The 2023 elections are in the books, and Democrats — including the White House — are elated over how well their party did in states as different as Kentucky, Ohio and Virginia.
There may be ingredients in Tuesday night’s results that prove to be a harbinger for President Joe Biden’s re-election in 2024. Nonetheless, there is still the reality that, even with his party’s strong showing this week, poll numbers for the president himself remain markedly low. And that strong electoral showing this week may have more to do with factors unrelated to Biden — and won’t necessarily strengthen his 2024 position beyond what polling now shows.
The local angle
First, Democrats benefited from some local factors. Redistricting played a role in their victories in the Virginia Legislature. Democrats had to turn out to take advantage of it, but they likely walked into the night with the upper hand in terms of how the lines were drawn.
And Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear ran a strong campaign on a record voters grew to like over four years. Looking throughout the state, he made gains versus his margins in the 2019 governor’s race, enough for an impressive victory.
Lower-turnout elections are going Democrats’ way right now
In the special and off-year elections this year, we are seeing smaller — and likely disproportionate — electorates come out to vote. Voting numbers are still incomplete, but turnout was down in Mississippi, Kentucky and Virginia on Tuesday compared to 2019. And those numbers were already below the voter turnout those states see in the midterm of presidential years.
Taken together, the results in Kentucky, Ohio, Virginia and Mississippi may speak partly to a trend we’ve been seeing more broadly: Democratic voters, particularly college-educated ones, seem extraordinarily motivated to vote, as they were when Donald Trump was president. It’s become even more pronounced in the wake of the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade last year.
However, recent polling suggests Trump and Republicans enjoy an advantage among voters who have not been as motivated to participate in special and off-year elections. If they turn out in 2024 for Trump — and voter turnout is always an if until it happens — that could produce a dramatically different result, one that’s in line with all of the recent national and swing state polling showing Biden struggling.
In other words, an election like Tuesday’s can be quite favorable to Democrats — and the polling that shows Biden in trouble in 2024 can still be accurate, like this week’s New York Times poll of battleground states.
Ohio exit poll shows strong Democratic turnout and low opinions of Biden
NBC News’ Ohio exit poll makes for an interesting companion to the Times poll, and it illustrates the turnout dynamics at play.
The exit poll showed a very favorable electorate for the left, as the state voted to expand abortion rights and legalize recreational marijuana. Trump won Ohio by 8 points in 2020, but in the exit poll question asking people how they voted in that election, the result was a Biden edge by 2 points.
When recollecting past choices like that, voters tend to overestimate the incumbent, but not to this degree. The size of this swing suggests that Democratic turnout was higher than Republican turnout and that the electorate was markedly different on Tuesday than it would be in a presidential year.
And even within that different, more friendly electorate, the exit poll still showed Biden struggling. Biden’s approval rating among Ohio voters was 39%. Nearly three-quarters, 73%, think Biden should not run in 2024, contrasted with 63% who think Trump should not run.
Despite the success of the abortion referendum, the exit poll suggests Trump would still be heavily favored to beat Biden comfortably in Ohio, as he did in 2020.
There is time for Biden’s polling to change, and he doesn’t have to win Ohio to win re-election. The bottom line: Recent Democratic election successes may owe a great deal to the nature of the electorates that have been voting, with the most committed participants — college-educated Democrats — turning out in droves.
The electorate will obviously be bigger in 2024, and it could also be quite different demographically, with Trump-friendly and Biden-hostile voters who have been sitting on the sidelines opting to vote. Under a scenario like this, a strong night for Democrats like we saw on Tuesday can easily exist side by side with polling that shows Biden in real peril of losing to Trump next year.
