While 2019 is an off-year for most major elections, we still have plenty of exciting races to watch on Tuesday. Democrats are hoping to flip the governorships in Kentucky and Mississippi, as well as both chambers of the Virginia state legislature. We also have several important contests in major cities and counties across the country. (Louisiana, where Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards is up for re-election, doesn’t conduct its runoffs until Nov. 16.)
What follows is an hour-by-hour guide to Tuesday's most interesting and competitive contests, organized by poll closing times. Please note that all times are Eastern. All mayoral races discussed below are for four-year terms unless otherwise noted.
We’ll be liveblogging the results at Daily Kos Elections, starting at 6 PM ET, and tweeting as well.
6 PM ET: Kentucky (Eastern Time Zone); Indianapolis, IN
• KY-Gov: Republican Gov. Matt Bevin has spent the last four years feuding with almost everyone, including the state’s teachers unions and members of his own party, and several polls have shown him deeply unpopular. However, Kentucky is one of the most conservative states in the country, and Bevin and his allies at the Republican Governors Association, as well as Donald Trump, have been trying to tie Democratic Attorney General Andy Beshear to high-profile national Democrats.
Beshear, who is the son of Kentucky’s last Democratic governor, has been focused on more local issues. He’s run ads focused on Bevin’s many insulting comments towards teachers and other Kentuckians and has also argued that Bevin is a threat to rural residents’ healthcare. There has been almost no public polling here throughout the entire race, but due to Kentucky’s deep red hue, we rate this race as Lean Republican.
• KY-SoS, KY-AG: Bluegrass Democrats are also hoping to hang onto their two remaining statewide offices. The contest to succeed termed-out Secretary of State Alison Grimes is between Democrat Heather French Henry, who is a former head of the state Department of Veterans Affairs as well as the 2000 Miss America, and Republican elections attorney Michael Adams.
The race to succeed Beshear as attorney general pits former Democratic state House Speaker Greg Stumbo, who previously served as attorney general from 2004 to 2008, against Republican Daniel Cameron. Cameron is a former general counsel for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and he’d be the first Republican to hold this office since World War II, as well as the state’s first black attorney general.
• Indianapolis, IN Mayor: Joe Hogsett regained this office for the Democrats in 2015 after eight years of Republican control, and he faces a challenge GOP state Sen. Jim Merritt. The race for what has become a reliably blue city doesn’t look very competitive, though. Hogsett has decisively outraised Merritt, and a late October poll from the GOP firm Mason Strategies for Indy Politics gave the incumbent a 57-23 lead.
7 PM ET: Kentucky (rest of the state); Virginia; Manchester, NH
• VA Legislature: Republicans enter Tuesday holding just a 21-19 majority in the state Senate and an equally thin 51-49 edge in the state House, and Democrats are looking to take control of both for the first time in a quarter century. The entire legislature is up on Tuesday and there are plenty of competitive seats in both houses, so we’ve put together this guide to help you keep track of the battlefield.
The Senate, where members are elected to four-year terms, looks more likely to flip. Republicans aren’t seriously targeting any Democratic-held seats, and if Team Blue picks up just one seat, Democratic Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax would be able to break a tie for his party—at least in theory.
However, Democrats wouldn't be comfortable with a 20-20 deadlock. While the Senate won't be up again until 2023, the lieutenant governor's office is on the ballot in 2021, so a GOP win then would flip a tied chamber back to them. Democrats also don’t want to stake their majority on Fairfax, whom two women have accused of sexually assaulting them, or the notorious Joe Morrissey, who says he’ll caucus with the Democrats but has become an independent twice in the last five years.
Meanwhile, the elections for the House will be held under a new court-ordered map that will be used in place of the previous GOP gerrymander, which federal judges partly struck down for discriminating against black voters. The new lines give Democrats a considerably better prospect in a number of districts, but unlike in the Senate, Team Red does have some pickup opportunities, particularly after Democrats won an unexpected 15-seat landslide two years ago. The House will be next up again in 2021, along with the governorship.
• Prince William County, VA Supervisor Chair: Confederacy fanboy and frequent statewide candidate Corey Stewart is retiring as chair of the Prince William County Board of Supervisors, and the GOP has nominated another far-right candidate in their bid to keep control of Virginia's second-largest jurisdiction. Accountant John Gray pulled off a surprising victory in May’s party-run firehouse primary, and he's loudly embraced Donald Trump in a Northern Virginia county that backed Hillary Clinton 58-37.
