Bryan Woolston/AP Photo
The highest profile victory came in Kentucky, where Democrat Andy Beshear eked out a narrow victory over Trump acolyte Matt Bevin.
For a second year in a row, election night 2019 yielded major victories for Democrats at the local and state levels. With many states and localities seeing shockingly high voter turnout for an off-year election, progressive forces managed to make major inroads in Republican strongholds in the south, while signature progressive ballot measures triumphed. And for the second straight cycle, Democrats all over the country continued to amass vote share in the suburbs, where Republicans have long prevailed.
The highest profile victory came in Kentucky, where Democrat Andy Beshear eked out a narrow victory over Trump acolyte Matt Bevin. In 2016, Kentucky provided one of the most resounding margins of victory for the Trump campaign, as he carried the state by some 30 points over Hillary Clinton. Trump made a last-minute visit to the state and mounted some aggressive campaigning on Bevin’s behalf, telling a crowd on Monday that if Bevin loses, “they are going to say Trump suffered the greatest defeat in the history of the world. You can't let that happen to me!" But that entreaty was not enough to drag the incumbent Republican across the finish line.
In the run-up to the race, commentators had claimed the result would prove to be a referendum on impeachment. In fact, the Bevin campaign banked on that assumption, running ads linking Beshear to the impeachment proceedings, despite the fact that neither the state office Beshear currently holds, nor the one he was running for, could possibly be engaged with a federal inquiry.
For some, Tuesday’s results will assuage any such concern. But they’re also not a clear indication that Kentucky is now in play for Democrats hoping to knock off Mitch McConnell in the Senate in 2020, either. Bevin was a uniquely maligned public figure in Kentucky, where he advocated for harsh Medicaid work requirements, antagonized teachers, and cruised to one of the lowest favorability ratings of any governor in the country. The other statewide offices all went Republican, including Beshear’s successor as attorney general, the first African-American holder of that office in history. Still, given Trump’s personal petition, Beshear’s victory is proof that the Trump brand is not as unassailable as it might have seemed.
Elsewhere, in Virginia, Democrats managed to flip both chambers of the state legislature, establishing a majority in both the Senate and the House. That result grants Democrats full control of state government—joining Democratic governor Ralph Northam— for the first time in a quarter century. That total wipeout of the Republican Party that has long dominated the state was among the night’s most profound results. Not a single Republican currently holds office in Fairfax County; the home of Trump Attorney General William Barr, who’s spoken openly against progressive district attorneys, even elected a progressive prosecutor in Steve Descano. Even low-profile Virginia races yielded smiles: Juli Briskman, a woman who famously flipped off Trump’s motorcade in a viral photo, earned a seat on the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors.
In Philadelphia, progressive city council candidate Kendra Brooks, running as a member of the Working Families Party, was able to peel off a seat that has been held by Republicans since the 1950s. Her victory marked a major win for a progressive insurgency in the country’s most Democratic city, which will likely move the council meaningfully to the left. That possibility was opposed by leadership within the Philadelphia Democratic machine, though Elizabeth Warren endorsed Brooks as part of her push to earn the Working Families Party endorsement.
One high-ranking Philadelphia Democrat encouraged voters to back Republican candidates in the race for the city’s two at-large seats, with party bosses threatening to remove Democratic committee members who backed Brooks’s candidacy. Nonetheless, she won, representing a major triumph for progressive forces, a blow to the centrist Democratic establishment, and an existential threat to the GOP, which has functionally been relegated to third-party status in Philadelphia.
Not all early returns were positive for Democrats. In Mississippi, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jim Hood fell to Republican Tate Reeves, while underperforming 2018’s Democratic Senate candidate Mike Espy in a number of districts. Hood, who billed himself as an economic populist with socially conservative values, was unable to channel Beshear’s good fortune in Kentucky.
A high-profile effort from Amazon and other firms to flip the Seattle City Council failed, though socialist Kshama Sawant’s seat was trailing in early returns. In San Francisco, the district attorney’s race was extremely tight, with progressive Chesa Boudin holding a slight lead. With ranked-choice voting, the race probably won’t be decided for a while.
UPDATE: Applying ranked-choice voting to all votes cast gave Suzy Loftus a 240-vote lead over Chesa Boudin, but there are still late absentee votes left to count.
There were smaller victories as well. Democrats achieved a city council majority in Columbus, Indiana, hometown of Vice President Mike Pence, for the first time in 38 years. Brandon Whipple, a Democrat, defeated a Republican and became mayor of Wichita, Kansas, the home of Koch Industries. A public defender ousted a longtime Republican incumbent district attorney in Albemarle County, Virginia, home to Charlottesville. A bellwether district in the Texas legislature, which has been trending blue rapidly, appears headed to a runoff.
If Tuesday’s results were a triumph for the Democratic Party, they marked an even bigger victory for small-d democracy. In New York City, voters overwhelmingly passed ranked-choice voting, making it the largest region in the country by population to adopt the procedure. In Kentucky, Beshear campaigned on restoring voting rights to anyone in Kentucky who has completed a sentence after a nonviolent felony conviction. That could amount to some 140,000 people returned to the voting rolls with the stroke of a pen, an astonishing five percent of the state’s population.
And in Virginia, now that Democrats control the entirety of the state government, it’s likely that they’ll sign the Equal Rights Amendment, which will be brought up for a vote in early 2020. Should it pass, Virginia would represent the final, 38th state needed to ratify the amendment, passed by Congress in 1972, amending the US Constitution to include the provision that "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex." (There’s debate as to whether the timeline for passage of the amendment has expired, which would likely result in a subsequent legal battle). It’s expected the state will also vote on same-day voter registration, automatic voter registration, softening voter-ID laws, and extending voting hours, among other things.
Tuesday night also proved a triumph for the expansion of public health insurance. In Kentucky, Matt Bevin’s loss wiped out the punitive Medicaid work requirements that he had promised to enact, which would have cost an estimated 100,000 poor people their coverage, many of them children. Beshear, on the other hand, ran on expanding consumer protections under the Affordable Care Act.
In Virginia, Democrats all over the state ran on Medicaid expansion, itself a provision of the ACA that Republicans had refused to implement for years. A number of the state’s Republicans, meanwhile, pledged to institute work requirements of their own. If, on November 16, Louisiana’s Democratic governor John Bel Edwards wins reelection, his victory could entrench his state’s own fragile expansion of Medicaid, as well. None of these victories will fix the deeply flawed health care system in the United States, or bring about single payer on their own, but they will expand coverage for scores of needy Americans, and could help give momentum to help bolster social programs or drive support for Medicare expansion this time next year.
Importantly, the election results marked a dramatic reversal of Democratic fortunes under President Obama. During that eight year period, the party was repeatedly decimated at the state and local levels, ceding control of governors’ mansions and state legislatures all over the country. Those losses made it all the more difficult to enact policy proposals, as states successfully leveraged those newfound Republican majorities to thwart the Democratic agenda. Regardless of how these results are interpreted—as a rebuke of Trump, as an endorsement of impeachment, or the byproduct of shifting demographic trends—Tuesday’s results will continue to add force to the Democratic platform as the presidential election nears.
