That's a wrap! In the key races of the night, both parties held serve with Democratic Gov. Beshear's win in Kentucky and Republican Gov. Reeves's win in Mississippi. Other than that race, most of the headliners went to Democrats. In Virginia, they staved off the threat of a GOP trifecta by taking control of both chambers of the state legislature. In Ohio, both liberal ballot measures succeeded with near supermajorities. And in Pennsylvania, Democrats won a vacant seat to secure a 5-2 majority on the state Supreme Court.

Thanks for joining us! We'll see you in 2024 ... but we'll all get some sleep first.

—Tia Yang, 538

The 2023 elections were unambiguously good for Democrats, and liberals. Despite fierce national political headwinds and a better competitor than his 2019 matchup, Andy Beshear expanded his vote margin and held the governorship in deep-red Kentucky. In Virginia, Democrats have won control of the state legislature, flipping the House of Delegates and holding their thin majority in the Senate. Their win is a rebuke, in part, of an anti-abortion push by Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin that saturated airwaves in the final weeks of the race. Democrats won a House special election in Rhode Island by about the same margin Biden did in 2020. And a near supermajority of Ohioans voted in favor of constitutional protections for abortion and to legalize cannabis for recreational use. That's a lot of "D" W's!

But the population of Americans who cast ballots in today's races will not be the same population that turns out next year. There is strong reason to suspect it will be more Republican-leaning than voters today. Because higher levels of education are correlated with political engagement (i.e., turnout) and, increasingly, the likelihood of voting for Democrats, off-year voters have become more reliably Democratic in recent years. But in presidential years, when more voters turn out, outcomes revert to the mean. "Low-engagement" voters, who are on average less educated and more Republican, show up. Per ABC News's exit polls, 46 percent of people who voted in Ohio today said they voted for Biden in 2020, versus 43 percent for Trump. That's an 11 point swing from 2020 just because of the types of people who cast ballots. As another example, Democrats did not perform nearly as well in Rhode Island's congressional special election today, with moderate turnout, as they have been in recent special elections, where turnout has been lower.

That's not to say that 2024 will be bad for Democrats. Maybe the demographic and political composition of voters will perfectly match the breakdown in 2020 and they'll be even more Democratic-leaning. That's a possibility! But it is not likely. The fact is that America's current educational divide makes it likely that the population of 2024 voters — ephemeral as it inherently is, spontaneously existing for a day and then disappearing into the ether — will be more favorable for Republicans than today's was. Democrats should celebrate their victories tonight, but they should not use them to dismiss other indicators of a close race next year.

—G. Elliott Morris, 538

Tonight largely went down as I — and the polls — expected. Democrats won the Kentucky governorship but fell just short in Mississippi. Virginia was close, but Democrats eked out a win. Ohio’s two liberal ballot measures passed easily. Overall, Democrats should be quite happy with these results.

But I think a lot of Democrats will be tempted to say that these results bode well for them in 2024, and I just don’t buy that. I don’t think anyone expects Biden to perform as well as Beshear nationwide next year. Ohio’s election was a ballot measure, not a Democrat-versus-Republican race. And Virginia’s legislative elections have historically not been very predictive of the following year’s election. (Remember, in 2021, Republicans had a good off-year election, but Democrats ended up having a pretty decent midterm after the Dobbs decision came down and changed the national environment.)

So my recommendation is not to read too much into what these results mean for the future, but rather just to appreciate their importance in the present. The 2023 elections will have tons of policy implications, and that’s a big enough deal on their own without tying them to the presidential race! Democrats had a good Election Day today, no matter what happens in 2024.

—Nathaniel Rakich, 538

I think it’s fair to say that we’re in uncharted territory in the world of modern-day elections. There are two possible options that account for Democrats’ success tonight: One, the races that took place were so localized and dependent on individual candidates that it’s no reflection at all of the national political environment, since voters regularly differentiate between state and federal elections. The other possibility is that voters are disentangling the presidency from their political preferences writ large, and the Democratic Party hasn’t taken a hit even though its standard-bearer, President Joe Biden, has an average approval rating below 40 percent: “Tonight feels a lot like 2022, when Democrats won in spite of Biden, not because of him. In 2024, we'll see if Biden can win in spite of Biden.”

—Leah Askarinam, 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