With all the attention on the presidential race, it's easy to lose track of key Senate and House races this cycle, not to mention important ballot measures. Don't worry — the 538 Politics podcast team is here to help with an election "road trip" (without even leaving the office!), and you're invited along for the ride.

Starting in New York, they previewed the state's competitive house races, before continuing south through Massachusetts, where psychedelics are on the ballot, and westward to Ohio, where the race between incumbent Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown and Republican challenger Bernie Moreno could decide control of the Senate. They zig-zag across the country, hitting races and referendums from Louisiana all the way to California, before finally taking the ferry to Alaska to preview the race in the state's lone congressional district. You can listen to that podcast here.

U.S. elections frequently rhyme with elections elsewhere. When Margaret Thatcher's Conservatives won the UK's 1979 parliamentary elections, it presaged Republican Ronald Reagan's sweeping victory in the U.S. a year later. In 1992, Bill Clinton steered Democrats to the center en route to a win that put an end to a period of relative Republican dominance — a win that was echoed in Canada's 1993 elections (a major political realignment that returned the Liberals to power) as well as the UK's 1997 elections (which saw Tony Blair and "New Labour" win a landslide).

So as we're looking for clues about how today's elections are likely to turn out, it is helpful to look at recent trends in other democracies. And the broad theme, as Kaleigh Rogers pointed out in July, is that voters are angry and often taking it out on incumbent governments. That's bad news for Democrats, who hold the presidency (and the Senate) right now.

On July 4th, U.K. voters sent the Conservatives packing by handing Labour a tremendous 411 out of 650 seats, a Blair-esque victory. In Canada, the governing center-left Liberals are widely expected to lose the next election. The centrist Renaissance party of Emmanuel Macron gave up the country's prime ministerial post after losing seats in that country's parliamentary elections last summer. In an era of inflation and immigration, incumbent parties are struggling at the ballot box.

To be fair, the Conservatives in the U.K. and the Liberals in Canada had each been governing for nearly a decade or more, giving voter fatigue far more time to develop than it has here. But more recently elected governments are struggling, too. Germany's 2021 elections returned a government headed by Olaf Scholz's Social Democratic Party, a party which is now commonly third in election polling. The long-dominant Liberal Democratic Party in Japan just suffered an unexpected electoral setback in late-October elections. Even the newly elected Labour government in the U.K. has had a rocky start — its lead over the Conservatives has dwindled rapidly, especially if you take into account that many right-leaning voters now back the right-wing populist party Reform UK. It's a hard time to be an incumbent.

There is, though, at least one counter-example. As voters in the Republic of Ireland get ready for an election that may be later this month, the parties in government — and especially the party that currently leads the government, Fine Gael — have been doing surprisingly well in polls. One reason for their success may give Democrats cause for cheer: Earlier this year, they replaced their former leader Leo Vradkar.

Heading inland, Las Vegas is also choosing a new mayor this year. Like San Francisco, the Las Vegas mayoral election is happening at the same time as a presidential race for the first time, following 2019 legislation that moved the elections from odd- to even-numbered years. Whoever wins, it will be the first time in 25 years that the office hasn't been held by a member of the Goodman family. Oscar and Carolyn Goodman, a husband-and-wife pair of Democrats-turned-independents, have traded the mayor's office since 1999.

The race is officially nonpartisan, though the candidates have opposing partisan backgrounds: Victoria Seaman, a city councilmember, previously served as a Republican in the state House, while former Democratic U.S. Rep. Shelley Berkley, is betting on the city's heavily-Democratic voters to carry her to victory. Berkley won more votes in the June primary, in which a third major candidate drew nearly 20% of the votes, but we haven't seen any public polling of the race since then. Berkley has positioned herself as a continuation of the Goodman regime, while Seaman has been more critical: Her campaign website cites a need to move on from the "failed policies of the past" without mentioning the Goodmans by name.

One of the biggest issues in the race has been how to deal with a lawsuit involving a defunct golf course in one of the city's wealthiest neighborhoods. A developer bought the golf course in 2015 intending to turn it into a housing development, but was blocked from doing so by the city. The developer sued, and the case has since been embroiled in a years-long legal battle that could end up costing city taxpayers over half a billion dollars. Both candidates say they want to settle the lawsuit, but disagree on how to do so.

As I wrote last week, voters in 10 states will decide on abortion-related measures, the biggest push for restoring reproductive rights at the ballot box since Roe v. Wade was overturned in the summer of 2022. Abortion has been a winning issue for Democrats in the past two years, and there's some evidence that many voters, especially women and Democrats, are even more motivated to show support for Harris because of the issue than they were for Biden.

Most of the state initiatives on the ballot today would restore the protections for abortion access that were in place under Roe, but some abortion-rights advocates think that they should go further. (Nebraska has two measures on the ballot, one of which would ban abortions after the first trimester.) Before it was overturned, Roe protected the right to abortion until the point of fetal viability, but many women still struggled to access abortion care under its constitutional protections, especially for later pregnancies. And while Americans have traditionally been in favor of some restrictions on abortion later in a pregnancy, there's some evidence in recent polling that Americans are increasingly suspicious of government involvement in abortion at any stage of pregnancy. For example, a June 2023 survey from the nonpartisan research firm PerryUndem found that registered voters may even be more likely to support a ballot initiative without viability limits than the same measure with viability limits, due to stronger support among those in favor of protecting abortion rights.

Another survey from September by PerryUndem and the National Institute of Reproductive Health — a group advocating for legal protections for abortion, including those beyond the Roe framework — found that 66% of Americans thought the decision of whether or not someone can have an abortion in the last three months of pregnancy should be "left to the person and their doctor," compared to 75% who answered the same way when asked the same question without a specific timeline. That means that support for abortion rights later in pregnancy might not be radically different from support for it earlier in pregnancy — perhaps in part because Americans have seen the consequences of state-level bans.

Whatever happens to these state initiatives, abortion rights advocates are likely to keep pushing forward with more expansive protections. Meanwhile, even though the issue contributed to a worse-than-expected midterm election for Republicans two years ago, the party continues to nominate anti-abortion candidates, especially in very red districts and states. If voters pass ballot initiatives protecting the right to abortion in their states while also electing candidates who would support passing a federal abortion ban, the battle over abortion rights could stretch into elections to come.

— Monica Potts