Hell yeah! Democrats and progressives simply crushed it from coast to coast on Tuesday night, so co-hosts David Nir and David Beard are devoting this week's entire episode of "The Downballot" to reveling in all the highlights. At the very top of the list is Jacksonville, where Democrats won the mayor's race for just the second time in three decades—and gave the Florida Democratic Party a much-needed shot in the arm. Republicans also lost the mayor's office in the longtime conservative bastion of Colorado Springs for the first time since the city began holding direct elections for the job 45 years ago.
But it doesn't stop there. Democrats held a critical seat in a special election for the Pennsylvania state House to preserve their one-seat majority in the chamber. The party's left flank also had a strong showing in Pittsburgh's Allegheny County, nominating an outspoken progressive for county executive and defeating an anti-reform incumbent for district attorney. New Hampshire Democrats, meanwhile, romped in a special election for their own state House, a positive sign for their chances of taking it back in 2024—if not sooner.
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: Now, Tuesday was one of the bigger election nights of 2023, and we have got a lot to talk about, don't we?
Nir: We have so much to talk about, and it's all good news from top to bottom. Let's get moving. Beard, I don't want to jinx us or anything, but this has been feeling like an awesome election year. This is starting to remind me of 2017.
Beard: Yeah, and it's really surprising considering that the party with the presidency tends to do worse in these off-year elections, but it really hasn't been the case this year. We've been doing as well as really anybody could expect.
Nir: I think even better, and let's dive right into things. The big news on Tuesday night, the biggest news unquestionably in my mind was the Democratic victory in the race for mayor of Jacksonville. Jacksonville may not be a city that gets a ton of attention, but it's actually the biggest city in Florida. It was, until Tuesday night, the biggest city in America with a Republican mayor and Republicans had dominated the mayor's office for three decades down there. Except on Tuesday night, former TV anchor Donna Deegan defeated Daniel Davis, who is the head of the Jacksonville Chamber of Commerce, by a 52-48 margin. She's just the second Democrat in the last three decades to actually win the mayor's race down here, and it's just a huge shot in the arm for Florida Democrats. As rough as shit was in New York and California for Democrats in the 2022 midterms, Florida... Nothing felt worse than Florida.
Watching Ron DeSantis win the governor's race by 20 points, the Senate race ultimately not even really competitive, multiple House races falling, GOP gerrymander of course a huge reason for that. But really it was this swing state, Florida's been the swing state for so long all of a sudden looking super red, and obviously a lot of people were wondering, was this just some kind of blip or was it the wave of the future? And look, one race in one city doesn't give us the answer, but at the very least it says, "Yeah. Fuck yeah, Florida Democrats can still win."
Beard: Yeah, and it also points towards a new way for Florida Democrats to win. I think Jacksonville and Duval County has been a conservative bastion in history where a lot of Republican votes would come from, and so as Republicans have made gains in southeastern Florida and in Miami-Dade, this is an alternative to look to if Democrats can't get back to where they used to be quite with Miami-Dade. With the issue of Cubans often being a lot more Republican and other Hispanic voters and all that, maybe Duval County and Jacksonville can be a way to counteract that to rebalance the state closer towards a swing state. Now, of course, this doesn't mean that Jacksonville is suddenly some sort of blue bastion. Deegan won a close race, Biden won the area very nearly, but it is positive, it is progress in a way that we haven't seen out of Florida in a while, so it's certainly something to hold up positively and to celebrate.
Nir: And even though the margin was seemingly close, I think it is a particularly strong sign for Deegan because she won by four points, which was about the exact same as Joe Biden's margin in the county. One aside here is that the city of Jacksonville and Duval County are united into a single governmental unit, so you can actually look at elections here at the county level. And so this is May of an odd-numbered year. Beard, like you said, Democrats are the party in the White House. Turnout is obviously way lower than you're going to get in an even-numbered year, especially in a presidential election year, and yet Deegan still managed to perform just as well as Joe Biden, and also she got badly outspent.
Yeah, I think that all things being equal, this is a really good result, and it seems that she might have even had coattails. There was another citywide position that was also on the ballot last night, the job of property assessor, and there Democrat Joyce Morgan also narrowly won that race. And there is another detail here that we have to mention, which is that DeSantis endorsed the Republicans in both of those races and they both lost. His political operation is not looking too sharp right now, and now, yeah, this is “The Downballot;” we're not going to devolve into talking about presidential politics, but what Democrat cannot find joy in watching Ron DeSantis suffer?
