Can the 2023 Election Results Tell Us Anything About 2024? Part 1: Kentucky, Louisiana, and Mississippi
Welcome to part 1 of our analysis on the 2023 elections and what (if anything) they can tell us about what will happen in 2024. As I was writing this article, it became clear that it was becoming too long to pack into one story. So, part 1 will look at the state-level elections that just took place in Kentucky, Louisiana, and Mississippi. Part 2 will look at New Jersey and Virginia’s 2023 state-level elections as well as the Ohio abortion measure.
Now, onto part 1:
You might have been surprised to hear that there were some notable elections being held this year, and they weren’t special elections either. Most often, odd-year elections (sometimes called “off-year elections”) are for local offices like mayor and city council, but a handful of states also have state-level elections at such times. Louisiana, Mississippi, New Jersey, and Virginia all held contests for state legislative seats, and those states plus Kentucky had contests for governor and other state executive offices.
Invariably, odd-year elections always lead to discussion about whether they can tell us anything about how the following even-year election will turn out, particularly when that even-year is a presidential election year. It’s understandable. Media pundits need something to talk about. Voters want to know about the most well-known elected government positions and who may occupy them next. Campaign operatives’ jobs depend on who wins office.
But predictions about even-year elections based on odd-year elections always need to be taken with big grains of salt. The turnout rates, and the kinds of people who show up for them, are vastly different between years. Presidential elections get the highest voter turnouts, but many of those voters don’t show up to the odd-year elections for various reasons. They might not live somewhere where one happens (I don’t have any, in fact, though the town right nearby where I live does). Or even if they could’ve voted in an odd-year, they either were not aware there was an election and/or they didn’t care about it.
That being said, that doesn’t mean there is absolutely zero value in talking about 2024 based on 2023 elections. There are just major caveats to think about, caveats which are part of the focus of today’s story.
Overview of 2023 State-Level Elections
Below is a synopsis of the state legislative and gubernatorial elections for states that had state legislative and/or gubernatorial elections in 2023 and the previous three odd-numbered years (2011, 2015, and 2019) that preceded a presidential election. We’ll call these pre-presidential election years, or PPEYs for short. These are then compared to the subsequent presidential election on the right-side of the table.
In the table are three sections:
- State House Seats by Party: This shows the number of Republicans and Democrats that occupied the state houses and senates in those states following the election. Note that in the case of state senates, not every seat was up for election, so some Republicans and Democrats may be holdovers from the prior election.
This section also shows the number of seats where only candidates from one party ran (though there could have been multiple candidates from that same party for a given seat). While this isn’t an infallible comparison point — the number of would-be votes for the opposing party will be inherently skewed because they aren’t running candidates in many races — it can give us a sense of how dominant either Republicans or Democrats may be in the state, or at least certain pockets of the state, and thus give insight into how they may fare in 2024. - Gubernatorial Results: These are vote totals and ratios for each gubernatorial general election (these exclude votes for candidates that were not the Republican or Democrat). I use ratios to more clearly demonstrate how close or wide the margin was between the winning party and the runner-up party. Note that due to the recency of the 2023 elections, the exact vote totals may be unofficial.
- Subsequent Presidential Election: This shows the vote totals and ratios for the Republican and Democratic candidates in the presidential election following directly after the odd-year election (again, excluding votes for candidates that were not Republicans or Democrats).
Numbers are color-coded based on party (red for Republican, blue for Democrat). Bolded and underlined numbers indicate the winning party in an election — and in the case of state legislatures, the party that won the majority. Note that not every state had an election for each of these offices in every PPEY.
Let’s go through each of these states one-by-one. Again, for part 1, these are Kentucky, Louisiana, and Mississippi.
Kentucky
Here’s a snapshot of just Kentucky from the table above.
Kentucky is generally thought of as a red state, and in many ways it is. The state legislature (though it doesn’t have odd-year elections) is considerably red: 80 of the 100 state house representatives and 31 of the 38 state senators are Republicans. And in presidential elections after the PPEYs, Republican candidates have run away with the state.
But the gubernatorial results tell a different story. Three of the last four Kentucky governor’s races were won by a Democrat. Andy Beshear defeated then-incumbent Matt Bevin in 2019, who won in 2015, and Attorney General Daniel Cameron in 2023. Andy’s father, Steven Beshear, was also a two-term governor for Kentucky, winning in 2007 and 2011 (although Andy has had much closer election results).
What’s with the significant discrepancy between gubernatorial results and presidential results/partisan affiliation of state legislators? For one thing, the voter registration numbers favor Republicans by only by a small margin. October 2023 data from the Kentucky State Board of Elections shows 1,603,069 Republicans and 1,527,087 Democrats, which amounts to 46.00% and 43.82%, respectively. From that same data, 71 of 120 counties show more registered Republicans than registered Democrats.
With this all in mind, there are two likely culprits you would normally scrutinize for the discrepancy in party voting. It could be one or both of these.
- There is a sizable amount of split-ticket voting going on, which refers to when voters pick one party for some offices but another party for other offices. Usually, this refers to races in the same year on the same ballot, but there may be splits in which party voters choose in races from 2023 to 2024.
- Republicans are turning out at much greater rates than Democrats are in even-year elections, when presidential and state legislative elections are occurring.
Data on split-ticket voting and turnout by party wasn’t readily available, so I’m reduced to speculation for Kentucky at the moment. But I suspect there is a little bit of both going on. It could also be that voters like Democratic gubernatorial candidates more, and dislike Republican gubernatorial candidates more, than their state legislative and presidential counterparts. Matt Bevin, the aforementioned last Republican governor of the state, was not popular when he lost his re-election bid to Andy Beshear, for example.
