We're celebrating an amazing 2023 by revisiting all of the year's best elections on this week's episode of The Downballot! January kicked us off with a huge special election flip for Democrats in the Virginia Senate that set the tone for the rest of the year—and made it clear that abortion would remain the most potent issue driving voters to the ballot box. We saw that again and again, from the Wisconsin Supreme Court race to Issue 1 in Ohio to the other Issue 1 in Ohio and even to the governor's race in deep-red Kentucky. The safest bet you can make is that we'll see more of the same in 2024.
David Beard then hands out the First Annual Downballot Awards! Who will take home the prize for Most Notorious Elected Official? Best Leveraging of Raw Political Power? Funniest Fall from Grace? And the biggest honor of them all, Most Badass Campaign Announcement? Tune in to find out! Our congratulations to all the winners! And in all sincerity, a huge thank you to all of our listeners, who are the reason for this show in the first place. We are so grateful for your support.
Transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
David Beard: Hello and welcome. I'm David Beard, contributing editor for Daily Kos Elections.
David Nir: And I'm David Nir, political director of Daily Kos. “The Downballot” is a weekly podcast dedicated to the many elections that take place below the presidency, from Senate to city council. Please subscribe to The Downballot on Apple Podcasts and leave us a five-star rating and review.
Beard: Well, it's the last episode of 2023, so let's go out in style.
Nir: We will indeed. We are going to be recapping our favorite elections of the year and stick with us to the end of the episode where we will be handing out the first annual Downballot awards to the best and worst candidates of the year. It is a lot of fun. We have so much to talk about because it was an amazing year, so let's get rolling.
Well, we had just a hell of a year in 2023 as Democrats, as progressives, and as podcast hosts here on “The Downballot,” and we thought there would be no better way to send this year off than to recap some of the top highlights of this year's elections.
Beard: Yeah, I think by the end of 2022, we were thinking, man, that went pretty well. Definitely far better than I think people expected by the end of 2022, but now having gone through almost all of 2023, it's arguably gone even better.
Nir: Yeah, it's absolutely gone way, way better, especially let's not forget, Democrats are still the party that's in the White House. They're the incumbent party. They are the party in power, even though Republicans kind of sort of control the House of Representatives and yet they still keep kicking ass… Democrats do… in all of these elections up and down the ballot from coast to coast.
Beard: Yeah, I like the description “kind of sort of” control the house, because I think that's pretty spot-on for how it's actually going. But yes, historically the party in power does poorly in these off-year elections. The opposition is motivated; supporters are not. We've seen that pretty consistently, both in America and abroad in other countries as well, so the results from the past year are really surprising.
Nir: Completely stunning. And why don't we get back into it, because I'm already excited at the thought of reliving all of these highlights. And we started the year off right, just in the most perfect way.
In January of 2023, there was a critical special election for the Virginia State Senate. And I think at the end of this segment, we'll see just how critical it wound up proving. One of the more unfortunate results in 2022 was seeing Congresswoman Elaine Luria, a Democrat from the Virginia Beach area, lose her bid for reelection, but there wound up being a silver lining because the woman who beat her, Republican Jen Kiggans, was an incumbent member of the state Senate and that meant that Virginia had to have a special election for her Senate seat in Virginia, which always has these super-fast special elections.
So we didn't really have time to get all that prepared, but Daily Kos jumped in. We endorsed the Democrat, Aaron Rouse, and he won. He won an incredible race over Republican Kevin Adams 51 to 49. This was a huge flip. It expanded the Democrats’ very skinny majority in the Senate from 21-19 to 22-18. And the most important thing I think about that race was that Rouse concentrated all of his fire on the issue of abortion. It wasn't just a one-time thing; it wasn't just 2022 and we're done. It really showed the incredible staying power of that issue, and it's something we spent the entire year talking about on “The Downballot.”
Beard: Yeah, and this being the first real election of 2023, two months passed between the November 2022 elections and this first election of 2023. Obviously, occasionally there were runoffs in other situations, but largely this is your first chance to check back in with the electorate a couple of months later, after the midterm elections.
And to see this victory, I think was a positive sign for Democrats going forward that wasn't just a one-off or a strange situation that we saw in November that this electoral strength was going to continue. And of course, the additional point that we've seen and continue to see, about the strength of abortion rights as an argument in Democratic campaigns, is evident here as well as throughout the year.
Nir: Yeah, you make a really good point about checking back in with the electorate. I remember so well in the months after Barack Obama first won in 2008, that there wasn't much of a Democratic electorate to check back in with. Folks felt that the job was done and that they really didn't need to show up anymore. But those races started going poorly for Democrats pretty soon thereafter. There was that Scott Murphy special election, the “Panic at Tedisco” election in New York’s 20th. That was early in 2009.
And there were still a couple of other special elections; the Jack Murtha special election in 2010. But if you look at the overall patterns, which we have done at Daily Kos Elections, the numbers in special elections started going south for Democrats in a hurry, and it really was a sign of things to come. And hopefully, in 2023, the strength that we have seen from Democrats is also a sign of things to come next year.
Beard: Yeah, absolutely.