Beard: Yeah, and it really seemed like DeSantis can just do whatever he wants in Florida. If you'll remember, he fired a state prosecutor who had been elected. He had fired a state prosecutor who was elected as a Democrat because he wasn't prosecuting the decisions that DeSantis thought he should prosecute, and that's been going through the legal system, but obviously that's taken years to go through and get a result, so it's really felt like DeSantis could do whatever he wants. And the idea that at least somewhere in Florida people are pushing back, people are voting for Democrats against DeSantis-endorsed candidates feels good.
Nir: I love it.
Beard: Now, Jacksonville wasn't the only major city in America with a surprising election result on Tuesday. In Colorado Springs over in Colorado, another historically conservative bastion, independent Yemi Mobolade will become the first non-Republican mayor of this long, long-time conservative city after defeating GOP city councilor Wayne Williams by a surprisingly wide margin, 57% to 43%. Williams was also formerly Secretary of State of Colorado, so really a significant name who he defeated. Mobolade will also be the first Black mayor of Colorado Springs. It's been 45 years that Colorado Springs has been electing mayors, and this is the first non-Republican to ever win.
Now, of course, Mobolade ran as an independent, he didn't run as a Democrat, but he was painted as a liberal by attacks from his GOP opponent, so this was certainly a moderate choice, if not a progressive choice for the city, and really a sign of how much the city has moved away from its conservative roots as Colorado has gotten bluer in recent years.
Nir: One other interesting thing about Mobolade is that he's also Nigerian-born, so he's an immigrant, and yeah, it's amazing to see how Colorado Springs has changed politically, how it's diversified, and also without Colorado Springs as their top stronghold statewide, that just makes it so much harder for Republicans to really compete in Colorado as a whole. We really saw that last year when Republicans just did terribly poorly up and down the ballot in statewide races and state legislative races, and this is just another gut punch. Colorado is obviously not New York-level blue yet, but it seems to be heading in a place where Republicans just are going to be writing it off for the most part.
Beard: Yeah, and an important thing about states west of the Mississippi in particular is they don't have the rural density that the eastern part of the country has because there's so many Republican votes that you gain in a state like Ohio with these dotted small towns in every single county across the state, and that's just not true out west in states like Arizona and Colorado and New Mexico. Most people don't live in those rural areas, those rural areas are all but zeroed out because so few people live there that the cities really matter, the cities and the suburbs, and if you're not holding a populated area in those states, it's really hard to win elections.
Nir: Let's circle back east to Kentucky, which had some big, big primaries on Tuesday night, and there's also going to be a Ron DeSantis angle here too, but save that one for me, Beard, please.
Beard: I will save the DeSantis hate for you, as much as I might want to have some.
Nir: All right, I'll share, I'll share.
Beard: In the GOP governor's race, which we talked about last week, Attorney General Daniel Cameron easily prevailed in his primary. We didn't have a lot of polling, so it looked like it could have been close, but it ended up not really being very close, and actually there was a bit of a surprise second-place finisher, as Agricultural Commissioner Ryan Quarles took second place, but it was a distant second. Cameron took 48%, Quarles took 22%. Quarles of course was the one trying to thread the needle between Cameron and his supposed main opponent, Kelly Craft. Craft, who spent a lot of money trying to get the GOP nomination, took just 17% and a dismal third place. And I believe this is where you, you'd like to mention that to DeSantis connection?
David Nir: Yeah, so Meatball Ron decided to endorse Craft in this race on Monday. On Monday. It's like some sort of Donald Trump-esque schtick. And I have to wonder, did he think that she was going to win? Either her campaign lied to his political operation about her chances, or they just had the worst polls of all time. What's evident though is that DeSantis was trying to suck up with Craft because the Craft family is super, super wealthy, and that was the only reason why she even seemed to possibly be competitive in this race at all. She spent millions of her own money. An absolute, absolute failure all around. I don't know, just totally inexplicable.
And one other detail, I swear this is not going to be turned into a show about presidential politics, but our Daily Kos Elections colleague Jeff Singer, had this incredible deep pull on Tuesday night. He remembered that someone else previously tried to suck up really hard to the Craft family to secure millions of dollars in support from them, and that was Jeb Bush back in 2015, and that worked out pretty poorly for him, as I seem to recall.
