hell of a negative news cycle to kick off a presidential election year with near-existential stakes.