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

One race I'm watching in New Jersey is in the 3rd Legislative District, where Republican state Sen. Ed Durr is running for re-election two years after he pulled off the upset of the year by defeating powerful state Senate President Steve Sweeney. Durr, a former truck driver, spent barely any money that year and his win rocked the balance of political power in the state. This year, he's facing a spirited challenge from former state Assemblyman John Burzichelli. With a little more than half the expected votes counted, per the New York Times, Burzichelli leads Durr, 62 to 38 percent.

—Jacob Rubashkin, Inside Elections

ABC News projects that Beshear will win re-election as governor of Kentucky. In national elections Kentucky has been reliably Republican, and Trump won the state by nearly 26 points in 2020. But Beshear has been popular with the state's voters and way ahead in fundraising. The vote stands at 53 to 47 percent, with 83 percent of the expected vote in. Kentucky is a unique case, but this could give Democrats, worried about Biden's favorability numbers, an emotional boost ahead of the presidential campaign season.

—Monica Potts, 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