Nir: Fast forwarding one month to February. We had a fascinating special election in the New Hampshire state House. New Hampshire, this was a state, Beard, that I'm sure you recall, Republicans actually picked up in the 2020 elections and they gerrymandered the hell out of it. And yet Democrats in 2022 wound up making big, big gains. They won a dozen seats in the state House and came very close to tying the chamber and one race in Strafford District 8, this one is known locally as Rochester Ward 4, wound up in an exact tie, an exact tie on election night. And this happens every so often, usually in lower-profile races, but this was completely wild.
And it turns out that in New Hampshire, the way that they usually resolve ties is to have a special election do-over between the same two guys. And so there was a do-over between Democrat Chuck Grassie; not Chuck Grassley, this is Chuck Grassie. He is an incumbent in the State House. He'd served there for many years versus Republican David Walker. And this one really felt like it might be a sign of the times because a race that was literally tied turned into a 12-point Democratic win. Grassie won 56-44, and that just had to not feel very good for New Hampshire Republicans.
Beard: Yeah, the margin shift is what's surprising. I think you'd expect a tied race to obviously not come out exactly the same again, but you'd expect something like 51-49, 52-48 as a few people don't show up, or maybe a handful of people change their mind over a few months, but 56-44 is a really strong result coming off of a tie. Obviously, we've talked a lot about the degree to which Democrats may have a turnout advantage when the electorate is smaller, but I don't think that creates the entire 12-point margin here. I think there's more going on than that and then good news for Democrats.
Nir: Yeah, I have to imagine that the overall success that Democrats had in November made Democrats or Democratic-leaning voters in New Hampshire feel like, oh, whoa, something real is going on here and have a real motivation to turn out. Believing you can win is so important to actually winning. I know it sounds like the Green Lantern theory of politics, but there really is a basis for it in the political science literature. And so seeing Democrats gain 12 seats in November, all of a sudden that says to you, oh yeah, I better show up. And I think that's what happened.
Beard: Yeah, and I think we as politicos, people who follow this every day, and I'm sure a lot of our listeners, the idea that you would just tune out politics and elections seems strange to us. But for a lot of people, if they're like, oh, Republicans are in power. I don't care. This sucks. I'm tuning out. And they're just not going to care about a special election or they're not going to bother to update their registration. And so this basic motivation, this engagement matters, and we see that in campaigns and elections all the time.
Nir: April, the big kahuna. The Wisconsin Supreme Court race. Beard, we've talked about this race so much beforehand, and afterward, but I can't get enough of it.
Beard: Yeah. Over a decade of conservative control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court, massively gerrymandered maps meant that the Wisconsin legislature was definitively Republican-controlled, if not the super majorities we've seen at times. And the fact that the long fight to take back the Supreme Court finally culminated this year, and we begin to see the results of that change play out. And once Janet Protasiewicz took her seat and we began to see the results of this long fight, it's been really, really a joy.
Nir: So that election was another huge blowout. This is a swing state, Wisconsin; we know how close it is in federal elections, especially presidential elections. Joe Biden won by less than a point, and Protasiewicz beat conservative Dan Kelly, 55-44 — truly, truly amazing. And once again, she focused on abortion and also gerrymandering.
And the thing to really emphasize here is that judicial candidates, especially those on the left, whether in officially non-partisan races like this one or even partisan races where they're running with democratic labels, have tended to really shy away from speaking in a clear voice about the issues that voters care about. And it's understandable why, because judges are, in theory, not supposed to form opinions about cases they might rule on before those cases come before them.
Republicans and conservative judicial candidates really never felt that same kind of restraint. They would holler about crime and abortion and other topics without hesitancy and Protasiewicz, I think really broke the mold for progressive judicial candidates, and I think that was so important. And I think that really helped her turn out the win that she wound up getting, because voters had very strong feelings about abortion, which at the time was essentially illegal in Wisconsin at the time of that election, and also completely disgusted by Republican gerrymandering.
And Republicans have, since she's taken her seat on the court, have freaked out about the thought of her weighing in on gerrymandering cases, because she opined that gerrymandering is anti-democratic during the course of the campaign. But come on, let's not pretend like these judges don't have opinions on these issues. Voters want to know what their opinions are and Protasiewicz told them.
Beard: Yeah. The reality is that in certain areas, the judicial system is a legislative body as much as it is a judicial body at this point, and it's incumbent upon the Democratic Party to recognize that and respond effectively and that's what Protasiewicz did. I think that we're going to see this copied in other states. Definitely, my home state of North Carolina has a really important state Supreme Court race coming up in 2024.
There are also races in Ohio and in other states where I would expect judges on the progressive side to increasingly run on things like abortion rights and fair districts because that's what judges have control over. For better or worse, that's how the system has gotten set up. And it's important that we have judges who are going to respect the people's will in these areas and not let the Republican party gerrymander Wisconsin or North Carolina to their hearts’ content so that the voters no longer have a say.
Nir: Beard, you referenced something that I think really, really bears underscoring, which is the long, long fight that progressives in Wisconsin waged to take back the state Supreme Court. The last time that liberals had control of the court, prior to this year, was 2008. So we are talking about a 15-year journey with a lot of setbacks along the way. I mean, think back to the Scott Walker era, and progressives really need to keep this in mind as we wage fights, for instance, to take back the North Carolina Supreme Court — which you just mentioned, which can't happen before 2028 at the soonest. That's five years away. Hell, that's a lot shorter than 15 years, but most folks only tend to think about the next election.