Anyway. Yeah, I think this does connect to a larger issue though, Beard, because we had seen reporting that particularly on Senate races, Republicans were hoping to overcome the huge fundraising advantage that Democrats have developed in recent years by recruiting wealthy self-funders. But man, if they're going to campaign like Kelly Craft, that's not going to get them jack shit.
Beard: Bad candidates with infinite money are still bad candidates. Infinite money is great, but you have to have some basic level of candidate quality or it doesn't matter. I also want to sort of flip it around and think, what did Kelly Craft actually get from DeSantis' endorsement? Clearly not particularly many votes. It doesn't seem like maybe it's that great of an endorsement, particularly if you're running against the Trump-endorsed candidate, as Cameron was Trump-endorsed. So maybe DeSantis just also doesn't have that much pull. So it's sort of bad candidate meeting bad candidate, it seems like. So maybe they're two peas in a pod.
Nir: Yeah, it's pretty perfect. And I mean, talk about DeSantis getting cucked by Donald Trump yet again. I love it. Okay. Okay, enough of that. Let's get back to the down ballot. I know you want to talk about the Secretary of State primary there too.
Beard: Yes, I do just want to briefly touch on the general election that'll be happening in November. Daniel Cameron won this pretty easily. He got 48% of the vote and now he'll look towards the race against Democratic incumbent Andy Beshear in November. Cameron, of course as I mentioned, was endorsed by Donald Trump, but is also a McConnell protege, so he's got a relatively united Republican base behind him. Beshear, of course, has pretty high favorables, especially for a Democrat in a red state, but I think this is going to be a really close competitive race. I think Cameron probably was the best candidate of the group that Republicans had. So Beshear is going to have to do a great campaign to hold onto his office in November.
Now, turning to the primary for Secretary of State, we had an incumbent here, GOP incumbent, Michael Adams, who turned back a challenge from Steve Knipper. Knipper was running almost entirely on the big lie on Trump-esque sort of claims of election fraud, but fortunately was turned back handily by the incumbent who, by Republican standards, is reasonable in that he doesn't talk about crazy conspiracy theories constantly. But Adams, the incumbent, won 64% to 26%, which I think we have to take as good news.
Nir: Let's switch gears and talk about the other big state that had all kinds of elections on Tuesday night, Pennsylvania. We talked about those races on previous episodes of “The Downballot.” The first contest that we need to talk about is House District 163. This was a blue seat in the Philadelphia suburbs in Delaware County. Democrat Heather Boyd handily defeated Republican Katie Ford by a 60 to 39 margin. That was slightly less than Biden's margin there, which was 62 to 37 in 2020. But as we had mentioned on “The Downballot” previously Pennsylvania Democrats seemed to be pretty worried about this race. They brought out their big guns. They had Governor Josh Shapiro cut an ad. They had an endorsement from Joe Biden. He doesn't usually issue endorsements in random state legislative special elections. They spent seven figures on this race.
Now, as we've mentioned many times, the Pennsylvania State House is decided by a one seat margin. Democrats have 102 seats and Republicans have 101 seats. In that sort of scenario, you are going to pull out all the stops when it comes to making sure you protect that majority. You cannot fuck that up.
At the same time, it seems reasonable to infer that Democrats saw polling that made them worry in the first place, and I can't really fault them because polling a legislative race with such a small electorate is already quite difficult. Polling a special election where you really have no idea what the electorate is going to look like, that makes it even harder. So it's pretty understandable that Democrats played it safe. This was money well spent. You do not want to wake up with regrets after a race like this, so we can put that one in the books. Democrats are definitely going to have to keep playing defense. There are going to be other special elections for Democratic seats coming up in the State House almost assuredly over the next year and a half. And then of course, the whole chamber is going to be up in 2024, as will half of the state's Senate. So it's a good sign that Democrats really did not fall too far off Joe Biden's margin and can retain their majority in the house.
Beard: Yeah. It would be great if one of those seats could open up, would be a Republican seat that we could potentially win and get a little extra padding.
Nir: Yeah, please.
David Beard: But we'll see if that happens. I do think this is one of those situations where you can't half activate the switch. You either turn the switch on or you don't.
Nir: Yeah.
Beard: And ultimately, even though she won by 21 points, you can't take the risk of not activating the switch, not doing all that you can. They brought in Shapiro, they had Biden record something, so it all worked out in the end. It was, I think ultimately you have to think money well spent even if maybe you could see it as unnecessary on one level. You don't know that ahead of time.