However, even Gray seems to have realized that voters wouldn't respond well to his Trump-like tweets, so he paid a company $30 to scrub his account of thousands of posts. Unfortunately for Gray, though, Democrat Ann Wheeler's campaign quickly found and released the racist and misogynist tweets that Gray had tried to purge.
• Manchester, NH Mayor: Joyce Craig scored a key win for Democrats in 2017 when she was elected mayor of this swing state’s largest city, breaking a 12-year Republican streak, and she’s the heavy favorite to win a second two-year term. Craig outpolled former GOP state Rep. Victoria Sullivan by a wide 57-39 margin in the August nonpartisan primary, so it would be a surprise if she has trouble in their rematch on Tuesday. Craig has already been mentioned as a possible candidate for higher office, and a wide win over Sullivan would only increase her stature.
8 PM ET: Mississippi; New Jersey; Texas; Wichita, KS; Bucks County, PA
• MS-Gov: GOP Gov. Phil Bryant is termed-out, and Democrats are hoping to win their first gubernatorial contest in Mississippi in 20 years. Team Blue’s nominee is four-term Attorney General Jim Hood, the only Democrat who has won a statewide race in over a decade, while the GOP is fielding Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves.
Mississippi is another very red state, but Democrats hope that Hood’s popularity will give him an opening against Reeves. The lieutenant governor has also made his share of enemies (Reeves’ intra-party detractors have liberally used the word “arrogant” to describe him), and while he won the August primary runoff 56-44, his defeated opponent, Bill Waller Jr. refused to endorse him.
There have been very few polls here, but those we’ve seen show that it’s possible Hood could win more votes than Reeves. However, Mississippi's 1890 state constitution contains a Jim Crow-era provision that requires gubernatorial candidates to win both a majority of the statewide vote and a majority of the 122 districts that make up the state House; if someone fails to hit both of these benchmarks, the Republican-controlled state House picks the new governor from the top two finishers.
That creates a double-barreled problem for Democrats. Since Republicans gerrymandered the House map in the first place, there’s little chance that Hood can win a majority of districts, barring an unlikely landslide. But on top of that, if the race gets thrown to the House, there's little question that GOP lawmakers would pick their own party’s nominee no matter which candidate actually won the most votes. Several black voters are currently suing to overturn this law and a federal judge indicated he would step in to bar its enforcement after Election Day if it were to come into play. Because of the serious obstacles Hood faces, we rate this race as Likely Republican.
• MS-AG: The race to succeed Democrat Jim Hood as attorney general pits Democrat Jennifer Riley Collins, who is a former executive director of the Mississippi ACLU, against Republican state Treasurer Lynn Fitch. Either candidate would be the first woman to serve as attorney general; Collins would also be the first African American to ever hold this post while Fitch would be the first Republican.
Again, though, the same Jim Crow-era law that makes Hood’s path to the governorship difficult also applies to every other statewide race, so even if Collins wins the most votes, the state House could wind up picking Fitch over her.
• MS Legislature: The GOP heads into Tuesday with a 75-45 majority in the state House (another two seats are held by independents), and thanks to both the state’s conservative lean and its Republican gerrymander, Team Red isn’t in any danger of losing power. The GOP shouldn’t have any trouble defending their 33-19 edge in the state Senate, either. Both state representatives and senators serve four-year terms.
• NJ Legislature: The entire state House is up for another two-year term on Tuesday, but Democrats aren’t worried about losing their 54-26 majority. The state Senate, which Democrats also hold, will not be up again until 2021, though there’s one special election for a Democratic-held seat in a district Trump won (the 1st).
• Wichita, KS Mayor: Republican incumbent Jeff Longwell flipped the mayor’s office in Wichita, the state’s largest city, in 2015, but Team Blue has the chance to get it back in this officially nonpartisan race. Longwell took first place in the August nonpartisan primary with 32% of the vote while Democratic state Rep. Brandon Whipple came out narrowly ahead of GOP businessman Lyndy Wells for second by a 25.9-25.2 spread. In mid-October, though, Wells announced that he’d run as a write-in candidate.
Longwell drew some bad headlines in September when The Wichita Eagle reported that he had steered a large and crucial city contract for a new water treatment plant to his political allies and friends. Wells said the next month that he hadn't planned to wage a write-in campaign until this news broke.
The race took another nasty turn a week before Election Day when Whipple filed a defamation lawsuit against a Republican operative and two unnamed defendants over a web ad that falsely accused Whipple of sexual harassment. Longwell has condemned the spot and denied any involvement.
