[There are more insights in this week’s elections than in polls
about a vote that won’t happen for a year. Defense of abortion
rights, legalizing marijuana, aligning with labor and saving the
planet are winning issues.]
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FORGET THE POLLS—HERE’S WHAT ACTUAL ELECTION RESULTS CAN TELL US
ABOUT 2024  
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John Nichols
November 10, 2023
The Nation
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_ There are more insights in this week’s elections than in polls
about a vote that won’t happen for a year. Defense of abortion
rights, legalizing marijuana, aligning with labor and saving the
planet are winning issues. _

Joe Biden giving an address on what his administration is doing to
preserve access to abortion, image: Youtube

 

“J
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Biden Loses Lead in Latest National Poll
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“Biden nosedives in early-state polls
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“Joe Biden Will Lose a General Election to Donald Trump
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These are real headlines.

But they’re not from the fall of 2023. They’re from 2019, when Joe
Biden’s third bid for the presidency appeared to be crashing and
burning. In 2019, there were plenty of polls that suggested Biden
would lose the race for the Democratic nomination. And if by some
chance he got the party line, there were plenty of polls, focus
groups, and analyses that said he would be a weak challenger to Donald
Trump.

Biden ignored them, won the nomination, and secured the presidency
with relative ease—winning the fall election with a 7 million
popular vote margin
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a 306-232 advantage in the Electoral College.

It turned out that what mattered was not the hundreds of people who
were polled at any particular moment but the tens of millions of
people who actually voted.

Four years later, Democrats are once more fretting
over doom-and-gloom headlines
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how Biden has lost his lead, nosedived in the polls, and is likely to
lose a 2024 election with—because history doesn’t rhyme, it
repeats—Donald Trump. The current obsession with polls revolves
around two basic premises: Biden is old and a lot of voters would
prefer a younger alternative. Fair enough, but that doesn’t have
much meaning if Biden is committed to running—and he is—along with
the almost equally old and more bedraggled Trump.

There’s not much point in looking to particular polls—or even to
sets of polls—for signals about an election that is a year off.
Instead, we should look at the choices—real choices, not theoretical
ones—that millions of voters made in elections that occurred just
this week.

A lot of Republicans grudgingly recognized this reality, following the
striking pattern of victories on Tuesday for progressive candidates,
progressive ideas, and for the party of FDR, JFK, and Joe Biden.
Democrats held the governorship of Kentucky, took full control of the
Virginia legislature, improved their position in the already
Democratic New Jersey legislature, came remarkably close to winning
the governorship of the deep-red state of Mississippi, solidified
their majority on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, elected dynamic new
officials such as incoming Allegheny County Executive Sara Innamorato
and Rhode Island US Representative Gabe Amo, and scored sweeping wins
in school board races
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upended the right-wing assault on honest education and LGBTQI+ rights.
Not bad for one night.

In fact, the November 7, 2023, off-year election produced so many
victories for Democrats—many of them running on agendas parallel to
those of Biden, and in stark opposition to Trump and an increasingly
extreme GOP—that Republican presidential candidate Vivek
Ramaswamy announced
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the GOP debate stage on the night after the election, “I think there
is something deeper going on in the Republican Party here and I am
upset about what happened last night. We’ve become a party of losers
at the end of the day.”

Ramaswamy is rarely right, and sometimes his pronouncements are so
cringeworthy that he merits rival Nikki Haley’s debate-night rebuke:
“You’re just scum.
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But Ramaswamy was no outlier when it came to bemoaning his party’s
pattern of worse-than-expected results in off-year, midterm, and
presidential election cycles since 2018. Right-wing pundits were also
acknowledging that GOP candidates and issues continue to be on a
losing streak
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“What, exactly, does Ronna McDaniel do, besides lose? asked
[[link removed]] former
Fox News contributor Monica Crowley, whose call for the Republican
National Committee chair to “RESIGN. Effective immediately,” was
widely echoed by right-wing pundits and activists. Fox News host
Kayleigh McEnany ran down a list of states where Republican candidates
and issues lost or ran poorly and reminded viewers
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Kentucky is a red state. Ohio is a red state. Mississippi…is a red
state. Tonight, the midterm elections, the last few elections, we must
recognize as a party, good polling does not always translate into
resounding victory.”

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre offered the same
assessment in only slightly milder language, declaring on Wednesday,
“We have always said that voting matters and polls do not.”

Jean-Pierre’s line was a little disingenuous. The Biden team and the
Democratic National Committee pay plenty of attention to polls, and no
doubt a wave of concern swept through Democratic circles Sunday
after _The New York Times_ published poll results
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Biden trailing Trump in five of six 2024 battleground states.

But then came Tuesday, when actual votes were cast and counted and, as
Jean-Pierre said, “President Biden’s values and agenda won big
across the country last night.”

That’s true. If anything, the voters on Tuesday leaned a little to
the president’s left.