Nir: No, no. And I like your framing of you can't half turn on this switch. You, you're either in or you're out. And they went in and they should have.
Beard: Now another big race in Pennsylvania was of course the primary for Philadelphia mayor. The Democratic primary almost inevitably turns out the winner of the Philadelphia Mayor's race in November, and the winner of the primary was former city council member Cherelle Parker. She won a surprisingly comfortable 10 point victory with 33%. It looked like it was going to be very close and that the winner could end up in the twenties, but she managed to consolidate a third of the vote, and she comfortably beat former city controller Rebecca Rhynhart's campaign, who got 23%. Then in third place, we had progressive favorite, former city council member Helen Gym, who took 21%.
Now Parker will be the first Black woman to serve as mayor of Philadelphia, assuming that she wins in November. She had a lot of the establishment support from the Democratic Party, particularly from the Black wards in the city of Philadelphia and a lot of building trades unions. So I think what we saw from this result was really the strength of the Democratic establishment coming through in the city of Philadelphia. It wasn't a super high turnout race, and so those sort of core demographics and machines that could turn voters out really came through for Parker and led to her victory.
Nir: And one other positive thing about the outcome here is that the other two quote unquote major candidates, Alan Domb and Jeff Brown, they spent millions, millions of their own money. They were huge factors in why this was the most expensive primary for mayor in Philadelphia ever, and they did really poorly. So I'm glad to see that these schmucks who tried to buy the race just went absolutely nowhere.
Beard: Yeah, the three leading candidates are all well within sort of the Democratic establishment. Obviously Parker, I think is definitely the most moderate of the three, the one who won, Gym the most progressive, but all three of them you could imagine running as sort of broad generic Democrats. They collectively took north of 70% of the vote, which I think is good news considering some of the conservative Democrats we've seen turned out in some places.
Nir: Another big primary for both parties in fact was in the race for a vacancy on the state Supreme Court. Democrat Dan McCaffery handily won his primary. He had been endorsed by the state Democratic Party.
Meanwhile, Republican Carolyn Carluccio, who was the GOP-endorsed candidate, only narrowly defeated her opponent, Patricia McCullough. McCullough's total crazy pants. She had pitched herself as quote "the only judge in America to order the 2020 presidential election not be certified." Republicans should feel pretty anxious that she came that close to winning.
Carluccio is not exactly a mainstream jurist. At one point, she wrote, quote, "If even one Pennsylvanian has concerns about our electoral process, we must address them." That might sound ... I don't know, not crazy, but it's a very, very extreme statement. I mean, this is the right-wing trope that if people believe there's fraud, well, then we have to take steps to try to prevent that fraud that doesn't exist, but people believe it because Republicans scream about it at the top of their lungs all the time.
Here are the stakes for November. Right now, Democrats hold a four to two majority on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. This race is for a vacant, Democratic-held seat that Governor Josh Shapiro has not tried to fill with an appointment. I think the reason for that is because Republicans still control the state's Senate and probably would not approve someone that Shapiro would like to appoint.
He's decided to let the seat remain vacant and in the hopes that McCaffery will fill it in November. If Republicans managed to win, they would carve the Democratic majority down to just four to three and set themselves up to retake this court, which has been so important for so many reasons for progressives since Democrats flipped control back in 2015.
Democrats definitely are going to go all out to make sure that they restore the court to its five- two Democratic majority in November.
It remains to be seen how competitive this race is going to be. I mean, we certainly have every reason to expect that Pennsylvania will once again be a competitive swing state at the presidential level in November of 2024, but who knows if Republicans are actually going to really make a play for the seat for the Supreme Court. I kind of think they have to, but it might be a little bit half-hearted sort of in the same way they were kind of half-hearted in pursuing the special election we were just talking about for the state House. We'll see.
Beard: Yeah. They haven't had a great track record winning the Supreme Court seat recently, which is great for us in Pennsylvania.
One of the things I want to observe is that talking about what Carluccio and McCullough have said… pre-Trump era, Republicans often had this thing where they would dog-whistle sort of the more extreme parts of the party, particularly around racial issues, so that voters who were aligned with them on that would hear what they would want to hear while they had plausible deniability to the media and to moderate swing voters.
That's very much what you can see Carluccio doing with that statement about, oh, if somebody has concerns with the electoral process, we have to address them. That's a dog whistle, a very pre-Trump dog whistle of being like, you guys know what I'm saying. You know what I'm saying here, but to regular people, it'll sound reasonable.
