 Victories notched up by Democrats in Tuesday's off-year elections show that abortion rights will continue to energize voters ahead of the 2024 presidential race, analysts told Reuters, Democrats and abortion rights advocates recorded a string of electoral victories, including in conservative Ohio and Kentucky. In Ohio, voters approved a constitutional amendment, guaranteeing abortion rights. Professor Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia said that abortion would likely be one of the two or three biggest issues of 2024, not just for president, but for governor and state legislators and U.S. Senate and U.S. house races. Amy Walter, editor-in-chief of the Cook Political Report said that polling shows most Americans want abortion rights to be legal in some form, and that Republicans are now perceived as the party that is more extreme on the issue. Time and again, pollsters and pundits have counted Joe Biden and Democrats out. We have continued to dig deep, fight back, deliver results for the American people, and win. And what we won on last night is exactly what we're going to win on next November. It is a big win for Democrats. In fact, surprisingly so. I don't think anybody in advance expected Democrats to do as well as they did overall. They won everything except for the Mississippi governorship, and even that was closer than it usually is. There were races that haven't been mentioned nationally that favored Democrats. For example, New Jersey, their whole assembly was up, and Democrats were supposed to lose at least a dozen seats. That was the consensus on both sides. They've picked up five or six. It's almost all due to abortion rights and the controversy that has come since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. The question going into 2023 was, well, is it still as hot button now that we are over a year away from that Dobs decisions? Now that so many states have already gone and passed laws or passed other ballot initiatives that maybe just doesn't have the same resonance that it did when it was such a shock to the system. And I think the answer is it still does have resonance, and it's likely to continue to have resonance going into 2024. I think it's reasonable to assume that abortion rights will be one of the two or three biggest issues of 2024, not just for president, but for governor and state legislators and U.S. Senate, U.S. House races. We've been seeing polling now for years that tells us that a majority of voters believe that abortion should be legal in some way, shape or form. Now, what the parameters around that look like will be different for different people. But I just keep going back to the takeaways I had from listening to voters in the midterm elections, many of whom were Republican, who defined themselves as pro-life, and they would say, well, you know, I'm pro-life, but I didn't think it meant no one could have access to abortion, am I? And tonight, the people of Kentucky elected me as just the third two consecutive term governor in our history. I wouldn't read a whole lot nationally into it. I think it's really more a matter of Andy Beshear having the kind of personality and record that overcomes the problems that come with being a Democrat in Kentucky, which, after all, Donald Trump won by 26 points. So there's no question Andy Beshear wasn't reelected because he's a Democrat. He was reelected in spite of the fact that he was a Democrat. This was the Glenn Yonkin theory of the case, which is you put out a reasonable, that was his wording on this, this was a reasonable restriction that pulls well. And yet, the challenge that Republicans have is the fact that when you ask voters who they think is going to best protect abortion access, who they think is more extreme on the issue of abortion, voters are pretty locked in on their perceptions of which party is the more extreme, which would be Republicans, and which is the more pro-choice or open to abortion access, and that would be Democrats. So Trump is a double-edged sword. When he is not on the ballot, his voters tend not to show up, which makes it difficult for Republican candidates to succeed when they are running as a similar brand. You know, if you're running as a Trump candidate without Trump on the ticket, you're not able to bring those same voters out that would show up for Donald Trump, but guess who does show up? A lot of the people who don't like Donald Trump, and that's what we saw in the midterm elections, and that's what we saw here in 2023 as well. And so the question going forward in 2024 to me is, does Donald Trump still have the ability to bring out those voters as he did in 2020? Are those voters tired and maybe they aren't as willing to show up even when Trump's on the ballot? I'm not supposed to be talking about things that bad people do.