Using midterm elections as a tool to predict the results of the next presidential election is never a good idea. Voter turnout is usually lower, local idiosyncrasies play a bigger role, and a lot can change in a mere two years. That goes double for elections that take place in odd numbered years, when even fewer people vote and just a handful of states hog the national spotlight. But the 2023 elections – in which three governorships, a handful of state legislatures, and hundreds of local offices were up for grabs – felt like they had a bit higher stakes than normal. The past month has not been kind to President Joe Biden, who has found himself dealing with a new war, a slightly (if only barely) more credible challenger in the upcoming Democratic primary, and a series of polls that show him trailing former President Donald Trump in a 2020 rematch. If Republicans won key legislative elections and referenda, a new wave of questions about the state of the party and Biden’s fitness to lead it into 2024 could crop up and embolden the GOP as it plots to take back the White House.

As you probably know by now, that isn’t what happened – in fact, by some measures, Democrats had a better night than expected, proving that even if Biden is facing headwinds in 2024, he isn’t dragging the rest of the party down with him. At least, not yet; as Winston Churchill said, success is not final, and failure is not fatal. But that doesn’t mean those things aren’t still fun to talk about – so, keeping all of that in mind, let’s take a look at who won and who lost on Election Day 2023.

Winner: Andy Beshear

Despite the high approval ratings Democratic Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear has enjoyed since he took office in 2019, Democrats had some reason to fret about whether or not he could pull off another win in a state where Donald Trump won over 62% of the vote in 2020. While Democrats never really expected to be competitive in Louisiana’s jungle primary this year, they still underperformed across the board, most troublingly with minority voters, allowing a once-Democratic governor’s mansion to flip without putting up much resistance. Considering that Republicans nominated Daniel Cameron, Kentucky’s Black attorney general, to run against Beshear, a repeat of this poor performance was not out of the question in the Bluegrass State, and could have been enough to hand one of the most high profile races of the night to the GOP. 

It turns out these concerns were unfounded. Despite Biden’s unpopularity and Kentucky’s strong rightward lean, Beshear actually expanded on his 2019 margin by over four percentage points, making the race callable early in the night. While Beshear’s largest improvement was seen in the same swingy suburbs that were key to his 2019 victory, his most striking results came in the state’s Eastern Coalfield region, which had raced away from Democrats and towards Republicans during the Trump era: Breathitt and Perry counties both made double digit swings to the left from their 2020 presidential numbers, while Letcher County, where Trump won over 79% of the vote three years ago, narrowly went for Beshear. 

Part of this overperformance is likely due to Beshear’s successful handling of a flood that hit the region in 2020, but – in what will become a common theme in this article – perhaps his most striking bit of messaging concerned abortion. After Cameron said he supported a statewide abortion ban without exceptions for the life of the mother, Beshear ran a searing ad in which a young woman who was sexually abused by her stepfather excoriated the attorney general’s position, a message that no doubt resonated in a state whose electorate voted against a constitutional amendment to strip abortion protections just last year. 

Beshear’s victory formula is probably not totally replicable for other red state Democrats, especially given his high name ID (he’s the son of a popular former governor), but the party has to be encouraged knowing that, if they find the right candidate, they can still be competitive in very conservative states. That’s certainly much easier said than done, but given how dismal things looked for Democrats after 2016, any bit of hope helps.

Loser: Glenn Youngkin

If Andy Beshear gave Democrats a glimmer of hope when he was first elected in 2019, then Glenn Youngkin gave Republicans a full aurora of it in 2021. The former Carlyle CEO’s upset victory in Virginia’s gubernatorial election helped boost the morale of a party still reeling from the 2020 election and the fallout of the January 6th riots, while candidates riding his coattails in a number of Biden-won districts flipped the commonwealth’s House of Delegates. Youngkin’s name quickly began to be floated in discussions about the Republicans’ 2024 presidential nomination, and while the governor claimed he was “wholly focused on the Commonwealth of Virginia,” Republican donors like Thomas Peterffy floated that idea that, should Youngkin help flip the state’s Senate in 2023, he would declare his candidacy for the top job. After all, it’d be hard to argue with the electoral prospects of a guy who helped create only the third Republican trifecta in a Biden-won state.