And if there's one lesson that I felt I have internalized the most and that I would want our listeners to take away the most in all my time in politics, is that you have to play the long game. And I am so glad to see that it paid off in Wisconsin. And if you're ever working on another race or in another state, some kind of situation where you know that the payoff is years down the line at the soonest, remember Wisconsin and remember Justice Protasiewicz, because that just gives me a ton of strength.
Beard: Yeah, and I think if there's one thing that I've learned over the years —and the first campaign that I volunteered on seriously was in 2004 with the Young Democrats, and we did some canvassing up in Virginia from North Carolina for John Kerry — now almost 20 years later, is that politics is not a game of one election, it's not a game of one bill, one legislative session. It is something that you work on over a lifetime because, as bad as things sometimes feel, and some bad, bad things have happened over those 20 years, a lot of good things have happened over those 20 years. And a lot of that is because, collectively, we've elected Democratic politicians who have passed laws to make people's lives better. And that doesn't happen over months; it happens over years, and that's what we're going to keep doing.
Nir: Speaking of a long-term project, maybe the converse of Wisconsin is Florida. And in May, we saw Democrats finally take their first step back toward regaining their mojo when they won the race for Jacksonville mayor. This was Democrat Donna Deegan; she beat Republican Daniel Davis, 52 to 48. Importantly, this was a flip. Republicans have dominated the mayor's office in Jacksonville for decades, and Jacksonville is the largest city in the state, which is maybe something folks don't really know.
Miami gets all the attention. Obviously, these cities have large metro areas, but Jacksonville is quite a sizable city. One other thing to point out about this flip is that Ron DeSantis had performed very well in Jacksonville just six months earlier, in 2022, when he won that huge statewide blowout for reelection. And he endorsed the Republican in this race, and Republicans outspent the Democratic side, and yet we won. Now this is a long, long road that Florida Democrats are on, but I think in addition to being the first step on that road, to me, the result of that race suggested that, yeah, Florida's probably to the right of the nation as a whole, but not as far as the midterm results might've suggested.
Beard: Yeah, I think 2022 was a unique confluence of bad factors for Florida that made it that much of a blowout. Obviously, you just go back to 2018, when we lost both the governor's race and the Senate race, but we did buy minuscule margins. The Senate race was in a recount. They were extremely close, and the state obviously changes year after year, but it hasn't changed that much. It's still a state that can be competitive, but it's tough. Obviously, we've lost a lot of statewide races in Florida, but I do think there's still, they're there to be had for Democrats, and this was good evidence of it.
Nir: And as we have noted before on “The Downballot,” we're going to get another chance right in the new year, January 16, a special election in a district that Biden won by about five points. This is for the state House. We'll definitely be talking about that one more.
But yeah, I think that Democrats at least have reason to start to feel some optimism in Florida, and that's where it's got to start. So we'll scroll on ahead to June, and this is the one primary that we feel it’s very necessary to recap here on this list of greatest hits of 2023. Talking about the state Senate primary in Virginia's 13th District between Joe Morrissey, the very conservative Democratic incumbent, and Lashrecse Aird, a former state delegate who challenged him from the left, very explicitly focusing on Morrissey's very poor record on abortion.
Beard, you put this so memorably at the time. He's one of these guys… he's just a total scumbag. He had served a prison sentence. He was notoriously corrupt. He was far to the right of his party. He'd always caused problems for Democrats in the legislature. Yet he kept surviving election after election until a huge spotlight was shined on him. The Dobbs decision absolutely was central to his downfall, in addition to, of course, the great campaign that Lashrecse Aird ran, and we know she ran a great campaign because she won by a 70 to 30 margin against an incumbent. That's unheard of.
Beard: Yeah, I mean, Morrissey, there are too many scandals to account. Obviously, you mentioned a couple of them, but you could go on an entire podcast going through the scandals of Joe Morrissey. But the point was you need somebody to beat an incumbent. You can't beat something with nothing, as the saying goes.
And so Aird was a key candidate who had been a state delegate who was willing to jump in and do that campaign and risk losing to somebody like this. Obviously, he'd won plenty of races before. There was a risk here to put your political career on the line. You had just lost a race, you lose this again, that's probably the end of your political career, but you run a great race against a bad opponent, and you beat them into the ground, and it's super, super impressive, and great news for Virginia Democrats.
Nir: Absolutely. And this is also, to be clear, a safely blue district. This wasn't some conservative-leaning district where you want some Blue Dog type of Democrat. Morrissey was just a relic, an absolute dinosaur. You don't see too many Democrats like that around anymore. But we still have a job to do, and we want a pro-choice, pro-democracy party, and Aird is part of that party. And Joe Morrissey simply isn't anymore.
Beard: Yeah. And not to sound old, but if you go back to the 20th century, if you will, there were plenty of Joe Morrissey types in the Democratic Party around here and there. And I feel like we've largely sort of been pushing them out of the party, which is great, and glad to see him out of the party as well.