• Bucks County, PA Commission: Republicans have spent decades in charge of the three-member Board of Commissioners in suburban Philadelphia’s populous and competitive Bucks County, but Democrats finally have the chance to take the majority on Tuesday.
Team Blue already achieved a major breakthrough in 2017 when they took four of Bucks’ five so-called “row offices,” which are the countywide offices other than commissioner; until that year, Democrats hadn’t won a single row office in over 30 years. Republicans then got some more unwelcome news earlier this year when one of their two county commissioners, Charley Martin, decided to retire after 23 years on the board.
County commission races operate under different rules in Pennsylvania than they do pretty much anywhere else. All three seats are elected countywide, and voters can select up to two candidates. However, each party can only nominate two candidates, so the board will wind up with a 2-1 split no matter what. The question is which party will get that vital second seat that they need to control the body.
The board’s Republican chair, Robert Loughery, is seeking re-election, and he’s joined by state Rep. Gene DiGirolamo, who represents a Democratic-leaning seat in the legislature. The Democratic ticket features incumbent Diane Ellis-Marseglia and Bob Harvie, who serves as chair of the Falls Township Board of Supervisors.
In 2015, the last time the commission was up, Loughery took first place with 27% while Ellis-Marseglia was close behind with 26%. Martin managed to edge out a Democratic candidate for the third and final seat by a narrow 23.8-23.5 margin, a 728-vote victory that allowed Republicans to hang on to the majority for another four years, but that long streak could come to an end on Tuesday.
• TX State House: Texas Democrats need to pick up just nine seats in the 150-member state House next year to take the majority for the first time in ages, and they have a chance to whittle that target number down by one in Tuesday’s special election by flipping the vacant 28th District in the Houston suburbs.
Mitt Romney easily carried this district 64-35 in 2012, while Ted Cruz won it by a similar 64-34 margin that year. By 2016, however, this district had moved sharply toward Democrats, as Donald Trump won by a much smaller 53-43 spread—a gap that collapsed to just 3 points in Cruz's re-election bid last year, the same as his statewide margin.
Under Texas law, all candidates from all parties compete on one ballot, and if no one takes a majority, the top two vote-getters, regardless of party, will advance to an as-yet unscheduled runoff. Educator Eliz Markowitz is the lone Democrat in the race while six Republicans are fighting it out, so there’s a chance she could win outright on Tuesday.
• Houston, TX Mayor: Democratic Mayor Sylvester Turner is seeking a second term as leader of America’s fourth-largest city, and he needs to win a majority of the vote to avoid a Dec. 14 runoff.
Turner’s main foe in this nonpartisan race appears to be attorney Tony Buzbee, who has poured at least $10 million of his own money into his campaign. Buzbee, who successfully defended then-GOP Gov. Rick Perry on corruption charges in 2014, refuses to identify himself with any party, and he's hosted fundraisers with Donald Trump as well as Hillary Clinton. However, he also donated $500,000 to Trump’s inaugural committee and has a Trumpesque habit of insulting his enemies over social media, prompting Turner to run ads connecting the two men.
Businessman Bill King, a conservative independent who lost to Turner 51-49 in 2015, is also running again, as are two Democrats, City Councilor Dwight Boykins and former City Councilor Sue Lovell. However, two polls this fall showed Buzbee far ahead of the rest of Turner’s opponents. The two surveys also show Turner falling short of a majority on Tuesday but still leading Buzbee by double digits in a hypothetical runoff.
9 PM ET: New York; Aurora, CO; Des Moines, IA
• Dutchess County, NY Executive: National Republicans are hoping to recruit Dutchess County Executive Marc Molinaro to challenge freshman Democratic Rep. Antonio Delgado in New York's 19th Congressional District, but Molinaro has more immediate worries. Molinaro is up for re-election against Democrat Joseph Ruggiero, a former executive director of the New York State Bridge Authority who lost the 2007 contest to lead this competitive Hudson Valley County by a narrow 52-48 margin.
Ruggiero has pointed to Molinaro's 2018 run against Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo and his potential 2020 congressional bid to argue that the incumbent is "tired" of his job and "hasn't kept the eye on the ball, which is county government." For his part, Molinaro has claimed that Cuomo's team is behind Ruggiero's campaign in order to punish the Republican for his gubernatorial bid. Ruggiero responded, "I can turn around and say, 'Cuomo got me to run? Well, that's not true. Maybe Trump has been calling Molinaro.'" Last year, Molinaro carried Dutchess County 52-45 while losing 60-36 statewide.
