Happy Monday everyone and welcome back to The Best & The Brightest, I’m Peter Hamby. I said “Happy” but that probably doesn’t apply to Democrats, who spent the weekend in full panic mode after a series of high-quality 2024 polls showed Joe Biden losing to Donald Trump in several big battleground states. But before fully wetting the bed, Dems should keep an eye on a series of elections tomorrow in Virginia to see if abortion politics save them at the ballot box again, much like it did in 2022.

But first, for a little more on how the Times pill is playing in Washington, here’s Abby Livingston’s Capitol Hill report…

• The Axelrod effect: The poll, of course, was compounded by former Obama adviser David Axelrod observing on Twitter/X that “this will send tremors of doubt through the party”; that the stakes are “too dramatic to ignore”; and that “only Joe Biden can make this decision.”

  Some Democratic consultants I spoke with on Sunday were not amused with Axelrod. Nobody wants to live through anything resembling 2016: a messy, divisive primary between the left and the establishment, which would only be worse this time around given the intensity of disagreement surrounding the Israel-Hamas war and the dwindling number of weeks until Iowa. But these are shocking numbers and show Biden has short coattails for down-ballot candidates. Moreover, the Times conducted the poll in the immediate aftermath of the Republican shitshow in the House. It looks like Biden isn’t getting points for being the adult in the room. (Axelrod, for his part, doubled down on his comments today on CNN.)

• Biden’s Arab Spring: The poll further validated rumblings I’ve heard in recent weeks out of Michigan, where Biden is down five points in the survey. Democrats there will probably have post-election stress disorder for a generation after Trump won the state in 2016, and Biden only carried it by 150,000 votes in 2020. Democrats are also worried about the impact of the Israel-Hamas war given the state’s robust Arab American population, particularly in Dearborn. A series of surveys indicate that Biden is hemorrhaging support from this group due to his full-throated support for Israel. At the same time, establishment Democrats have for weeks privately voiced concerns that the region’s congresswoman, Rashida Tlaib, is exacerbating the problem with her rhetoric—specifically, her embrace of the “From the river to the sea” mantra.

  A cluster of prominent conservatives and liberals have already demanded that Tlaib retract her statement calling the slogan “aspirational,” including the state’s Democratic attorney general, Dana Nessel, and Democratic Rep. Elissa Slotkin, the party’s likely nominee for the Senate in 2024. (In the meantime, Peter Meijer entered the crowded Republican primary, joining fellow former congressman Mike Rogers and others.)

• Leading indicators: Democrats will be closely studying the results and cross-tabs following Tuesday’s elections in Virginia, New Jersey, Mississippi and Kentucky, which should add some much-needed context to the national political picture. In Kentucky, a win by Gov. Andy Beshear—currently fighting to keep his office from state A.G. and McConnell protégé Daniel Cameron—could reassure Democrats after their drubbing in Louisiana last month. (Both Beshear and Cameron are considered good bets for a national ticket one day, and this race could be determinative.) The next governor could also play a key role in appointing McConnell’s temporary replacement, if the Senate minority leader, who has suffered a number of health episodes, were to suddenly leave his seat.

  But the real show will be in Virginia, where Republicans have a fighting chance to take control of the state House of Delegates and state Senate. The first series of postmortems will likely focus on what the results mean for G.O.P. Gov. Glenn Youngkin and his national aspirations. But the other Virginia pol to keep an eye on is U.S. Rep. Abigail Spanberger, who’s expected to run for governor in 2025 and has campaigned for and donated to dozens of Democratic state legislative candidates.

A little more on this…

The public panic over those polls was so widespread that the Biden campaign emailed confidential talking points to friendly surrogates—literally at 4:59 a.m. Eastern time on Sunday—urging them to “Keep Calm. Carry On.” I got my hands on the email, too. In it, the Biden communications team told allies to tweet that polls one year out from an election are rarely predictive, that Obama’s approval ratings weren’t that great at this time either before his 2012 re-election, and that Biden has been underestimated many times before. “There’s no doubt this will be a very close election,” the email said. “Joe Biden has been counted out time and time again and proved pollsters and pundits wrong. His campaign is ignoring the noise and building the strong campaign it needs to win—just like in 2020.”