Nir: I don't think you have to go back that far. We still had lots of Blue Dogs in Congress, even in the first decade of this century. I think that to call it a silver lining might be a bit extreme, but one thing that happened as a result of the 2010 and then the 2014 elections is that most of those Blue Dogs lost. And while Democrats were very, very painfully in the minority, it almost certainly meant that the next Democratic majority was, instead of being based in rural areas, going to be based in suburban areas and was going to be more progressive. And that turned out to be right when Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats won the majority in 2018. That was by far the most progressive House majority that has ever existed, and that is the future we can look forward to, obviously, as long as we have majorities.
Not having to fight with those Blue Dogs — we called them Bush dogs back in the day because so many of them were on board with so much of George Bush's platform. It's a relief not to have to worry about scummy Democrats like that.
Beard: Yeah, obviously, the party has to be flexible enough to win a majority. We have members like Mary Peltola or Jared Golden who aren't down-the-line progressives; they vote with Republicans on occasion on a particular issue or two that affects their districts, or they feel like they need to for political reasons. But by and large, it's a very coherent, very cohesive group in the Democratic Party, in the House caucus, in the Senate, particularly now, obviously Manchin is on his way out. So I think that bodes well for progressive governance when Democrats have the majority going forward.
Nir: Absolutely. And Daily Kos has always been an extremely heterodox site. Our motto for decades has been more and better Democrats. Sometimes it's about better Democrats, like Aird versus Morrissey, but we've always been focused on the more Democrats, and it really takes a lot of different types. The great news, though, is that the gulf between the Jared Goldens on one end and the outspoken progressive wing on the other end is the smallest that we have ever seen.
I saw Nancy Pelosi speak in person earlier this year. It was the first time I'd ever seen her. She was a fantastic speaker, and she delivered a line that I'm sure she uses in every speech. But I just loved hearing her say, she said something to the effect of, "People always come up to me and say, 'You did such an amazing job keeping the Democrats together.' And what I tell them is, I didn't keep us together. Our values kept us together." And I was like, oh, hell yeah. I love that. And you know what? It's not bullshit either.
Beard: And one of the good things I think about being a Democrat is most people try to become an elected official. They go to Congress because they want to do things to make people's lives better. And I think that's something that brings all Democrats together. And certainly, there are plenty of Republicans on the other side who come, and they have whatever ideological needs and wants that they want their party to pass.
But there are also a lot of crazies on the Republican side who just come, who want to be famous, want to throw bombs, and are not very engaged in the legislative process. And so we've seen that break down on their side when they have a small majority. They can't pass things because a lot of people aren't there to pass things. They're there to do other things.
Nir: Speaking of the legislative process, we will skip ahead to August. We have to talk about Ohio issue one. Now, “Downballot” listeners will recall that this year, Ohio voted on two separate ballot measures that were both called Issue One, but of course, the one in August was an amendment referred to the ballot by Republican legislators in Ohio. This is what they were spending their time on that was designed to make it harder to pass future ballot measures. And most notoriously, it would've raised the threshold for a ballot measure to pass from a simple majority, 50% plus one to a 60% supermajority.
And absolutely everyone on earth knows that the reason why Republicans put that measure on the ballot was to thwart the other Issue One, which came up in November to enshrine abortion rights into the state constitution. And this wasn't just political analysts guessing at Republican motives. Republicans were so explicit about it, most of all, Frank LaRose, the Secretary of State.
Beard: And I think this is one of the most insulting to voters ballot measures that has ever been put on the ballot. I think the cynicism of being like, “Well, we are concerned that you're going to pass an abortion rights measure in November, and so we're going to put this other measure in August. You're going to be too stupid to vote on it because it is in August. Even if you do, we're going to run on these other things to make you think, oh, you should just pass this and don't think about the abortion stuff.” It's just so cynical and insulting, and I'm so glad that it got blown out because it needs to remind the Republican Party that you can't just take fucking voters for granted all the time.
Nir: Well, it was a huge blowout. The no side got 57% of the vote to just 43% for the yes side, but I don't think Republicans learned a single damn lesson.
Beard: No, they never do. You always are like, maybe now Republicans will moderate or change their tune or something, and they never do.
Nir: I mean, they could just do the thing that we always advise them to do, which is pass popular legislation that has the public's support, but instead, they'd much rather pass unpopular legislation to try to prevent us from passing popular legislation. Go figure. And it turned out that Issue One 1.0 was an almost perfect preview of Issue One 2.0 because in November, Ohio voters voted to add the right to an abortion and other reproductive rights to the state constitution by the exact same 57-43 margin.
And man, Republicans were just so profoundly upset. I mean, forget about learning the right lessons. They started saying how they would put abortion on the ballot again. There were some absolute lunatics who said they wanted to strip the ability of the courts to even rule on Issue One. I mean, they did everything except confront reality.
Beard: Yeah, no, the Republican Party in Ohio clearly believes that it should be able to do whatever it wants, and the idea that the people of Ohio could stop them from doing what they want is very much anathema to them. So they were very upset by that. But I think it's extremely clear that voters knew exactly what was what and what they had to do to make sure that abortion rights were protected.
That's why the votes were so similar in August and November; they were not fooled. 57% of Ohioans want reproductive rights to be protected if they had to go vote no in August, and yes in November, to do it, they were perfectly willing to do that. And the fact that the Ohio Republican Party refuses to accept it, I think, is bad news for them. Obviously, it's still a red-leaning state, but I certainly think that we could see continued effects of this in future elections in Ohio.