• Erie County, NY Executive: Republicans lost control of the top job in Erie County, which is home to Buffalo and some of its suburbs, in 2011 when Democrat Mark Poloncarz unseated County Executive Chris Collins. (Collins won a seat in Congress the next year but resigned at the end of September and currently faces up to 10 years in prison on charges related to insider trading.)
Poloncarz faces a challenge from County Legislator Lynne Dixon, a member of the Independence Party who is also running on the GOP line. (New York's electoral fusion law allows candidates to claim nominations from multiple parties.) Erie County backed Hillary Clinton 51-44, and Dixon is promoting herself as an "independent" voice even though she's reliably voted with her Republican colleagues on important issues and backed Donald Trump in 2016. Poloncarz has responded by tying Dixon to the disgraced Collins and described his own message as "strong fiscal leadership while also approving of progressive values."
Dixon and her allies are hoping that a law recently passed by the Democratic state legislature that allows undocumented immigrants to apply for drivers' licenses will lead to a backlash against Democrats on Tuesday. Poloncarz says he supports a lawsuit against the legislation brought by the county clerk but believes it was passed with good intentions.
• Monroe County, NY Executive: Republican incumbent Cheryl Dinolfo faces Democratic County Clerk Adam Bello in the race to lead Monroe County, which includes Rochester and some of its suburbs.
Dinolfo, who is seeking her second term, is emphasizing that she passed the county’s first property tax rate decrease in a decade and says that 20,000 local jobs were created during her administration. Bello, though, has reminded voters that the county will still collect more in property taxes than it did the previous year and argued that Dinolfo has dramatically inflated her job creation number. Bello has also charged that the incumbent has done a poor job dealing with issues at the county’s Child Protective Services division.
Democratic presidential candidates have carried Monroe County in every election since 1988, and the county supported Hillary Clinton 54-39; Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo also carried it 51-42 last year. However, Republicans have controlled the county executive’s office since 1992.
• Onondaga County, NY Executive: Democrats haven't won a single countywide office in Onondaga County, which is home to Syracuse, since the 1980s, but Team Blue could break that losing streak on Tuesday in a big way. Republican County Executive Ryan McMahon faces a challenge from businessman Tony Malavenda, a Democrat who has self-funded $800,000 for his campaign for an office his party has never won. McMahon has raised $700,000 for his re-election bid, while Malavenda has taken in $60,000 from donors.
McMahon is arguing that the county's economy is making serious gains under his leadership, and he's portrayed himself as someone who can work well across party lines. Malavenda, though, says that the GOP's long rule has prevented Syracuse from making the same type of recovery as other cities that have been hit hard by the loss of manufacturing jobs. Malavenda has also attacked what he calls the "pay-to-play, gerrymandering and cronyism" in county politics, saying, "I came out of the sewer business, and I feel like I went down a level."
Onondaga County makes up the bulk of New York’s 24th Congressional District, which is one of only three seats in the entire country that voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and a Republican congressman last year. In 2018 Democrat Dana Balter narrowly won the county 51-49 while she was losing districtwide to Republican Rep. John Katko by a 53-47 spread; Clinton carried the county 54-40.
• Suffolk County, NY Executive: Democratic incumbent Steve Bellone is seeking a third and final term as executive of Suffolk County, a large suburban county on Long Island that swung from 51-47 Obama to 51-45 Trump. Bellone's opponent is Republican John Kennedy, who won re-election as county comptroller last year in a tight 50.4-49.6 contest. Bellone entered the race with a massive financial edge over Kennedy, and he maintained a $1.6 million to $235,000 cash-on-hand lead at the end of September.
The two candidates have sparred over the state of the county economy. Kennedy has focused on the fact that ratings agencies have downgraded Suffolk County's bonds because of heavy borrowing, while Bellone has blamed the problem on the deficit he inherited when he took office nearly eight years ago. Bellone has argued that the county’s finances have improved since he took over and also says that Kennedy helped create the budget crisis when he served on the county legislature.
• New York City, NY Ballot: On Tuesday, New York City will vote on whether to adopt instant-runoff voting for all city primaries and special elections. If a majority votes in favor of Ballot Question 1, instant runoffs would come into effect for races for mayor, public advocate, comptroller, borough president, and the New York City Council starting in 2021.
The measure would not impact general elections, where it still would take just a simple plurality of the vote to win, but if New York City does adopt instant-runoff voting, it would be by far the largest jurisdiction in America to do so.