The off-year election results gave Biden a reprieve. They certainly
don’t guarantee that the president will win in 2024. But they have
set the stage for next year’s competition, and this year’s big
night for Democrats further locks in the likelihood that Biden will
appear on the 2024 ballot’s Democratic line.

Instead of speculating about whether the president might be dissuaded
or displaced—at a point when primary state surveys show Biden’s
Democratic challengers are stuck in single digits—it would seem that
the smarter strategy is to look for insights on how Biden’s
reelection bid might be strengthened.

So what messages can be gleaned, and what lessons can be learned, by
putting aside the polls and looking at actual election results?

Here are five.

THE DEFENSE OF ABORTION RIGHTS REMAINS A DEFINITIONAL ISSUE

Democratic and Republican strategists have consistently underestimated
the intensity of public support for protecting the right to choose
since the Supreme Court overturned its own _Roe v. Wade_ precedent
in 2022. But time after time over the past year, voters have shown
that the abortion debate has reframed approaches to American politics
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especially for the young people that Democrats need to turn out in
order to win elections.

Tuesday was no different. The overwhelming win for Ohio’s Issue 1
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which writes reproductive rights protections into that state’s
Constitution, was just one measure of the continued potency of this
issue. But the Democratic wins in fights for control of the two
chambers of the Virginia House of Delegates were even more instructive
for Biden and national Democrats. Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin
tried to present what anti-abortion advocates surely hoped would come
across as a “milder” anti-choice message. As part of the GOP
campaign for legislative seats, Youngkin talked about “limits”
rather than “bans,” and vowed to accept the necessity of some
exceptions to those limits. Democrats responded with clarity,
absolutely supporting reproductive rights. The result? Voters rejected
the anti-choice spin and went with Biden’s partisan allies.

The same thing happened in Kentucky, where Democratic Governor Andy
Beshear, who had vetoed anti-choice legislation, leaned into the
abortion rights issue. Beshear hammered his pro-choice message home
in TV ads
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speeches, and on the debate stage. In a reasonably red and socially
conservative state, he bet that voters were prepared to back a
candidate who supported the rights of women to make their own
decisions. He was right.

In contrast, Mississippi Democratic gubernatorial candidate Brandon
Presley, who mounted an aggressive campaign as an economic populist
running against a corrupt Republican incumbent, chose to present
himself as a “pro-life Democrat
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It was always hard to imagine that Presley’s stance would pull many
anti-abortion rights voters away from Republican incumbent Tate
Reeves, an ardent social conservative. But it is notable that, while
Presley generally improved on Democratic numbers statewide, he failed
to gain sufficient traction in suburban areas where Democrats in other
states have made significant gains with a pro-choice message.

Biden’s post-election statement on the 2023 results recognized the
power of the abortion rights agenda
[[link removed]].
“Ohioans and voters across the country rejected attempts by MAGA
Republican elected officials to impose extreme abortion bans that put
the health and lives of women in jeopardy, force women to travel
hundreds of miles for care, and threaten to criminalize doctors and
nurses for providing the health care that their patients need and that
they are trained to provide,” declared the president. If he takes
that message forward in 2024, he will appeal to voters who may not
generally approve of him but who see the defense of abortion rights as
a concern so fundamental that it trumps other issues.

LEGALIZING MARIJUANA IS A WINNING ISSUE

Ohio’s less noted referendum on Tuesday, Issue 2, which raised the
question of whether “To Commercialize, Regulate, Legalize, and Tax
the Adult Use of Cannabis,” won by a slightly wider margin than the
abortion rights amendment
[[link removed]].
Ohio is the 24th state to legalize adult marijuana use. For the first
time, according to Matthew Schweich, the executive director of the
Marijuana Policy Project, “more than half of Americans (52 percent)
live in legal cannabis states.”

The Biden administration has been slow to embrace this issue. While
the White House says that “the president has always supported the
legalization of marijuana for medical purposes,” and Biden
has repeatedly said
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“no one should be in jail just for using or possessing marijuana”
and has pardoned prior federal offenses of simple possession of
marijuana, he has consistently shied away from a full embrace of the
legalization movement. A clear-eyed view of the election results
argues that Biden should recognize that this is a winning issue for
Democrats—one on which they have an opportunity to distinguish
themselves from authoritarian Republicans. Biden also has a clear
problem with young voters, many of whom are feeling profoundly
alienated from him due to his support of Israel’s bombardment of
Gaza. He would be wise to avoid disappointing them around this issue
as well.

DEMOCRATS CAN, AND MUST, DO BETTER IN RURAL COUNTIES

Beshear won his first term in 2019 by around 5,000 votes
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He was elected Tuesday night, as a pro-choice, pro-labor Democrat, who
had vetoed anti-trans legislation and called out Republican “anger
politics,” by around 70,000 votes
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a solid 52.5-47.4 margin
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a top-tier Republican candidate, Attorney General Daniel Cameron.
Biden’s not going to win Kentucky, a state that Trump took by 26
points in the last presidential election. But he doesn’t have to do
that. What the president has to do is mirror Beshear’s advances in
rural areas, where the Kentucky Democrat’s focused outreach to
farmers and small-town voters yielded big benefits.