Nir: That's a really good point, and let's not forget that turnout in both of those races was really high. Republicans did this August special election specifically because they hoped there would be low turnout, and the turnout was huge, and then it was even huger in November. In an odd-numbered year, people are freaking motivated over this issue. We started this recap of talking about the Virginia election in January, and here we are, August, and then November. Abortion is still issue number one, two, and three.
Beard: And it motivates people. It persuades people. It is a very powerful issue, and it's not going away anytime soon.
Nir: We have to rewind actually for a moment, Beard. We have a whole bunch of other November highlights to hit, but we have to talk about the freaking funniest special election of the year, which also just had an awesome result. So we're back in the New Hampshire state House. This is Rockingham District 1, covering the towns of Northwood and Nottingham. This was for a very swingy Republican-held seat where the Republican resigned, creating a vacancy, and Republicans actually had a primary for this special election. But the candidate preferred by the GOP establishment lost to an absolute raging nutbar, a pastor named Jim Guzofski, who, man, I wish we could devote more time to all of the unbelievably lunatic things that he said. I know we've talked about them before on this show. They fill me with pleasure because he's just so freaking unhinged.
But most notoriously of all, in one of his many, many off-the-wall sermons, he said, "Progressives support abortion rights because they know blood sacrifices to their god Moloch." Yes, he compared abortion to human sacrifice straight out of the Bible. That's what this nutcase was all about. Democrat Hal Rafter absolutely crushed him. 56-44, and he flipped the seat. It was a super fun race. Oh, and Beard, let's also not forget the fact that New Hampshire Republicans freaked out about Daily Kos's endorsement in this race.
Beard: Oh, yeah. That was a wild turn of events.
Nir: Yeah, so I wrote this endorsement post where I said that this special election would go a long way toward nuking the GOP majority in the New Hampshire State House. I used the word nuke in the headline, and Republicans just had nothing on Hal Rafter. They had nothing to complain about, so they actually printed up a mailer featuring this post with a mushroom cloud, but also barrels of toxic nuclear waste. It really didn't make any sense at all, and I was like, "Oh man, we're not going to be the thing that loses this special election. No, hell no." It was a 12-point blowout.
Beard: Yeah, shockingly somehow this guy didn't win. I can't believe it. It must've been my blood sacrifices to Moloch have been going very well this year. I'm assuming all of our listeners have been doing so as well. That's why all the good 2023 results have been happening, so let's keep it up, everybody!
Nir: Oh yeah. I know that all of our listeners on “The Downballot” really took those instructions to heart and they were busy worshiping Moloch, which is why we had such a freaking awesome November.
Beard: Yeah, that's the only explanation, to be honest.
Nir: It really is. So of course we just talked about abortion in Ohio, but abortion played a huge role in almost every major Democratic victory. I think we’ve got to start with the Virginia legislature because we've already talked about two state Senate races there. Democrats held the state Senate and the big, big news, they flipped the state House. The state House had been 52 Republican, 48 Democrat, and now it's 51D, 49R. The Senate Democrats actually saw their caucus slip by one seat 21D, 19R. Previously, like I mentioned, it had been 22D, 18R, and that's a huge reason why Lashrecse Aird's win over Joe Morrissey was so important because imagine if we were back to a situation where Democrats have this one-seat majority.
In a 20-20 vote, the Republican Lieutenant Governor gets to break ties. So instead we have this really cohesive 21-seat democratic majority that I really don't think we have to worry about. We see what happens when Republicans have majorities; hello Mike Johnson! But Democrats don't really seem to suffer the same problem, and also this was just a huge repudiation of everything that Republican governor Glenn Youngkin stood for in his campaign.
Beard: Yeah. I'll also note that of course, Aaron Rouse's victory in January was also a very important race. It turned out he won reelection in November and in some ways was the 21st seat. Obviously, you can measure which one is the 21st seat, but they all matter when it's 21/19.
But I do think that the Virginia state legislative results are probably the best comparison we have to look back at in 2022 and look to 2024.
Obviously, it's a competitive state, so both parties are all in here. Because it's legislative elections, you don't have sort of the individual candidate quirks that you can have for like a gubernatorial election or a special election that on its own you might think, oh, how much did that affect things? But with all of the seats up here, you can really have a good comparison to the midterms or the presidential year, and the results were pretty good for Democrats. Obviously taking back the House, like you said, was a huge victory and really showed a complete lack of evidence of any sort of Republican rebound or progress that they could have made since 2022. Despite obviously as we've talked about some not great polling at times, the election results continue to come in well.
Nir: Yeah, and not only that. I feel like a large portion of the Beltway media really gave a huge amount of attention to Youngkin, particularly his emphasis on schools and parental rights, and then Youngkin transitioned to wanting Republicans to support a 15-week abortion ban, which he framed as a compromise. He was supposed to be the way forward for, I don't know, moderate Republicans, or at least non-crazy Republicans — and that way forward just slammed into a brick wall.