The talking points also conveyed a sentiment I hear a lot in my conversations with Biden’s team when they tell me to ignore the noise: The 2024 election will favor Biden because it will fundamentally be a choice between the Democratic president and Trump, a repugnant figure to swing voters who also happens to be charged with a laundry list of felonies. Biden might not be perfect, the thinking goes, and he’s certainly old. But Democrats—including those young voters currently raging against Old Man Biden and his support for Israel—will come home when they understand the stakes and the issues on the ballot. And there’s one issue they mention more than any other: abortion.

A year later, Biden’s approval ratings are even worse, his head-to-head numbers against Trump are worse, and even more voters believe the country is on the wrong track. But in my conversations with Democrats, from the White House to campaign committees to state party organizations, they remain confident that abortion will still be the issue that gets them over the hump next year—even if Democrats aren’t in love with President Biden. “The abortion issue remains relevant because Republicans are still talking about banning it the second they get the chance to,” said Heather Williams, the interim president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee. She has a point: Despite the national air of pessimism about Democrats, voters aren’t thrilled with Republicans, either. Faced with the choice this year in state legislative special elections around the country—many of them in battleground states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin—voters have elected Democrats almost every time. And Democrats overperformed in those races, too, by an average of seven points compared to past cycles.

Will the same dynamic work for Biden and Democrats in November 2024? Luckily, we don’t have to wait until next year—we just have to wait until tomorrow. Abortion is a major factor in multiple elections happening Tuesday around the country. In red-drifting Ohio, voters will decide on a constitutional amendment establishing a right to an abortion. There’s also the governor’s race in Kentucky, where Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear has forced his Republican challenger to soften his formerly staunch support for a near-total abortion ban. There’s a governor’s race in Mississippi, too, the state that launched the Dobbs v. Jackson lawsuit. That race doesn’t really fit the pattern: Democrats have a viable, well-funded candidate, Brandon Presley, but a big reason he’s viable in Mississippi is that he’s actually pro-life.

The purest test of abortion politics is happening in my home state of Virginia, the only state in the South that hasn’t enacted some kind of ban on abortion in the wake of Dobbs. All 140 seats in the General Assembly are up for grabs on Tuesday—Republicans narrowly hold the House of Delegates right now, with Democrats narrowly holding the Senate—and Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin is campaigning to take full G.O.P. control of state government and enact a ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, with exceptions for rape and incest. (He is also, as I’ve written, hoping to build conservative currency for a future presidential bid, though not in 2024.)

Youngkin, elected in 2021, remains relatively popular in Virginia, with approval ratings over 50 percent. After Dobbs, he went all-in on the 15-week abortion ban, saying he would “happily and gleefully” sign any bill that comes to his desk restricting abortion access. The races in Virginia are almost fully a referendum on that proposal. Polls show that voters are roughly split on the idea of a 15-week ban, but Democrats are using it as a cudgel. For months, their messaging has been inescapable for any Virginian in earshot of the campaigns. Almost every piece of Democratic paid media—television, digital, mail—includes a screaming warning that “MAGA extremists” want to fully ban abortion in the commonwealth. “It’s clear that the election is at least partially about abortion, because Republicans have made it that way,” said Schuyler VanValkenburg, a Democrat defending his House of Delegates seat in the Richmond suburbs. VanValkenburg told me other issues are surfacing at the doors as he canvasses for votes, especially gun violence and education. But, he said, “Youngkin and my opponent have decided to lead with a ban. Republicans are trying to make this a test case.”

Democrats have been somewhat exaggerating the threat of a “full” abortion ban. Unlike Republican governors in Texas and Florida, who signed bills banning abortion after just six weeks, Youngkin is campaigning for a 15-week ban, an idea he calls “reasonable” and “common sense.” But VanValkenburg is correct that Republicans have made abortion the issue of the campaign. And that’s what’s so fascinating about the races in Virginia, which remains a bellwether state in nonfederal elections, with suburban and exurban voters dominating the voter rolls. Before Dobbs, Republicans in swing states rarely fronted their races by talking about abortion restrictions. But Youngkin decided early on to make abortion the central issue of this season’s G.O.P. campaign, and most Republicans on the ballot Tuesday are following his lead. It’s a remarkable, ballsy test of his political capital in a state where voters have long prized moderate politics over white-hot culture war battles.

