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Joe Biden’s Democratic party has secured victories in a series of US state and local elections, providing a boost for the president as he confronts declining approval ratings ahead of a fight for re-election.
Voter support for abortion rights, a key issue for Democrats, helped the president’s party to success in several electoral races on Tuesday, 12 months ahead of a presidential election in which Mr Biden is set to seek a second four-year term.
Democratic governor Andy Beshear was re-elected in Kentucky, while voters in Ohio backed a ballot measure to enshrine abortion rights in the state’s constitution.
In Virginia, voters dealt a blow to Republican governor Glenn Youngkin by allowing Democrats to reclaim control of the state’s legislature.
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The results — along with Democratic victories in local elections in Pennsylvania on Tuesday — will buoy a party that has been grappling with declining poll numbers for Mr Biden.
With one year until the presidential vote, a New York Times/Siena College poll this week showed Mr Biden losing to former Republican president Donald Trump in five of the six swing states that are likely to determine the outcome.
The numbers prompted hand-wringing among Democrats who have privately fretted about Mr Biden’s age and apparent electoral weaknesses.
Mr Biden rejected the polls in a social media post on Tuesday, saying: “Across the country tonight, democracy won and MAGA lost. Voters vote. Polls don’t. Now let’s go win next year.”
In Kentucky, Mr Beshear secured a second term in a Republican state where Mr Trump defeated Mr Biden by a 26-point margin in 2020.
Voters in Ohio — an increasingly Republican state that Mr Trump won by 8 percentage points in 2020 — overwhelmingly backed a ballot measure that codified the right to an abortion in the state’s constitution.
The referendum came after Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, signed into law a so-called heartbeat bill that banned abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, when many women do not yet know whether they are pregnant.
The result in Ohio was the latest example of voters rejecting restrictive abortion policies after the supreme court last year overturned Roe vs Wade, which enshrined the legal right to the procedure at the federal level.
Mr Biden issued a statement celebrating the result in Ohio, saying “Americans once again voted to protect their fundamental freedoms”. He said Republicans had an “extreme and dangerous agenda” on abortion that was “out of step with the vast majority of Americans”.
Abortion also played a role in deciding the results in Virginia, where Mr Youngkin, the Republican governor, had tried to chart a more moderate path by promoting a ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, with some exceptions.
But voters rejected the idea and instead delivered Democrats a majority in the state’s legislature that stands to block many of Mr Youngkin’s policy plans.
The results are a blow to Mr Youngkin, a former Carlyle executive who was elected governor with little political experience in 2021.
He quickly became a favourite among the Republican donor class, which urged him to launch a late push to challenge Mr Trump for the party’s presidential nomination. — Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2023