Beard: Yeah, I mean, obviously he's supposed to be running for president right now. Had they taken back the state Senate and held the state House, it was going to be “Youngkin gets parachuted in by all these billionaires and just overruns Trump somehow.” I don't know how that whole plan was supposed to go, but that was the plan, and obviously, voters stopped that in its tracks by handing Democrats control of the legislature, and it was definitely one of the most fun elections to cover in terms of seeing Youngkin's downfall.
Nir: Oh yeah. We are not above schadenfreude. I mean, who is?
Beard: Of course.
Nir: Let's be honest, winning elections is really important, but the schadenfreude also keeps us going. Well, abortion was central to those Virginia races, not in the way Republicans wanted it to be, but the most shocking of all to me was that it played such a huge role in the Kentucky Governor's race,
Beard: Yeah, and this was something that we really have not historically seen in the South in a state as red as Kentucky. Usually, abortion is something that Democratic candidates have not wanted to talk about. So to see this become one of the central parts of Beshear's campaign was really surprising and it worked. Clearly, he won by a much larger margin than he did four years ago when he just squeaked by Matt Bevin — even though I think a lot of people thought that Daniel Cameron was a more impressive candidate than Matt Bevin, who was massively unpopular for an incumbent governor. Beshear won 53 to 47. It really wasn't all that close in the end. And to do that in Kentucky, obviously which remains one of the redder states in the country, is incredibly impressive.
Nir: Yeah. Not only that, Andy Beshear, a Democrat in Kentucky, won reelection by a larger margin than Republican Tate Reeves did in Mississippi. I think that just says it all.
Beard: Yeah. I mean, it's too bad that he's term-limited. I would love to see just like Andy Beshear stay governor of Kentucky forever, but hopefully, there's a son or a nephew, a niece who can continue the Beshear line because obviously, Andy Beshear's father was also a Democratic governor of Kentucky. The Beshear name gives a lot of weight in Kentucky as we've seen, so we need some other Beshear out there to run in a few years.
Nir: Well, it really was a hell of a year. There were a lot of other elections we could have mentioned, but we want to change gears a little bit and do something new for the first time. So Beard, please take it away.
Beard: Yes, we're going to be presenting the first annual “Downballot” awards for various categories that we've made up entirely to winners who receive nothing but the joy of us getting to talk about them for a few minutes. But we hope you'll enjoy this little trip down the highs and lows of 2023.
We're going to start right in Kentucky where we finished the previous segment, with the “Best Ad” category, and this one I think had a clear winner. It was Andy Beshear's abortion ad starring Hadley Duvall. It was, if you haven't seen it, an incredibly powerful moving piece where Duvall spoke directly to the camera about the sexual assault that she had gone through when she was young, and the fact that people in her situation or in other situations who desperately needed abortion care wouldn't be able to receive it because of Daniel Cameron's extremism.
It really was an inflection point in the race. It forced Cameron to respond saying that he would sign an exceptions bill for certain exceptions in the abortion ban. So there are a few ads that make that sort of impact and difference in such a clear way, and so I think it's the clear winner for Best Ad of the Year,
Nir: Yeah, and you really do need to watch, if you haven't, Duvall actually called out Cameron directly in the ad. She said, "This is to you, Daniel Cameron." It was absolutely devastating, and Beshear thanked her on election night in his victory speech, and like we were saying, for abortion to take center stage like this in Kentucky, is absolutely unheard of and it just shows the potency of this issue in so, so many corners of the country.
Beard: Absolutely. It was really unprecedented, particularly for a state like Kentucky, like you say. Moving on, our next award goes to “Most Notorious Elected Official.” This was another blowout as you might've expected--George Santos. George Santos brought a lot of levity in all of his crimes over the past year, and we so enjoyed having a chance to talk about him. Of course, he is not in Congress anymore, sadly, but I get the feeling he's not going to go away until he actually either takes a plea deal or gets convicted and goes to prison because he keeps popping up in the news regardless.
Nir: So technically then this category should be the most notorious former elected official because, of course, he was expelled in a historic vote, the first member of Congress to be expelled in 20 years and the first Republican ever to be expelled. Woo-hoo. Amazing. I really wasn't sure it would happen. We talked about how this vote completely divided the Republican Party, but Democrats, wow, are amazing. We know right from wrong, and George Santos, wrong. Wrong for New York, wrong for America, wrong for Congress.
Beard: Yeah. Not only did he put Republicans in the news repeatedly with all of these bad things that he did, and then they got reported on, but he then disparaged a lot of the other Republicans, which put all that in the news, and then he divided the Republican caucus repeatedly throughout the year between whether or not to expel him, and then also divided the Republican caucus on the final vote that actually got him expelled. So it was really an incredible run of bad news for Republicans from George Santos. So a well-deserved award there.
Nir: Well, I think that sets you up perfectly for the next award that you are going to head out, Beard.
Beard: Yes, we're not going far away at all. We're going to stick with the Republican House Conference, “Funniest Fall From Grace.” I don't know if you can guess who this might be, but it's former speaker Kevin McCarthy. Has there been anybody more weirdly confident in his own abilities and then shows a complete inability to get anything done and then lose his job?
It's really incredible from the repeated votes to just get the job where he just seemed to believe that everyone would just get so tired, he could just get the job eventually, which sort of worked. Then he also apparently made a bunch of secret promises to people that he didn't keep, according to the House Freedom Caucus, followed by making deals again, going back on them, getting everybody mad at him, only to put a brief extension of government funding on the floor that should normally be relatively uncontroversial. I believe it was like 45 or 47 days.