While Beshear ran up his numbers in urban areas, his greatest progress
came in economically hard-hit counties in eastern Kentucky’s coal
country. The governor flipped eight counties that had voted Republican
in 2019, according to Louisville Public Media
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but that was just the tip of the iceberg. Beshear improved his
percentage of the vote in 91 of Kentucky’s 120 counties, the vast
majority of which are rural or semirural. The lesson for Biden in 2024
is clear: The president is unlikely to win rural America, but he can
focus on doing better there than in 2020, when exit polls suggested he
lost the rural vote by a 57-42 margin
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That could make a big difference in a contest that will likely hinge
on a string of razor-thin outcomes in key swing states.

Biden’s 2020 finish in rural areas was an improvement on Democrat
Hillary Clinton’s numbers from 2016. But national Democrats have to
do more if they want to secure the swing states, such as Wisconsin,
Pennsylvania, and Georgia, that Biden won in 2020, and make progress
in red-trending states such as Ohio and Iowa, which Trump won in both
2016 and 2020. A good place to start is with Beshear’s approach of
showing up—a lot—in regions where, with considerable
justification, voters feel they’ve been neglected by both major
parties. Biden’s been doing some of this recently. He has to do
much, much more, and not just as a president making announcements
about infrastructure money. He has to appear, as Beshear did, as a
Democratic candidate who is actively seeking rural votes.

ALIGNING WITH LABOR, FULLY AND UNAPOLOGETICALLY, IS SMART POLITICS

Biden walked a UAW picket line in Michigan in September
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That was the right thing to do. It was also politically on point.
Surveys show that two-thirds of Americans
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favorable views of unions. The numbers are dramatically higher among
the young voters that Democrats need so much.

The lesson from the 2023 election is that Democrats who run as
committed pro-union candidates—such as Beshear, who joined a UAW
picket line in Kentucky
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was talking union all through his reelection run, and
Pennsylvania’s Sara Innamorato
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who proposed to make county government a greater ally of unions—win
in tightly contested races. According to the AFL-CIO
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“union members led the way to historic wins in races in New Jersey,
Pennsylvania, Ohio and many other states, with close to 400 of our
union member candidates winning their races, including an astounding
82% who ran in New Jersey.” There will always be corporate
Democrats, and cautious strategists, who counsel against going all in
for the labor movement. That’s bad advice. Biden’s always
identified as pro-union, and made history by walking a UAW picket line
himself. Now, he should go further, by framing a 2024 message that
says that, if he’s reelected, he will make the expansion of labor
rights central to his second-term agenda. And he should explicitly
make the case that he needs pro-union Democratic majorities in the US
House and Senate to deliver on that agenda.

VOTERS WANT TO SAVE THE PLANET

Biden is constantly being advised to dial back his commitment to the
environment. Trump attacks him all the time on this issue. Yet 2023
candidates who made environmental and climate concerns central to
their bids, such as Tucson Mayor Regina Romero, came out as big
winners Tuesday. And big-spending campaigns by the groups associated
with the fossil fuel industry fell flat.

“In Virginia, Governor Youngkin led an unprecedented spending
campaign by promising to establish a Republican trifecta. But despite
this wave of attacks including a late effort to attack electric
vehicles, climate champions held the state Senate and flipped the
House of Delegates
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ensuring a new conservation majority and a backstop against the
governor’s extreme anti-science, anti-climate agenda,” noted the
League of Conservation Voters [[link removed]] in its
post-election review of results. “In New Jersey, fossil fuel
companies for months have funded astroturf organizations to undermine
support for offshore wind. But pro–clean energy candidates under
an avalanche of anti-wind spending
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won across the state returning an expanded Democratic trifecta to
Trenton.” The LCV’s Pete Maysmith noted that “up and down the
ticket big oil spent millions trying to convince us to turn our backs
on a clean energy future but voters once again rejected their lies.”

Between now and November of 2024, there will be plenty of polls. They
are sure to alternately encourage and dishearten Biden and the
Democrats. But most of them are unlikely to offer anything in the way
of ideas for how to win next year’s election. On the other hand, the
results from the 2023 off-year voting provide a road map that the
president and his allies would be wise to follow.

_John Nichols [[link removed]] is a
national affairs correspondent for The Nation. He has written,
cowritten, or edited over a dozen books on topics ranging from
histories of American socialism and the Democratic Party to analyses
of US and global media systems. His latest, cowritten with Senator
Bernie Sanders, is the New York Times bestseller It's OK to Be
Angry About Capitalism
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_Copyright c 2023 The Nation. Reprinted with permission. May not be
reprinted without permission
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Distributed by PARS International Corp
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support  progressive journalism. Get a digital subscription
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to The Nation for just $24.95!    _

* abortion rights
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* Global warming
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