Of course, McCullough is, of course, a classic Trump-era Republican who is like, "I don't need a dog whistle. Give me that human whistle and I'm going to blow it as loud as humanly possible." That's sort of the distinction there, so we'll have to make sure and call out that dog whistling in November.
Nir: That human whistle. I fucking love that. I also wonder if the Wisconsin Supreme Court election is going to change how state Supreme Court races look permanently, because Janet Protasiewicz had huge success by being open about her beliefs… and the way that judicial candidates and judicial nominees always kind of beat around the bush. I don't know. I understand why that's been the norm for so long, but especially in an election, I think that kind of does a disservice to voters.
There's no question that Protasiewicz being so open about her support for abortion rights was the number one factor in that race. Who knows what the Pennsylvania race will turn on, and maybe McCaffery is not as inclined as Protasiewicz was to really be that open about his views, but I think we're definitely going to see, on the progressive or Democratic side, more judicial candidates really be open about not just what they believe in, but also calling out the bullshit from their opponents.
I hope we see that. I'd love to see Democrats be really aggressive here, but it's going to be an interesting race no matter what.
Beard: Yeah. The reality is, is that Supreme Courts, both at the state level, and of course the federal level, are now policymaking bodies. In some ways they've been that for a long time, but nothing has made that more obvious than the Supreme Court decisions around abortion. As long as they're policymaking bodies, voters are going to rationally vote for the candidates who represent the policies that they support and believe in.
All of the sort of rigamarole around like, oh, I'll do what's right and what the law says, that's not how it works anymore. Voters understand that by and large, so I don't think you gain anything by being like, "Well, I can't tell you my views on these issues I'll be ruling on, but I will tell you I believe in the rule of law." That doesn't say anything. Nobody ...
Nir: Yeah. Right.
Beard: Voters don't take anything from that, but when you say, "I think gerrymandering is bad for democracy, and democracy is an important part of our legal system," that tells you important points about how you're going to be a judge. I think that's where things are inevitably leading.
Nir: I know there's a couple more races out in western Pennsylvania that we got to hit.
Beard: Yes. Over in Allegheny County, which is where Pittsburgh is located, on the other side of the state, we had a couple of important Democratic primaries for Allegheny County Executive, which was open; state Representative Sara Innamorato defeated county treasurer John Weinstein, 38% to 30%. Innamorato was definitely the much more progressive candidate in this race. Weinstein was the more moderate or even conservative candidate.
When he conceded on Tuesday night, Weinstein blamed the loss on other white men in the race. He said, quote, "There were too many white men in this race. That's the reality of it." End quote. Presumably, he was talking about Michael Lamb, the third place candidate who got 22% of the vote, but really it's an incredibly strange comment and not one that would lend itself to any future elective office, to blame the fact that there were too many white men in the primary.
I guess presumably the non-white, non-male candidate I guess managed to sneak through with 38% of the vote is what he's sort of implying, and that if only he could've been the only white man in the race he would've taken all of the white men votes. I don't even quite know what he's trying to say there, but it's not good.
Now, Innamorato will face Joe Rockey for the general election in November. The county went 59% to 39% Biden in 2020, so she's a pretty strong favorite to take that executive spot in November.
The other big race in Allegheny County on Tuesday night was the district attorney race, where 25-year incumbent Steve Zappala was defeated by Chief Public Defender Matt Dugan. Zappala had a very bad relationship over many years with criminal justice reformers. Two-thirds of the county's prison inmates are black, even though African-American only make up 12% of the population.
People have also criticized Zappala for rarely prosecuting police officers for misconduct and for a 2021 incident where the incumbent forbade his prosecutors from offering any plea deals to clients represented by a prominent black attorney who had called his office systematically racist.
This is guy is a real piece of work. Fortunately, he lost in the primary to, as I said, the chief public defender, which is great news.
The not so good news is that he's almost certainly still going to be on the ballot in November. He was written in by a number of people in the Republican primary, which didn't have a candidate, and as long as he has at least 500 write-ins, which he almost certainly will have, as there were thousands of write-ins registered, obviously they have to now go through and identify who was written in for each ballot, but assuming he gets that number he'll be able to appear as the Republican nominee on the ballot, and he's indicated that he's likely to do so.
