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

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