In any case, I would not count on Kentucky’s 2023 governor’s election signaling anything about 2024. Republican presidential candidates have run away with the state’s electoral votes since 2000, when their current winning streak in the state began. Even following Democrat Steven Beshear’s blowout victory in 2011, Barack Obama didn’t even come close to taking the state when he won re-election in 2012. Recent history suggests that Republicans are going to handily win the state in the presidential election in 2024.
Louisiana
Here’s a snapshot of just Louisiana from the table above.
Louisiana’s political system is bizarre compared to those of other states in many ways, but we’ll call attention to the one that is most relevant. It has a unique majority-vote system where every candidate in a given race is on the same primary ballot, but if any of them garner more than a majority of the vote in the primary they win the race outright. Compare this to top-two primary systems like California and Washington, where the top two vote-getters in the primary advance to the general election regardless of how many votes the first-place candidate received.
Similarly to Kentucky, there is some difference between party votes for the state legislature and for governor. Republicans comfortably hold the majority in both the state house and state senate but Democrats were able to win two recent governor’s races when John Bel Edwards won in 2015 and 2019. Republicans reclaimed that seat, however, with Attorney General Jeff Landry’s decisive win in 2023.
But what is particularly notable is the lack of competition in state legislative races. (I talk more about the lack of political competitiveness and the problems it brings in this article I wrote a couple weeks prior to this one). Both parties, but especially Republicans, ran in elections where their party was the only one to run candidates (sometimes this was just one person overall, but other times it was multiple people of the same party) and there were no independents. In 2023, 56 state house races and 22 state senate races featured only Republicans. Similarly, recent presidential elections have been decisively red.
But if you take a quick glance at voter registration numbers, this is somewhat surprising. In the 2023 primary election in October that sort of operates like a general election (remember, Louisiana is weird), there were 1,151,436 registered Democrats and 1,003,537 registered Republicans. How do Republicans win as much as they do in Louisiana, then?
The answer is turnout rates. For the October 2023 elections, 46.91% of Republicans cast votes compared to only 36.28% of Democrats. As a general rule of thumb, Republicans tend to vote at higher rates than Democrats, but even this is a rather wide margin.
Let’s compare this to the previous PPEYs and presidential elections in the chart above. Bolded PPEYs are gubernatorial elections that went to a November general election between the top two-vote getters from October. The turnout rates for Republicans (REPs) and Democrats (DEMs), with the data’s sources, are as follows:
- 2011 (PPEY): 44.06% of Republicans, 40.97% of Democrats
- 2012 (presidential): 76.43% of Republicans, 69.75% of Democrats
- 2015 (PPEY): 46.42% of Republicans, 45.00% of Democrats
- 2016 (presidential): 78.01% of Republicans, 68.05% of Democrats
- 2019 (PPEY): 58.40% of Republicans, 55.29% of Democrats
- 2020 (presidential): 80.65% of Republicans, 69.23% of Democrats
Notice how in the two cases where Democrats won the governor’s race (2015 and 2019), the turnout rates were close to what Republicans had. Meanwhile, every time that Republicans had the distinct advantage in turnout (2012, 2016, and 2020), they coasted to victory in the state in presidential elections. The 2011 election is a bit of an outlier, as even though Democrats had a somewhat close turnout rate to Republicans, Republican Bobby Jindal coasted to reelection when he won the race for governor in the primary with 65.80% of the vote.
What does that mean for 2024? It means Louisiana Democrats are in big trouble. They already had turnout problems in at least the past three presidential elections, but unlike in the most recent prior PPEYs they also had trouble getting their base out to vote in 2023. It’s very unlikely that they will turn things around in time to compete for the state’s electoral votes in next year’s presidential election.
Mississippi
Here’s a snapshot of just Mississippi from the table above.
Mississippi is a lot more straightforward than Kentucky and Louisiana, so we won’t spend too much time here. Though Governor Tate Reeves’ election victories in 2019 and 2023 were probably closer than Republicans would have liked, the state is a solid red, especially in presidential elections. That was despite large national Democratic investment in their party’s candidate, Brandon Presley, and tepid feelings from Republicans toward Reeves.
(And it turns out that Brandon Presley is a distant cousin of Elvis Presley. Why does that matter? Well, it doesn’t, but I like knowing random useless facts that make me sound more interesting than I actually am. And I totally knew this before researching this race for this article. Yep…)
The party’s majority in the state legislature in PPEYs has expanded since 2011 (though Mississippi has state legislative elections in every odd-year). In the state house, which has 122 total members, the majority went from 64 Republicans in 2011 to 79 of them in 2023. In the state senate, which has 52 total members, the majority went from 31 Republicans in 2011 to 36 of them in 2019 and 2023.
Can we take anything from Mississippi in 2023 and apply it to 2024? Not much except for Republicans capturing the state again for the presidency, but the margin will probably be much larger than Reeves’ reelection victory. Republicans in the state are probably much more enthused about Donald Trump than Reeves. Mississippi doesn’t track party affiliations of voters, so we are limited there, but recent presidential elections are likely more indicative of what will happen in 2024 than this latest PPEY.
Normally, I would have a section here that gives final thoughts about future developments related to the topic of the story, but I think that is more appropriate to leave until the end of part 2 when we can wrap everything up in a nice, pretty bow (not a red or blue one, though, so there are no unintentional indications of partisan bias). Stay tuned for part 2 where we cover New Jersey and Virginia’s 2023 state-level elections and the Ohio abortion measure results.
And, of course, Happy Thanksgiving!
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