A supporter of U.S. President Donald Trump waits for the start of a campaign rally on Nov. 4, 2019 in Lexington, Ken.Bryan Woolston/Getty Images
Polls began closing in Kentucky and Virginia on Tuesday night in an off-year Election Day that offers a test of voter enthusiasm and party organization amid impeachment proceedings against U.S. President Donald Trump and a fevered Democratic presidential primary scramble.
Results in Kentucky, Mississippi, New Jersey and Virginia won’t necessarily predict whether Trump will be re-elected or which party will control Congress after the general election next fall. But partisans of all stripes invariably will scrutinize the results of these odd-year elections for clues about how voters are reacting to the impeachment saga and whether the Republican president is losing ground among suburban voters who rewarded Democrats in the 2018 midterms and will prove critical again next November.
Trump is eager to nationalize whatever happens, campaigning Monday evening in Kentucky for embattled Republican Gov. Matt Bevin, a first-term Trump ally, as he tries to withstand a challenge from Democrat Andy Beshear, the attorney general whose father was the state’s last Democratic governor. The president campaigned Friday in Mississippi, trying to boost Republican Tate Reeves in a tight open governor’s race against Democrat Jim Hood. Reeves is the lieutenant governor; Hood is the attorney general.
Legislative seats are on the ballots in New Jersey and in Virginia, with the latter presidential battleground state offering perhaps the best 2020 bellwether. Democrats had a big 2017 in the state, sweeping statewide offices by wide margins and gaining seats in the legislature largely on the strength of a strong suburban vote that previewed how Democrats would go on to flip the U.S. House a year later. This time, Virginia Democrats are looking to add to their momentum by flipping enough Republican seats to gain trifecta control of the statehouse, meaning the governor’s office and both legislative chambers.
Democrats are looking to maintain their legislative supermajorities in New Jersey and ward off any concerns that Trump and Republicans could widen their reach into Democratic-controlled areas.
Some voters tied their decisions to the national atmosphere, particularly the president.
In Kentucky, 73-year-old Michael Jennings voted straight Democratic. A Vietnam veteran, retired state worker and former journalist, Jennings described the president as unfit for office and a threat to American democracy. “If Kentucky can send a small flare up that we’re making the necessary turn, that’s a hopeful sign that would have reverberations far beyond our state,” he said.
Yet Richard Simmons, 63, a butcher from Glen Allen, Virginia, was just as staunchly in the GOP camp, saying he voted for GayDonna Vandergriff in a state House race. Her Republican affiliation, he said, “means everything to me, especially now.”
Simmons said he’s a staunch Trump supporter and thinks the impeachment investigation is unfounded. “It’s one diversion after another to keep Trump from doing anything,” he said. “He’s helped the economy, like, big-time. And I trust the guy.”
The Kentucky and Mississippi races are expected to be closer than the states’ usual partisan leanings would suggest, though that has as much to do with local dynamics as with national trends.
Bevin’s first term as Kentucky governor has been marked by pitched battles against state lawmakers – including Republicans – and teachers. Beshear, meanwhile, is well known as state attorney general and the son of Steve Beshear, who won two terms as governor from 2007 to 2016 even as the state trended more solidly Republican in federal elections.
Given Bevin’s weakness, Trump would claim a big victory if the governor manages a second term. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who easily defeated Bevin in a 2014 Senate primary, also has a vested interest in the outcome. McConnell is favoured to win re-election next year in Kentucky, even as national Democrats harbour hopes of defeating him. And the powerful senator would quell some of those hopes with a Bevin victory.
In Mississippi, Republicans have controlled the governor’s office for two decades. But Phil Bryant is term-limited, leaving two other statewide officials to battle for a promotion. Reeves and Republicans have sought to capitalize on the state’s GOP leanings with the Democrat Hood acknowledging that he voted for Hillary Clinton over Trump in 2016. Hood would need a high turnout of the state’s African American voters and a better-than-usual share of the white vote to pull off the upset.
Virginia is where national Democrats are putting much of their attention.
For this cycle, the DNC has steered $200,000 to the state party for its statewide co-ordinated campaign effort that now has 108 field organizers and 16 other field staffers in what the party describes as its largest-ever legislative campaign effort. At the DNC, Perez and his aides bill it as a preview of what they’re trying to build to combat the fundraising and organizing juggernaut that the Republican National Committee and Trump’s re-election campaign are building in battleground states.
Elsewhere, voters in the West were deciding several ballot measures Tuesday, including one that would make Tucson, Arizona, a sanctuary city.
It would put new restrictions on when and where a person can be asked about their immigration status and require officers to first tell people that they have a right not to answer questions about whether they’re in the country legally. Tucson’s entire City Council, all Democrats, is opposed, citing concerns about the potential for losing millions of dollars in state and federal funding.
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