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Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist and a former professor of political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio and DePauw University.
The off-year elections are coming, with Virginia’s state legislative races — all seats in both closely divided chambers are on the ballot in November — probably the highest-profile contests. There are also gubernatorial elections in Kentucky, Mississippi, and Louisiana, and in addition to Virginia, state legislature elections in Mississippi, Louisiana, and New Jersey.
Virginia is drawing the most attention because it’s the only close presidential state with regularly scheduled elections this year, the outcome is uncertain in both chambers, and because its Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin, has been mentioned as a potential 2024 presidential contender. It’s also close to the Washington political media center.
So let’s talk about widely hyped off-year elections.
First of all, they’re important. Many of the nation’s biggest policy issues are being decided at the state level. For example, the elections in Virginia this year will determine whether abortion remains legal there. Virginia is the only Southern state that hasn’t banned or restricted the procedure since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe. Decisions related to education, gun laws, taxation, infrastructure spending and so on are decided at the state level, so state policy matters a lot more to citizens than federal in many ways.
That said, off-year elections can have a broader impact, especially those that attract the attention of political professionals and national media. Political strategists and candidates look to them to see what appears to have worked and didn’t and then apply those lessons to the next round of elections.
For Virginia Republicans it’s education, or as they’ve branded it, “parent’s rights,” in the form of a variety of “anti-woke” measures. It’s what helped propel Youngkin to victory two years ago, flipping the state red. And while Republicans didn’t do well in the 2022 midterms they’ll likely move back to those issues should they do well in Virginia this November.
Meanwhile, Democrats continue to run on their support for abortion rights. They’ll do so next year regardless of the Virginia results (and a key statewide ballot measure in Ohio), but what happens there will inform their national campaign strategy.
This is all about perceptions, which may or may not be based on reality. Republicans may do well in Virginia simply because there’s an unpopular Democrat in the White House — that’s usually an important factor driving mid-term and off-year elections. Or the outcome could actually be about individual candidates and their campaigns and have nothing to do with Youngkin. But if party actors believe something is responsible, they’ll react to that, true or not.
Where the hype comes up short is in attempting to use what happens in off-year elections as a prediction about the next presidential election or as an “indicator of the national mood.” At best, all the off-year and special elections combined might add up to give us a bit of a hint about November 2024 more than current national polls alone, but interpreting them is still difficult.
There’s no reason to think that winning or losing control of the Virginia legislature is any more important for forecasting purposes than, say, whether the Republicans win the Mississippi governorship by more or less than the state’s normal GOP tilt.
And if anyone wants an indication of national mood, I’d suggest commissioning national surveys rather than leaning on a handful of non-representative elections in a handful of non-representative states. As for Youngkin, I’ve learned to never say never about Republican presidential nomination politics, but the history of those who have jumped in late is extremely discouraging.
None of this means off-year elections aren’t important. It’s just necessary to separate the hype from reality.