It was a very short extension just to avoid a government shutdown, which caused the part of the caucus that hated him to revolt. He, of course, lost that vote after walking in that morning and being like, "I'm very confident that everything's going to go well." And then he's just lost. And he was like, "Well, I guess I'll leave." And now he's resigning. So what a departure, Kevin McCarthy.
Nir: You know there's a funny coda to all of this. McCarthy just said he's resigning effective December 31, and now of course that means his seat is going to be open next year. His preferred successor, Assemblyman Vince Fong, couldn't even manage to get on the ballot to run for McCarthy’s seat properly. Fong had filed for his own reelection campaign to the assembly, and the problem is in California, you can't run for two offices at once.
So when he decided a few days later that he was going to file to run for McCarthy's seat, the Secretary of State said, "Sorry, you already said you were running for the assembly." It's just really the perfect bookend to Kevin McCarthy's career that the guy that he wants to run for this safe red seat can't even do so.
Beard: Yeah, the whole thing is sort of incredible. McCarthy was always this strange sort of nothing figure where obviously he was very good at meeting people and raising money and doing that sort of politician stuff, but the idea that he cared about anything or was passionate about any topics beyond being the speaker or moving up various chains never really seemed evident. Of course, there are always politicians like that, but he seemed especially shallow and empty about the whole thing. So the fact that I guess now he is resigning, of course, he's probably going to go make a lot of money as a lobbyist or a commentator or something, so I'm sure he'll be fine, but the rest of us will move on continuing to make a difference in the world.
Now we're going to move to “Best Leveraging of Raw Political Power.” Now this one is going to go to something from very early in the year, and that was the alliance of New York progressive and labor groups who were able to come together and pressure the New York state Senate into defeating Kathy Hochul's nominee for the chief judge of New York's highest court, Hector LaSalle. LaSalle had been a very conservative judge on lower courts, and a lot of groups were very concerned about how he would rule on the highest court. And so a lot of groups came together to push back against him. This is not something that really had any precedents in New York. Judges tend to sail through pretty easily, particularly obviously when the party in power controls both the governor's office and the Senate. And so the fact that they were able to come together, make this happen, and get a different nominee that I think we're already seeing the positive results from, is just a really great showing of what you can do when you come together and fight back against something that you think is wrong.
Nir: It was a very interesting and powerful alliance. As it turned out, we have seen it pay huge dividends in a number of cases, but most recently in the redistricting ruling because the person who did become chief judge, Rowan Wilson, who had been an associate judge on the Court of Appeals, was the author of an opinion just the other week finding that New York has to redraw its congressional map, and that could have a huge impact on House elections next year.
But also there have been other cases on criminal justice matters and other topics where the previous majority on New York's highest court was shockingly reactionary. It was not appropriate at all for a blue state. And now I think it's fair to say that New York has a pretty solid progressive majority on its top court, and as a lifelong New Yorker boy, am I ever glad to see that?
Beard: Yeah. And it's something that can really be under the radar, particularly because there's not a clear partisan divide about these judges' ideological leanings so that's something that you really have to be in the nitty-gritty for to understand what's going on there.
Nir: Well, we're going to stay on the topic of courts for our next award.
Beard: Yes. And these two awards that we're about to do, I really think are going to become annual key awards in this little award show we've got developed starting off with “Best Campaign,” and that's going to go to Janet Protasiewicz, of course, in the Wisconsin Supreme Court election that we talked about earlier in the episode. She really redefined how to run for the state Supreme Court.
She took on these issues that matter so much in the judiciary redistricting abortion rights, and she wasn't afraid to put that at the forefront of her campaign and not just do a bunch of namby-pamby, "I'll support justice and fairness for all," so that you can't tell the difference between the candidates who are running and it did a great job. It resulted in a blowout win; it changed the composition of the Wisconsin Supreme Court, and we're going to see those effects continue to reverberate for years to come.
Nir: And I think there is also a corollary to this award, which is that progressives spent a lot of money to help ensure that Dan Kelly would be the conservative nominee to emerge from the primary. I think given the magnitude of Protasiewicz's win, I think she would have beaten the other conservative judge who ran. But Kelly was by far the worst candidate. And so I want to point out that once again, Democrats and progressives have taken sides in a primary to help push forward the worst candidate and that worst candidate got his ass kicked.
Beard: And we've yet to see the reverse where Democrats go in to try to get somebody terrible nominated, but they go on to win an election like people consistently scaremonger about. And then of course, the other award that has to follow the best campaign award is the “Worst Campaign Award,” and there are a lot of potential contenders for this award, but we decided it had to go to Lori Lightfoot, the former mayor of Chicago. Lightfoot, of course, was the incumbent. She was the first openly lesbian Black woman to serve as mayor of a major city in the US. She had a lot of things potentially going for her, but did she make the runoff in her race for reelection? No, she did not. She placed third in her race for reelection. She got a paltry 17% of the vote. Brandon Johnson, of course, defeated Paul Vallas in that runoff, 52 to 48. But the fact that Lightfoot couldn't even make the runoff in her first reelection campaign just seals this award for her; it was really one of the worst showings you could possibly imagine.