Unfortunately for Peterffy, this prediction proved to be premature. Republicans not only failed to win the Virginia Senate, but also ceded back control of the House of Delegates, where their 52-48 majority transformed into a 49-51 minority. The day after, Youngkin implied that he would not run for president.

Technically, this wasn’t an awful result for Republicans – they still won in every district where Biden won less than 9% of the vote in 2020, and actually gained a seat in the Senate. But from a psychological perspective, it’s a bit of a blow. Youngkin spent heavily on the race through his Spirit of Virginia PAC and campaigned personally on behalf of candidates, detailing his plans to “progress” a 15-week abortion ban if his party gained a trifecta. Much like Terry McAuliffe’s comments about parents’ involvement in their children’s education from the 2021 governor’s race, Youngkin’s words wound up being great ammo for the other party, popping up in Democratic campaign ads and mailers. In 2021, Youngkin had found a secret sauce to win back suburbanites by focusing on education issues, some light anti-trans rhetoric, and opposition to lingering COVID restrictions. But if last week was any indication, abortion has become the driving political issue at the state and local level. Speaking of which…

Winner: Abortion rights

While abortion was a leading issue in both Kentucky and Virginia, there was one state where it was virtually the only issue. In Ohio, 56% of voters approved Issue 1, a ballot measure that enshrined a right to reproductive freedom in the state’s constitution. Abortion was also on the ballot to a lesser extent in Pennsylvania, where Democrat Daniel McCaffery defeated Republican Carolyn Carluccio in a race for a vacant seat on the state supreme court. Unlike Janet Protasiewicz’s win in Wisconsin earlier this year, McCaffery’s victory didn’t flip control of the court – Democrats already had a 4-2 majority – but it was yet another race where Democrats put abortion at the forefront of their messaging, criticizing Carluccio for website copy that described her as a “Defender of… All Life Under the Law.” 

Neither of these races were particularly dramatic – an August referendum that would have required Ohio ballot measures to be passed with a supermajority to be successful failed by a similar margin, and the pro-choice side has come out on top every time the issue has been voted on directly by Americans, even in deep red states like Kansas, Kentucky, and Montana. But it seems to have reinforced the idea that abortion is a driving issue for their voters, and the party is already plotting to hold similar ballot measures in Arizona, Nevada, and Florida to try and drive voter turnout in 2024.

Losers: The 2021 Political Environment

I’ve lived through the Democratic landslide in the 2006 midterms, the Republican shellacking of Barack Obama’s congressional majorities in 2010, and the nine-seat Senate swing in 2014. All of these elections represented massive shifts in power that were seen as a stinging rebuke to the presidents who were serving at the time, but, speaking on a personal and anecdotal level, the Democratic panic that set in after the 2021 elections in Virginia and New Jersey felt particularly apocalyptic. 

Part of that may have been the upset factor – ever since the 1994 Republican Revolution, voters and commentators have gotten used to the idea that the president’s party suffers losses in midterm years. But it felt unlikely that two states that went decisively for Biden in 2020 would vote for Republican governors or state legislatures the following year, especially after January 6th. Once Youngkin defeated Terry McAuliffe, Republicans flipped the Virginia House of Delegates, and made serious gains in the New Jersey Legislature, the idea that Democrats were squandering the progress they made in attracting suburban voters during the Trump era became a common theme. The subtext of each of these panicked op-eds and comments – that Democratic shortcomings could lead to a Trump reelection in 2024 – was as palpable as the despair. 

Republicans found success in those elections by adhering to what I’ve decided to uncreatively dub the 2021 strategy: hammering Democrats on crime, “wokeness” (particularly in regards to education policy), “grooming” children by educating them about LGBTQ issues, lingering COVID-19 precautions, and the United States’ withdrawal from Afghanistan. This approach produced tangible policy outcomes, especially when it came to banning certain books in school libraries, banning gender affirming care for minors, and banning transgender athletes from competing in sports alongside members of their preferred gender. As Biden’s approval numbers continued to slip, conventional wisdom seemed to be that Republicans could ride this strategy to an overwhelming congressional majority in 2022, not to mention stack swing states with governors and secretaries of state who denied the results of the 2020 election and who could then play key roles in a disputed outcome in 2024.

