Good morning. We're covering last night's election results — as well as the Israel-Hamas war, wildfires and "The Simpsons." |
 | | Gov. Andy BeshearJon Cherry for The New York Times |
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Yesterday's elections went well for the Democratic Party. |
Gov. Andy Beshear won re-election in normally red Kentucky, 53 percent to 48 percent, by emphasizing his support for abortion rights and the economic benefits of Biden administration policies. |
In increasingly red Ohio, voters overwhelmingly passed a constitutional amendment that keeps abortion legal until roughly 23 weeks of pregnancy. The vote was 57 percent to 43 percent. Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, all seven states to have voted on abortion rights have chosen to protect or expand them. |
In Virginia, Democrats flipped the House of Delegates and kept control of the State Senate, albeit narrowly. That will likely doom Gov. Glenn Youngkin's hopes of passing a 15-week abortion ban. It may also quiet some Republicans' calls for Youngkin to run for president, given that he had trumpeted his approach to abortion as a sensible middle ground for his party. |
"Democrats, to their credit, made this their signature issue of this campaign," J. Miles Coleman, an election analyst at the University of Virginia, said of abortion. "It's still a very potent energizer." |
In New Jersey, Democrats are expected to keep their comfortable majorities in the state legislature, with Republican candidates losing even in more conservative parts of the state. |
In Pennsylvania, Democrats won a seat on the state Supreme Court, padding their majority. The court would have jurisdiction over lawsuits related to the 2024 election in a key swing state. |
It wasn't a perfect night for Democrats. In Mississippi, Brandon Presley, a state official who ran for governor on a platform of expanding Medicaid, lost to Tate Reeves, the Republican incumbent. In New York, a Republican flipped the Suffolk County executive's office for the first time in two decades. A Republican-backed candidate also flipped the mayor's office in Manchester, N.H. |
Nationwide, though, Democrats continued a strong recent electoral run that dates to last year's midterms and has continued through most special elections (which are held to fill unexpectedly vacant posts) this year. Democrats have done well despite President Biden's low approval ratings for several reasons. |
One, Donald Trump and the so-called MAGA movement are also unpopular, and candidates aligned with him have fared poorly. Two, the Supreme Court's 2022 decision overturning Roe — and subsequent Republican-passed abortion bans — have upset many voters. Three, college graduates and affluent professionals increasingly vote Democratic and also have higher turnout in off-year elections. Four, many Democratic politicians — like Beshear in Kentucky — have managed to remain more popular than Biden. |
In the rest of today's newsletter, we'll walk through other results from last night. |
- Marijuana: Ohio became the 24th state to legalize recreational marijuana. Voters approved the initiative 57 percent to 43 percent.
- Mayoral races: Cody Smith, a former mayor of Uvalde, Texas, won the office again, defeating the mother of a girl killed in last year's school shooting there. Philadelphia and Des Moines elected their first female mayors. And two Democrats — a liberal and a moderate — will compete in a runoff next month for Houston mayor.
- Affordable housing and homelessness: Voters in Seattle and Santa Fe, N.M., passed initiatives to fund affordable housing. In Spokane, Wash., voters approved a measure to let the police issue tickets to people who camp near schools, parks and playgrounds.
- Education: Liberals led school board races in suburban Philadelphia and Northern Virginia, where gender issues have been central. In Pella, Iowa, voters narrowly rejected a measure that would have given the City Council more control over the public library, which had resisted efforts to ban an L.G.B.T.Q. memoir.
- Criminal justice: In Allegheny County, Pa., Stephen Zappala, a Democrat-turned-Republican, defeated a progressive candidate in the district attorney race.
- Democracy: Kentucky's Republican secretary of state easily won re-election; he previously rejected Trump's false claims of voter fraud. And in Derby, Conn., a Republican charged with trespassing at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 lost his race for mayor.
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 | | Lessie Benningfield RandleMichael Noble Jr. for The New York Times |
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The American left's celebration of Hamas's atrocities has shown Jewish people who their friends are not, Bret Stephens writes. |
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 | | Galaxies belonging to the Perseus Cluster.European Space Agency/Euclid Consortium/NASA; image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre, G. Anselmi |
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Health: Many popular nicotine vapes look like toys. Experts worry that could entice young users. |
Lives Lived: Mortimer Downey helped revive New York City's subway, bolstered Amtrak and secured federal funds for public transit. He died at 87. |
Michigan: The Wolverines told the Big Ten yesterday that they had evidence of other teams sharing information on their own signs. |
 | | This was in 2018.Evan Agostini/Invision, via Associated Press |
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21st-century Springfield: Over its three decades on the air, "The Simpsons" has changed to meet evolving sensibilities. The show stopped making fun of gay characters, for instance, and stopped using a white actor to voice Black and Indian characters. Now, it is abandoning the long-running joke in which Homer Simpson strangles his son, Bart. "I don't do that anymore," Homer said on a recent episode. "Times have changed." |
A recent article in Vulture — titled "The Simpsons" Is Good Again — argues that such willingness to change has made the show fresh and funny for the first time in years. |
 | | Ryan Liebe for The New York Times |
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Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. — David and Ian |
 | Editor: David Leonhardt News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Lauren Jackson, Sean Kawasaki-Culligan, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch |
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