• Aurora, CO Mayor: Republican Mike Coffman, a former congressman who lost his seat last year, is seeking a comeback in the open seat race for mayor of Aurora, a city of 367,000 in the Denver area. Coffman has by far the most cash of any of the five candidates, and since there’s no runoff here, whoever earns the most votes will win.
The only Democrat in this officially nonpartisan contest is local NAACP head Omar Montgomery. Also in the hunt are Republican City Councilwoman Marsha Berzins, who filled in as temporary mayor last year when incumbent Steve Hogan became ill (Hogan died in May of last year, and another Republican took over), as well as former City Councilman Ryan Frazier, who became an independent after losing several races as a Republican. A fifth candidate, Renie Peterson, has raised very little cash.
• Des Moines, IA Mayor: Former state Sen. Jack Hatch, who was the 2014 Democratic nominee for governor of Iowa, announced just before the mid-September filing deadline that he would challenge Mayor Frank Cownie in this nonpartisan race. Cownie, a fellow Democrat, was first elected in 2003, and he's the longest-serving mayor in Des Moines history. A few other candidates are running, and if no one takes a majority on Tuesday, there would be a runoff Dec. 3.
Hatch, who works as a developer, has argued that the city needs to do a better job improving infrastructure and mental health care. He’s also attacked Des Moines' new zoning code for "fast-tracking" development projects, which will mean less input from the neighborhoods that will be impacted.
However, as Hatch himself acknowledged when he kicked off his campaign, he’s the "underdog." Cownie won his last re-election campaign in 2015 with 80% of the vote. Hatch was last on the ballot during the 2014 GOP wave when he lost to Republican Gov. Terry Branstad 59-37.
10 PM ET: Salt Lake City, UT
• Salt Lake City, UT Mayor: Mayor Jackie Biskupski is not seeking a second term, and two Democrats are competing to succeed her. In early October Biskupski endorsed state Sen. Luz Escamilla, who would be the city’s first Hispanic mayor, over City Councilwoman Erin Mendenhall. Biskupski and Mendenhall have clashed over the city’s dealings with the GOP-dominated state legislature over the Utah Inland Port Authority, a state-created agency that has attracted a great deal of controversy.
Last year, Biskupski ended negotiations with the legislature, arguing that their Inland Port legislation was "designed to incrementally force Salt Lake City to bend to the Legislature's will." Mendenhall, who was the City Council chairwoman at the time, continued to talk to legislative leaders, though, and she won some concessions for the city in the bill that ended up passing.
Biskupski was nevertheless angry about the bill’s passage, and she said of Mendenhall, "She has never stood with me." Mendenhall says she still opposes the project, and like Escamilla, says she’ll continue Biskupski’s lawsuit over the port's creation and taxing authority if elected.
Two recent polls show Mendenhall ahead of Escamilla. A Dan Jones & Associates survey for the Salt Lake Chamber gave Mendenhall a 42-37 edge, while a Y2 Analytics survey for Utah Policy had her ahead 46-33.
11 PM ET: San Francisco, CA
• San Francisco, CA District Attorney: George Gascón announced last year that he would not seek re-election as district attorney, and four candidates entered the race to succeed him. The contest took an unexpected turn in early October, though, when Gascón resigned early and moved back to Southern California to prepare a bid for Los Angeles County district attorney. San Francisco Mayor London Breed was already supporting former city prosecutor Suzy Loftus, and by appointing her to replace Gascón, she gave Loftus a few weeks of incumbency before Tuesday’s election.
Loftus faces three opponents, but her most prominent foe is public defender Chesa Boudin. Both of Boudin’s parents were members of the militant Weather Underground and went to prison when he was just 14 months old for their role as getaway drivers in the notorious Brink’s armored car robbery that ended in the deaths of two police officers and a security guard north of New York City in 1981. Boudin has said that his time visiting his parents in jail played the biggest part in forming his political views, including his support for ending cash bail.
Both Loftus and Boudin have called for overhauling the local justice system, but they have two very different bases of support. In addition to Breed, Loftus has the backing of Gov. Gavin Newsom and Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Kamala Harris, who are all former San Francisco elected officials (Harris in fact served as D.A. in the 2000s). Boudin, by contrast, has the support of a number of prominent national criminal justice reformers, including Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner.
Deputy state attorney general Leif Dautch and former San Francisco prosecutor Nancy Tung, who would be the city’s first Chinese American district attorney, are also on the ballot, but neither has attracted the type of money or attention that Loftus and Boudin have. All the candidates will compete in a ranked-choice election, though, so the second-choice preferences of the lesser-known contenders could still have an impact.