For an entire year, Democrats and Republicans have been splitting hairs over what constitutes an abortion ban. Which means everyone in Virginia is talking about abortion, constantly, everywhere you turn—which is exactly what Democratic strategists want. In a nod to the fact that he might have overstepped, Youngkin has gently backed away from his abortion crusade in the closing days of the campaign. In fact, Youngkin’s final TV ad of the campaign for Republicans makes no mention of abortion at all. Instead, Youngkin talks about education, law enforcement, job creation, and tax relief—sounding more Chamber of Commerce than Christian Coalition.

Republican candidates down the ballot have been leaning more into the issues of crime and inflation lately, much like they did nationally against Democrats in the closing weeks of the 2022 races. According to Republican polling I obtained over the weekend tracking every competitive House district in Virginia, inflation remains the top concern for voters—followed by abortion, taxes and the economy, and immigration. Aside from abortion, none of those issues plays in the Democrats’ favor down the stretch. Biden is also far more unpopular than Youngkin in Virginia. The president’s approval rating is at a lowly 38 percent in those districts, according to G.O.P. internals. Youngkin is at 49 percent.

Almost $50 million has been pumped into the state Senate and House races, with ads swamping the airwaves. A swing of one or two seats either way could literally decide control of state government (which is one reason Democrats are so livid at one of their candidates, who decided to risk it all by livestreaming sex acts with her husband while running for office). Democrats are hoping that the blaring warnings about an abortion ban will force their voters to pay attention in an off-off year election, which is already a heavy ask. Virginians are asked to cast ballots a lot—there are state and federal elections literally every year—and voter fatigue is a very real thing. “Having year-round engagement from electeds might be trying for them, but it’s also cemented their ability to understand what’s going on,” said Williams, the D.L.C.C. president. “They have this ever-present voting responsibility, and Virginians take that role seriously.” If Democrats capture both houses of the General Assembly on Tuesday, they will once again have their abortion messaging to thank, and maybe they can take a deep breath after a weekend of hyperventilating about Biden’s 2024 poll numbers. But if Democrats come up short tomorrow, it might be a sign that the post-Dobbs passion of 2022 has started to fade.

“It works as a motivating factor in Virginia because we have a governor who has said he would happily sign any restriction bill,” Spanberger said. “There is a correlation between what people are voting on and what will happen if Republicans win.” But Spanberger also had a warning for Democrats outside of Virginia: they can’t become too reliant on abortion alone to turn out voters. She told me it’s an “oversimplification” to say Dobbs saved Democrats in 2022—it was a strong undercurrent, she said, but every race had its own issues. She also told me it would be an enormous gamble for Democrats to pin all their hopes on abortion again in 2024, more than two years after Dobbs.

“Voters overall are tired of being told they need to be afraid, afraid, afraid,” Spanberger told me. “Look at 2020. That was supposed to be the year we beat Trump for good. We did have success, but here we are four years later talking about Trump. And 2022, that was supposed to be the year that we protected the country from an all-out abortion ban. That was the risk. But the risk is still there. So then a voter might say, ‘I voted for you, why is this still a risk? Why do we still live in fear of a nationwide abortion ban?’ It’s very easy to oversimplify on the campaign trail. But that leads to a larger strategic challenge for Democrats. If we campaign on ‘We are gonna do this,’ voters will eventually ask, ‘Why haven’t you guys done this?’ ”

Spanberger said Democratic voters will get exhausted by constant outrage and the hair-on-fire warnings unless her party can better communicate what they’ve actually done for voters—and also communicate that protecting abortion rights at a national level will take many years of hard work, and many more elections. The abortion campaign could be effective in Virginia, she said, but whatever happens on Tuesday, “it does not translate 1:1 on a national level.”