So this race is going to get rerun for a general election in November, where Dugan will be the Democratic nominee and Zappala will be the Republican nominee, and hopefully Dugan is able to take that Democratic label to victory. But I could certainly imagine this being a close race in November, given Zappala's long history and name recognition. So it's something we're definitely going to have to keep track of as we look to November.
Nir: One last race up in the Granite State, New Hampshire, a special election for the State House in the city of Nashua. This was a safely blue district, but Democrat Marc Plamondon defeated his Republican opponent by 43 points, which is notable, because Joe Biden carried the district by 27 points. Now, caveat here, this was a very low turnout, special election in a very small district. There were only around 200 total votes cast, so we don't want to read too much into that. However, you'll recall, longtime Downballot listeners, that Democrats also won a huge, very expensive, heavily scrutinized special election in New Hampshire earlier this year, that was a do-over of a race that ended in a tie in November. That race was a tie in November, but yet Democrats won it by 12 points in the special election rematch in February. So we have this pattern of Democratic overperformance in New Hampshire, but also nationwide.
Now at Daily Kos Elections, we track all the special elections that take place in every corner of the country and compare them to the presidential margins in those districts, because those presidential numbers give us a good baseline of the kind of performance we can typically expect from Democrats in a given district. And we don't have as much data as we'd like so far, but to date, we have 18 special elections nationwide that we've cataloged, and in those races, on average, Democrats are running seven points ahead of Joe Biden in 2023. This is a big deal in New Hampshire, because there's going to be another special election coming up probably in August or September, it hasn't been scheduled yet, for a Republican held seat that is super swingy. Donald Trump won it by less than one point. This is the 1st district in Rockingham County. Locals know it by the two towns that it covers; Nottingham and Northwood. And in 2022, Democrats fell short of winning a seat in this district by just 10 votes.
So if Democrats overperform just a little bit in this special election, then something amazing is probably going to unfold. And that means we would have an exact 200 to 200 tie in the gigantic New Hampshire state House. Now, even if that comes to pass, sometime this summer, it's not clear that control of the Chamber will change hands. There were a few Democrats who actually voted for the Republican Speaker of the House back in December. It's very frustrating. We don't know who they were, because it was a secret ballot. But on any given day in the New Hampshire House, there are always absences. There are just so many members, and there have been times this year where Democrats have actually controlled the agenda, simply because more Democrats have shown up that day.
And so every seat that Democrats win, that puts them closer to being able to block the GOP agenda or advance their own agenda. And let's say they get to a 200-200 tie, there's going to be more special elections after that, I can guarantee you, and maybe Democrats take a 201 to 199 majority, at least on paper. I think something interesting would happen at that point, because are you really going to say that Republicans should have the speakership of the State House even though they have a minority? I don't know. That could cause a rethink among Democrats, maybe force a new vote. Who knows?
Bottom line is this has been good news all around. Now, we don't know if these Democratic overperformances in special elections nationwide are going to continue, but we do know that special elections, taken in aggregate, are quite predictive of how general elections are going to go. And if Democrats are running seven points ahead of Biden, through October of 2024, then I'm going to go out and predict a good election for the party as a whole in November of next year.
Beard: And to look back to last year, we've really seen this Democratic overperformance fairly consistently, since the Dobbs decision came down in the summer last year. We saw it in the special elections that took place in August and September. We saw, I think, pretty clearly a Democratic overperformance in the 2022 midterms, considering what you would expect to happen, even though they still narrowly lost the House. We've seen that overperformances continue throughout 2023, and frankly, I would expect it not to go away anytime soon. Of course, we don't know what could happen with any future election. There could be a recession or any other event that causes Democratic fortunes to go down, but I think as long as abortion continues to remain a main focus, and I think it will, then this Democratic overperformance, I would think, is more likely than not to continue and we'll have to see how that goes into obviously the elections later this year and into 2024.
Nir: Whew, that was a hell of a week. Beard, I love chatting about these elections with you, especially when we win.
Beard: Yes, much, much better than when we lose. I think we should just always win. That's what's best for me. I don't know if that works for you, but...
Nir: Oh, I'm totally on board. Great plan. Let's do it.
Beard: Great. That's all from us this week. “The Downballot” comes out every Thursday, everywhere you listen to podcasts. You can reach out to us by emailing thedownballot@daleykos.com. Now, if you haven't already, please subscribe to “The Downballot” on Apple Podcast and leave us a five star rating and review. Thanks to our producer, Walter Einenkel and editor Trevor Jones. We'll be back next week with a new episode.