Election 2023 results and analysis: Democrats excel in Kentucky, Ohio, Virginia

It is way early in vote counting in Houston’s mayoral race, but the two candidates who have been widely expected to progress to a runoff are also way ahead. If no candidate receives 50 percent of the vote, the top two compete in a Dec. 9 runoff. With 31 percent of the expected vote in, according to the New York Times, Democratic state Sen. John Whitmire is leading with 43 percent, followed by Democratic Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee with 36.5 percent. The third-place candidate lags far behind, with 7 percent of the vote. Although it’s a nonpartisan race with two Democrats in the lead, Whitmire has received support from more Republican and independent candidates, according to recent polling.

—Leah Askarinam, 538

Democrats are looking good in two key districts in the Virginia state Senate, but there's another one in Northern Virginia where Democrats were favored that could be very close. In the 30th Senate District, Democrat Danica Roem leads Republican Bill Woolf by about 4 percentage points. But the Virginia Public Access Project reports that all early votes are in, so the fact that all four remaining precincts are at least somewhat GOP-leaning could give Woolf a narrow path to overtake Roem. Woolf's campaign took a hit earlier in the campaign when The Washington Post reported that the former police detective would have been fired back in 2017 for working another job while reporting hours worked for the Fairfax County police department. Roem, meanwhile, is a member of the House of Delegates and made history as the first transgender woman ever elected to Virginia's General Assembly when she first won in 2017.

—Geoffrey Skelley, 538

Ohio is projected to vote “yes” on Issue 1, a proposed constitutional amendment that enshrines abortion rights in the state constitution. The courts had previously blocked Gov. Mike DeWine’s six-week abortion ban, and the new constitutional amendment protects the right to abortion through fetal viability, around 24 weeks of pregnancy.

—Leah Askarinam, 538

As Leah mentioned, ABC News now projects that Ohioans have voted to add protections for abortion to their state constitution. According to estimates from the New York Times, the abortion referendum in Ohio is on track for a +15 point "yes" margin. Compared to a partisan benchmark of Ohio — the 2020 election — that's a 23 point "swing" for Democrats, since they lost by 8 in 2020. Yes, I know, this is not exactly an apples-to-apples comparison, but it's not the topline I'm interested in anyway. Rather, I'm looking at the results of ABC News's exit poll, which preliminarily shows that Trump only won the people who turned this year out by 3 points back in 2020. Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest about 5 points of the Democrats' 23 point swing is due to a turnout advantage, then. The rest of it is due to residual overperformance of abortion as an issue.

The upshot here? Democrats are continuing a pattern of beating expectations in off-year elections, likely due to a concentration of highly engaged, educated voters in their coalition. We may be looking at a new era of off-year Democratic overperformance.

—G. Elliott Morris, 538