Takeaways from the off-year races in Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Mississippi.
Welcome to 2020 Vision, the Yahoo News column covering the presidential race with one key takeaway every weekday and a wrap-up each weekend. Reminder: There are 89 days until the Iowa caucuses and 363 days until the 2020 election.
Trump was right that Republicans won a majority of the races in Kentucky and retained the governorship of Mississippi. But a more objective reading is that winning in Kentucky and Mississippi isn’t exactly something to brag about, given that three years ago Trump won the former by 30 points and the latter by 18.
But the issues he did run on, including his support for Medicaid expansion — a key part of former President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act — are part of the broader Democratic agenda that will be in play in a number of key state races next year. On Tuesday, Beshear ran up the score in Lexington, Louisville and the surrounding suburbs while eating into Bevin’s margins in coal country; he even won Knott County, where Trump won in 2016 with 76 percent of the vote. The question for 2020 is whether someone like McGrath can do the same to McConnell.
Democrats received a boost from Michael Bloomberg’s gun safety group Everytown, which spent $2.5 million in the state, far outpacing the National Rifle Association’s expenditure of $300,000. Gun policy was the top issue for voters in the state, where a mass shooting in Virginia Beach in May left 12 dead. The suburbs were again a nightmare for Republicans. A loss by Delegate Tim Hugo wiped out the last GOP representative in northern Virginia at both the state and federal levels.
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