Democrats have every reason to be pleased with the way this year’s scattered off-year elections showed them winning key races and the abortion issue retaining its political clout.

But Tuesday’s successes came tempered with a warning of trouble ahead as yet another major poll showed President Joe Biden in serious reelection trouble, a problem likely to persist when the immediate glow wears off.

The day’s races continued the pattern since the Supreme Court last year reversed its 1973 legalization of abortion rights: Democrats held Kentucky’s governorship with an increased margin, added Virginia’s House of Delegates to their control of the state Senate and made Ohio the latest state to guarantee the right to an abortion.

In all three states, Democratic campaigns stressed the need to protect abortion rights, a crucial factor in their victories over the past year. “We head into 2024 with the wind at our back,” tweeted longtime Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg

But one year’s elections don’t take place in a vacuum. And just like the New York Times/Siena College survey a few days earlier, a new CNN poll showed Biden suffering serious voter erosion in a possible 2024 rematch against his 2020 victim, former President Donald Trump.

The bottom line: Democrats are continuing to do well. But Biden’s reelection bid is in trouble.

And if that persists, party leaders won’t be able to take much solace from the fact that, since 2001, the Kentucky gubernatorial election has been an accurate prognosticator of the following year’s presidential race.

Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear won by five points in a state that Trump carried in 2020 by 26 points.

He did so by assailing his GOP opponent’s support for a state law banning almost all abortions and defending his own veto of a measure curbing medical aid for transgender children, passed by the GOP-controlled legislature.

Kentuckians “sent a loud, clear message, a message that candidates should run for something and not against someone,” said Beshear, whose victory positions him as one of a number of governors who could become 2028 Democratic presidential candidates.

Meanwhile, the election for Virginia’s General Assembly may have reduced the number of prospective GOP presidential candidates. Glenn Youngkin, the state’s first Republican governor in a decade, spent time and money campaigning for a GOP takeover of the state Senate in hopes of enacting a conservative agenda that would provide a possible launching pad for his presidential ambitions, either as a late entry Trump rival next year or in 2028.
Specifically, he hoped to show that the GOP could reduce its political damage from the abortion issue by pushing a 15-week abortion ban as a “consensus” measure. But Democrats seized on his promise and made it a crucial part of their campaigns in every closely fought legislative district, especially in suburban northern Virginia.

The CNN poll, however, showed that the registered voters sampled gave Trump substantial advantages on “being an effective world leader” and “having the stamina and sharpness to serve.”

Tribune News Service