This didn’t quite come to pass. Republicans did take control of the House of Representatives – but with a miniscule minority that ended up causing them more problems than they bargained for – but they actually lost ground in the Senate, governor’s mansions, and state legislatures. Candidate selection and some Republicans’ insistence on relitigating the validity of the 2020 election played a large role in these electoral disappointments, but the biggest shift in 2022 came earlier, after the Supreme Court ruled in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that there was no constitutional right to an abortion. Speaking broadly, the reason why this hurt Republicans is fairly obvious – legal abortion is popular in the United States, and the party that not only removed its constitutional protection, but then worked to actively ban it, suffered for it electorally. 

But I think the Dobbs ruling did something else, as well. By allowing Republicans to implement their preferred policies and forcing them to discuss the specifics, it made them appear like the most powerful political actors in the country. In other words, the political conversation was no longer about Biden. Instead, it was about Republicans, who now had to own perhaps the only policy less popular than high gas prices and street crime. Democrats no longer had to run on defending Biden’s agenda. Instead, they ran in opposition to the Republican agenda, playing the insurgent role typically held by the party that’s out of power during the midterms. Rather than having to make the case as to why voters should keep them in charge, they made the case as to why Republicans were unfit to lead. 

Optimistic Republicans had some reason to believe that the Dobbs effect would last in 2023. Even though abortion restrictions proved unpopular at the ballot box, governors who signed abortion limitations like Ohio’s Mike DeWine, Georgia’s Brian Kemp, and Florida’s Ron DeSantis handily won reelection in 2022, and Joe Biden’s approval numbers have remained consistently underwater and Democrats’ progressive base fractured over the president’s support of Israel’s military operations in Gaza..  Combine that with pessimistic voter opinions on inflation, crime, and the general direction of the country, and it wasn’t inconceivable that Republicans could beat conventional wisdom yet again and score some big wins heading into 2024. And yet, the abortion issue would not go away. 

Smart Republicans probably expected to lose the Ohio abortion referendum, the Virginia legislative elections, and even the Kentucky governor’s race. But what makes those losses even more difficult for them to cope with is that they lost ground in many other parts of the country as well. After a better than expected showing in 2021, New Jersey Republicans had high hopes of taking control of the Garden State’s legislature for the first time in almost 20 years, seizing upon voters’ dissatisfaction with high taxes and crime. Instead, many of the seats that they flipped in 2021 went back to Democrats, including that of Ed Durr, the truck driver who upset former Senate President Stephen Sweeney via a $2,300 campaign back in 2021. Across the Hudson River in New York City, where the election of law and order Democrat Eric Adams and Republican gains in the City Council two years hinted at dissatisfaction with the Big Apple’s progressive prosecutors and the criminal justice reform movement, Democrats held serve, countering a Republican pickup in The Bronx with Councilmember Justin Brannan’s victory over party-switcher and fellow incumbent Ari Kagan in Brooklyn. 

In Loudon County, Virginia, where a sexual assault a high school was cynically used by Republcains to question the safety of gender neutral bathrooms and progressive education methods in 2021, liberals won two-thirds of school board seats. In Republican-leaning Iowa, school board candidates endorsed by the right-wing Moms for Liberty lost nearly every race they ran in, while those endorsed by LGBTQ rights organization One Iowa won the majority of their races. Moms for Liberty also lost a high-profile school board election in Bucks County, Pennsylvania; elsewhere in the Keystone state, Democrats took control of the Delaware County Council for the first time since the Civil War. 

It wasn’t all bad news for Republicans: they extended their Long Island-winning streak by electing a Suffolk County Executive for the first time in 12 years, either held onto or reclaimed a number of state, county, and local offices in Northern New Jersey, and saw Tate Reeves hold onto the Mississippi governor’s mansion against feisty Democratic Public Service Commissioner Brandon Presley (albeit with the smallest share for a Republican in a race for that office since 1999). However, even when one takes these victories into account, 2023 has left the Republican Party with more questions than answers. In theory, the party goes into 2024 with a number of advantages: voters are pessimistic about the economy, the border, and the general future of the country. But as long as Dobbs dominates the headline, Republicans will find themselves on the defensive, trying to satisfy both their rabidly pro-life base and a mainstream public that has made very clear that it wants abortion to remain legal. At least voters know Biden and the Democrats want inflation and crime rates to be lower. Republicans have been working to restrict abortion for years. In 2022, they scored their biggest legal victory in years. They’ve been paying for it ever since.