Notes on the State of the 2023 Elections
Dear Readers: We wish all of you a Happy Thanksgiving; the Crystal Ball will not be publishing next week. Before we move full speed into assessing 2024, we wanted to take a quick look back at a few notable findings from last week’s elections — specifically in Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Kentucky. — The Editors Virginia result looked a lot like four years ago Vote counts in Virginia are nearly final but not yet certified. There were no late changes to the topline result that seemed likeliest the morning after the election: Democrats won their barest possible majorities in both chambers: 51-49 in the state House of Delegates and 21-19 in the state Senate. There has been a “choose your own adventure” aspect to interpreting the results, ranging from the elections being a devastating rebuke to Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R-VA) — because he invested so much political capital into winning unified control of Richmond only to come up short — to the outcome actually being a great sign for Republicans because their candidates ran well ahead of the 2020 presidential results in many places. After looking more closely at the numbers, our own assessment is that the result was… very familiar.