Nir: Yeah, Lightfoot had done a lot to piss off a lot of different constituencies. I think her handling of crime as well as a lot of concerns about the police; those both were things that she had fumbled. And the good news is that Brandon Johnson, the progressive candidate in the race beat Vallas, who was really the candidate of the school voucher crowd. And I think that there was a lot of talk about how, oh wow, progressives can't even win in Chicago before this race and hey, that isn't what happened.
Beard: Now for the next award, and the one that makes me personally the most upset, it is the “Worst Betrayal of One's Own Voters” award. And that of course goes to Tricia Cotham and her decision to switch parties from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party in North Carolina handing Republicans a supermajority in the state house. They already had the supermajority in the state Senate, allowing Republicans to override Governor Cooper's veto.
So somebody who single-handedly decided that the voters who elected her to be a Democrat to stand with Governor Cooper didn't matter, and instead, because she was mad at how some Democrats were mean to her, she's going to hand over complete control of the state of North Carolina essentially to the Republican Party and regularly vote with them to override Cooper's vetoes and pass a very severe abortion ban and all of this stuff, just because she was mad at Democrats for being mean to her for missing a vote is just one of the worst things I can possibly imagine and still makes me mad to think about it. So she gets the worst betrayal of one's own voters award.
Nir: Yeah. And let's not forget about the fact that she had run as a pro-choice candidate. She even talked about having an abortion herself. So her betrayal of abortion rights just makes it extra, extra worse. And of course, to make the whole thing even worse, Republicans repaid her. They just passed brand-new gerrymandered maps. Cotham had been in a district that was solidly blue. They instead gave her a district that would've voted for Trump by a couple of points. However, this is still very, very swingy turf. It's turf that is moving in the democratic direction that Democrats are chomping at the bit to defeat her. And I think she is going to lose next year.
Beard: Oh, yes. The non-federal race I will be following most closely is absolutely this race. Of course, they redistricted her as much as they could. The issue was they had to keep her district in Mecklenburg County. They weren't allowed to go across the county line, which is why it's only Trump +2. If they had the ability to make it more Republican, they absolutely would have, but they were forced by the county regulations to keep it within Mecklenburg County so we do have a chance to beat her, and I will be very, very eager that we do so.
Nir: Well, we have one final award before we wrap up this last show of the year.
Beard: Yes. And to end it on a good note, it is the “Most Badass Campaign Announcement” award. It goes to Congressman Andy Kim for announcing for the New Jersey Senate just the day after Bob Menendez was indicted. Obviously, the Menendez indictment was a shockwave across the country, particularly in New Jersey. But if we know anything about New Jersey is that it's very, very party-focused. There's a big machine there, and people often take their time; they check in with all the different people they're supposed to check in with and try to be the approved candidate. And Kim didn't wait for any of that. He saw that Menendez was going to be a huge problem, that Democrats couldn't afford to have him on the ballot in 2024, and that there needed to be a challenger, someone strong who could win this with or without party endorsements from various counties and could go be a good Democratic candidate next year and decided if no one else would that he would do it.
And he jumped in and it's something that's very brave to do in New Jersey because you could hear very quickly afterward that a lot of the county party officials that run the ballot line system there weren't necessarily happy with how he jumped in without consulting them or going through the party apparatus. And eventually, a machine candidate did come out. That's First Lady Tammy Murphy, the wife of the governor of New Jersey, Phil Murphy. She's already on track to get a number of ballot lines in a number of counties, but Kim is already running a great race and we're excited to see how that goes next year.
Nir: Absolutely. I was so excited by the way he just jumped into that race. I think the kids these days would say that it was based. I was about to go on vacation and I said Daily Kos has got to endorse this guy. And I just scrambled like in the 24 hours before I was leaving to help get this endorsement out the door and I'm so glad that we did that. He would be an amazing senator. He has already been an amazing congressman, and it just shows you the power that you can have if you are fearless and you just jump in right away.
We've now seen multiple polls showing him with sizable leads over Murphy in the primary, and she hasn't responded with anything. So not only could New Jersey have a fantastic replacement for Bob Menendez come 2025, but Andy Kim could actually deal a pretty serious blow to machine politics in New Jersey, and that is why he deserves the Most Badass Campaign Announcement award.
Beard: Absolutely. That wraps up our first annual Downballot awards. Congratulations to all the winners, even the winners of the worst categories. That's how it goes. And commiserations to all the nominees who tried their best but didn't win this year. There's always next year.
Nir: And as we wrap up 2023, we also have to thank all of our many guests who were so generous with their time in coming on “The Downballot” and sharing their knowledge and wisdom with us and our listeners. And thanks most of all to you, our listeners. You are the reason why we record “The Downballot” every week and why we have such a blast doing so. We would love to hear from you. Thank you so much for your support all year long, and we are looking forward to an awesome 2024 with you.
Beard: That's all from us this week. “The Downballot” comes out every Thursday, everywhere you're listening to podcasts. You can reach out to us by emailing thedownballot@dailykos.com. If you haven't already, please subscribe to the Downballot on Apple Podcasts and leave us a five-star rating and review. Thanks to our editor, Trever Jones. We'll be off next week. We'll see you back here for 2024!