In Kentucky, 60 percent of the expected vote has reported in the governor's race, and Beshear leads by 5 points over Cameron, 52.5 percent to 47.5 percent. But there's more good news for Beshear: He's mostly running ahead of his 2019 numbers in the counties where most of the vote has come in. At this point, 37 counties have reported at least 90 percent of their expected vote (out of 120 in the state), and across them Beshear is running 4.7 points ahead of his 2019 margin. Now, most of those counties are small — together, they made up about 23 percent of the statewide vote four years ago. But those counties also don't include the two biggest Democratic bases of support in Jefferson and Fayette counties (Louisville and Lexington).

—Geoffrey Skelley, 538

As our colleague Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux has written, the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization Supreme Court decision last year has turned reproductive health and abortion rights into a liability for Republicans at the ballot box. After Republican-led states began restricting abortion rights in the wake of the decision, voters around the country have supported increasing abortion rights when it was directly on the ballot and helped Democrats over-perform in the 2022 midterms. Support for abortion has been rising. A win for the "yes" in Ohio tonight could mean abortion rights will stay on voters minds as we head into the 2024 election season.

—Monica Potts, 538

Democrats face test in Kentucky governor's race:

The clock has chimed for 8 p.m. Eastern, which means polls have closed in four more states voting today. In Mississippi, the main action is the state's governor race, although there are also down-ballot races for statewide and legislative office. In New Jersey, the state legislative elections are the main focus. In Pennsylvania, there's a contest for the state supreme court that could be important for how the court decides election law questions in the 2024 election (among other things). And in Rhode Island, there's the special election for the vacant 1st Congressional District left behind by former Democratic Rep. David Cicilline.

—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