The Democratic Party had a huge night Tuesday, holding on to the governor’s mansion in Kentucky and the Senate in Virginia while also managing to flip the Virginia House.
The Democrats' biggest wins, however, came in the two ballot measures in Ohio, where one measure added a right to abortion to the Ohio constitution and another measure legalized marijuana in the state. The margins on both ballot measures were not close, with both abortion and marijuana winning by double digits.
GOP FACES EXTINCTION IN PHILADELPHIA
One race in the Virginia House was particularly close, however, with Democrat Susanna Gibson narrowly leading Republican David Owens as this is published. Gibson, if you may remember, is a nurse practitioner who achieved brief national fame when videos of her performing sex with her husband were discovered on a livestreaming porn site.
Gibson claimed the videos were “an invasion of her privacy,” but the entire point of the website Gibson was using, Chaturbate, was to solicit payments from strangers to perform live sex acts on camera.
“I need, like, more tokens before I let him do that,” Gibson responds in one of the videos to a request that she and her husband perform a specific sex act. “One token, no. More. Raising money for a good cause.”
In all three states (Kentucky, Ohio, and Virginia), abortion was the leading issue in television advertisements. In Kentucky, Gov. Andy Beshear (D-KY) closed the final by spending millions on an ad attacking his opponent for wanting to ban abortion without exceptions for rape or incest. In Ohio, pro-abortion activists heavily outspent the pro-life cause. And in Virginia, virtually every television ad by all Democratic candidates attacked Republicans for wanting to ban all abortions.
In each state, Republicans tried a different response to the abortion attacks. None of them worked. Eventually, abortion has to subside as a salient issue for voters. Including the Ohio measure last night, a total of seven states have now passed statewide laws making it easier to get abortions. At least in these states, the issue has to be less important going forward.
But until abortion fades as a concern, it looks like Democrats are going to win a lot of elections on just that one issue.