Six takeaways from Tuesday’s elections

BloombergOpinion Early Returns

Jonathan Bernstein

Get Jonathan Bernstein's newsletter every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. Democrats had a good night Tuesday in the off-year elections, picking up both chambers of the Virginia state legislature and apparently the governor seat in Kentucky, although Republican Governor Matt Bevin hasn't yet conceded. In Mississippi, Republicans held on in the gubernatorial race, but by a relatively slim margin. Six quick takeaways: It ain't about 2020. Don't try to extrapolate any insights about next year's presidential election from these results. It's not unusual for out-parties to win big in midterms and other off-year elections, only to see the president's party recover and retain the White House. To the extent that the Democrats did well, they may have been helped by Republican weakness. But that doesn't tell us anything new about how the party will perform next fall.  It was partisan polarization. Mostly. Outside of Bevin's likely loss, Republicans won every statewide contest in Kentucky and Mississippi. Meanwhile, the Democratic gains in Virginia were essentially a case of the legislature catching up with what has become a strongly Democratic state. We'll see whether the incumbent Democratic governor in Republican Louisiana can hold on later this month. But for now, what we're mostly seeing is parties winning where they're strong.  Don't be a bad governor! By all accounts, Bevin has governed as an ideologue, and not a very likable one. He feuded with teachers and tried to aggressively scale back the state's very popular Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act. Kentucky may be Republican, but a bad politician is a bad politician — and Bevin was apparently bad enough to lose where President Donald Trump won by 30 percentage points in 2016. As strong as partisan polarization has become, governor contests may be something of an exception: See the Republicans governing in very Democratic Maryland and Massachusetts, or the Democrat in the Kansas statehouse.  The real winners: Medicaid expansion and education. See above. Bevin's style aside, it's highly likely that other politicians will take policy lessons from these results. Republicans in Arizona, Oklahoma and elsewhere have seen that tangling with teachers usually doesn't work out well; they've also learned that as much as they may dislike the Affordable Care Act, it's a political nightmare to mess with. Every time an election like this happens, it makes politicians more likely to heed those lessons. Oh yes, the suburbs. Bevin was hurt in suburban Cincinnati (although see a dissenting thread). Democrats also picked up a state legislative seat in suburban St. Louis; won their first three city council seats in Carmel, an Indianapolis suburb; and did better than usual in some Memphis suburbs. That continues a trend from 2018 that should scare Republicans. That said, it's impossible to know if it will continue or if it's a Trump-era reaction that will dissipate or reverse once he's gone.  National effects? The Washington Post's Robert Costa reports that Senate Republicans were watching Kentucky closely: "not just watching the returns, but President Trump's political capital as they make decisions about how to handle impeachment and their own future." How politicians interpret elections is only sometimes scientific, but it always matters, often far more than the objective facts about those elections. Whether they think Trump is an electoral asset or poison at the ballot box will be at least as important to the outcome of impeachment and a Senate trial as actual evidence of malfeasance. I can say one thing: These political professionals are unlikely to be convinced by Trump's habitual false claims that his intervention in a race moved the polls by massive amounts.  1. Seth Masket on the electoral effects of impeachment. 2. Sean Trende on elections in the 1870s and now. 3. Jenna Jordan at the Monkey Cage on the future of Islamic State. 4. Nate Silver takes a broad look at how public-opinion polls are doing.  5. My Bloomberg Opinion colleague Noah Smith on immigration. 6. Adam Serwer on Trump and the Republicans. 7. Nate Cohn on swing voters. 8. And a Brookings team on "democratic backsliding" and how to prevent it. Get Early Returns every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. Also subscribe to Bloomberg All Access and get much, much more. You'll receive our unmatched global news coverage and two in-depth daily newsletters, the Bloomberg Open and the Bloomberg Close.

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