With abortion on the ballot in Ohio, Issue 2 — a statute that would allow Ohioans to possess and grow marijuana and create a new Division of Cannabis Control to regulate it — fell under the radar. However, ABC projects that Issue 2 will pass.

—Leah Askarinam, 538

There's one race in New Jersey I've been particularly interested in, because it's taking place in a district that has no right being competitive: the 30th Legislative District, which voted for Trump by 35 points in 2020 and for GOP gubernatorial nominee Jack Ciattarelli by 28 points in 2021. But Democrats landed a top recruit in Avi Schnall, who's a leader in the district's sizeable Orthodox Jewish community. Schnall, who only recently left the Republican Party, is running for one of the district's two state assembly seats. In New Jersey, each legislative district has two assemblymembers, so the top two vote-getters in the race win. In the assembly race, the AP estimates 76 percent of the expected vote has been counted, and Schnall is currently in second place with 25.3 percent. While Republican Sean Kean is in first with 38 percent, the other GOP nominee, Ned Thomson, is in third with 24.7 percent.

—Jacob Rubashkin, Inside Elections

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

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