Elections in 2022 yielded very different political outcomes across different states. Just take a look at of voting patterns in last year’s Senate contests compared to the 2020 presidential race, and you’ll see that it looked like a blue wave in some states and a red wave in others. There weren’t even regional trends, let alone national trends! For example, Democrats overperformed in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Kentucky, while Republicans overperformed in Indiana, Iowa and Wisconsin. That’s particularly striking given the relatively high degree of nationalization in American politics today.

There are a couple of explanations for those discordant results, and one obvious one was candidate quality. In places where Republicans , they lost, even while more mainstream Republican candidates were winning elsewhere on the ballot. Another likely factor is that state-level policy concerns were indeed influencing voters. For example, in places where a midterm vote served as a proxy for abortion rights — like Michigan, — Democrats tended to do better. In places where the issue appeared settled — like New York — Democrats did worse.

Tonight I’m curious if we’ll see a continuation of this trend. Beyond the issue of abortion, blue and red states are heading in different policy directions on everything from guns, to taxes, to LGBTQ issues. So will voters living in different policy worlds vote differently? Might voters in blue states react to perceived excesses in Democratic governance by swinging to the right, and vice versa? Or will national politics trump everything, leading to uniform swings? We shall see.

—Galen Druke, 538

Pennsylvania has a slew of state and local races to keep an eye on this evening, headlined by a multimillion-dollar state Supreme Court contest between Republican Carolyn Carluccio, president judge of the Montgomery County Court of Common Pleas, and Democrat Daniel McCaffery, a Superior Court judge.

The outcome here won’t change party control of the seven-member court, where Democrats have held a 4-2 majority (with one vacancy) since the death of Democratic Chief Justice Max Baer in October 2022. Rather, Democrats are looking to shore up their majority amid continued legal battles over voting access in the battleground state, and ahead of the next judicial elections in 2025, when three of their four existing seats will be up for retention.

There isn’t much polling on this race, but a September survey by the Commonwealth Foundation, a conservative think tank, showed McCaffery in the lead 42 percent to 36 percent. However, a mid-October survey by Franklin & Marshall College found that, for each candidate, over 70 percent of registered voters weren’t familiar enough to have an opinion of them. Voters, then, are more likely to be influenced in this race by partisan preference and issue-related messaging — of which there’s been plenty.

As we’ve seen repeatedly in the post-Dobbs era, Pennsylvania Democrats have made abortion central to their turnout efforts and attacks against Carluccio. But tonight’s outcome will likely have more immediate ramifications on another key issue: voting access. Pennsylvania’s Act 77, a bipartisan measure that widely expanded access to mail-in voting in 2019, has been repeatedly challenged by Republicans in the wake of Trump’s baseless claims of voting fraud in the 2020 election. The state Supreme Court deadlocked 3-3 on one such challenge right before the 2022 election and is likely to hear additional challenges heading into, and perhaps in relation to, the 2024 election.

—Tia Yang, 538

Brandon Presley is trying to pull off an upset in Mississippi, which hasn’t elected a Democratic governor since 1999. To do that, he’ll need strong support from Black voters, who are the bedrock of the Democratic Party in the South. Mississippi has the highest proportion of Black residents of any state in the nation at 38 percent, but they are underrepresented in the electorate, usually coming in at around 30 percent of voters. In 2020, Black voters made up 29 percent of the electorate according to the A.P. VoteCast. To win, Presley probably needs Black voters to make up around 35 percent of the electorate. But turnout has only approached that level in elections where Democrats have had a Black candidate at the top of the ticket, specifically Barack Obama in 2012, when Black voters were 36 percent of the electorate, and Mike Espy in 2018’s Senate special election, when Black voters were 32.5 percent of the electorate. (And this wasn’t enough to boost either candidate to victory — Presley, who is white, would also need far greater support from white voters than Obama and Espy received.)

While the Presley campaign has invested significantly in Black voter turnout and worked to court Black voters in a way that 2019 Democratic gubernatorial nominee Jim Hood did not, he’s up against some serious structural hurdles. Mississippi has one of the most restrictive felony disenfranchisement laws in the nation owing to provisions of its 1890 constitution, which was written in large part to restrict Black residents from exercising their recently obtained right to vote. A 2020 study found that one in six Black Mississippians are ineligible to vote under state law because of felony convictions. While a federal appeals court panel this summer ordered the state to stop enforcing the disenfranchisement law, that decision has been vacated pending an en banc appeal to the full 5th Circuit, so residents who would have regained their rights are back in limbo.

—Jacob Rubashkin, Inside Elections

One of the sleeper elections I’m watching tonight is the Mississippi governor’s race. In this video, I explain why Presley may be a strong enough candidate to swim against the state’s partisan tide.

—Nathaniel Rakich, 538