NBC News Exit Poll in Ohio: Our methodology
The NBC News Exit Poll was conducted with voters as they left polling places across Ohio on Election Day.
To account for the high number of early and absentee voters and to ensure a sample that represents the ways Americans cast their ballots, the exit poll also includes extensive interviews with in-person early voters at 80 voting centers across the state, as well as a telephone survey to capture the estimated 25% of Ohio voters who cast an absentee ballot.
The Ohio exit poll will include about 3,600 voters in all: approximately 2,800 Election Day voters and 800 early voters.
In Ohio, abortion backers hope for another victory in their unbroken winning streak
One of the marquee Election Day contests is in Ohio, where voters will decide whether to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution.
A victory would continue a winning streak for abortion rights supporters. In the nearly 17 months since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, candidates and ballot measures backing abortion rights have won in every election, including in conservative states like Kentucky and Kansas — as well as in an August special election in Ohio that served as a proxy battle ahead of today's vote.
At stake is Issue 1, a proposed amendment that would insert language in the state constitution codifying the right “to one’s own reproductive medical treatment, including but not limited to abortion” and barring the state from “burdening, penalizing or prohibiting” those rights. The proposed measure specifies that abortion would remain prohibited after fetal viability, but includes exceptions to protect the mother’s life or health.
Eyes on 2024: Virginia to test Youngkin’s message and political power
Tuesday’s legislative elections in Virginia will provide key tests for both parties’ messaging ahead of 2024, as well as the state’s GOP governor.
“I think they’re the most important elections in America because these issues that are so important to Virginians are also the ones that are going to be so important to Americans next year,” Virginia GOP Gov. Glenn Youngkin told ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday.
The battles for the state House of Delegates, which Republicans control, and the state Senate, which Democrats control, could come down to a handful of districts. And they’ll test Youngkin’s own political power as he’s brushed off questions about his presidential ambitions.
NBC’s Gary Grumbach and Katherine Koretski caught up with Youngkin over the weekend while he was campaigning in the Senate’s competitive 10th District, where GOP state Sen. Siobhan Dunnavant is running against Democrat Schuyler Van Valkenburg.
In deep-red Kentucky, Democrats bet abortion will be a winning issue in the governor’s race
Last fall, voters in deep-red Kentucky delivered a win for Democrats when they rejected an amendment that would have written opposition to abortion into the state constitution.
This year, state Democrats are again banking that voters will side with protecting abortion rights. They’re putting the issue front and center in the closely watched governor’s race on Nov. 7, hoping it will help boost Gov. Andy Beshear to another term.
The race between Beshear, the popular Democratic incumbent, and his Republican challenger, Daniel Cameron, the conservative attorney general, has emerged as yet another test of whether abortion rights can help Democrats in otherwise tough political terrain.
Robust turnout in competitive Virginia district
Of the 3,200 people who are registered to vote at one precinct in Henrico County, outside of Richmond, more than 1,200 people have already voted today, and 800 people voted during the 45-day early voting period.
Election officials at this polling location say they’ve been doing this for more than a decade here and are “very impressed” with this level of turnout.
Youngkin’s team is predicting this area’s Senate race to be one of the closest in the state. Republican state Sen. Siobhan Dunnavant, an OB-GYN, is running for re-election against Democratic Delegate Schuyler Van Valkenburg.
Youngkin is hoping to hold the Assembly and flip the Senate, which would allow for many of his conservative priorities to move through the General Assembly with ease.
In Mississippi's governor's race, health care a top issue
For some voters in here Mississippi’s capital, the state’s high uninsured rates and struggling hospitals were defining issues in today's gubernatorial election.
At a precinct in Jackson’s Fondren neighborhood, Evan Parker, 35, said he’s backing Presley, the Democratic nominee who has made Medicaid expansion a focal point of his campaign.
Republican incumbent Gov. Reeves opposes expansion.
As an alternative, Reeves announced a plan that his administration estimates will send nearly $700 million to the state’s hospitals, but unlike expansion wouldn't provide health insurance.
Parker, a professor at a local college, said Medicaid expansion provided him with coverage while he was “a poor graduate student” living in Louisiana. He said moving back to Mississippi and seeing people “suffering without health care” was a “grave injustice.”
“I think health care is a right,” Parker said.
Mississippi is one of 10 states that has not expanded the public health insurance program. Almost 11% of the state’s residents lack health insurance.
CISA sees no threats so far to today's elections
The federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which is responsible for providing cybersecurity aid to election officials, has not seen any issues of concern so far in today's elections.
“We continue to see no specific or critical threat to disrupt election infrastructure or Election Day operations,” a senior CISA official said on a press call this morning.
That doesn’t constitute a guarantee that every election will run smoothly, the official said.
“Things are going to come up. And with 30 states conducting elections across numerous jurisdictions, we should expect to see some examples of standard operational disruption, whether it’s from Mother Nature or human error,” she said.
Virginia says purged voters are back on rolls
The 3,400 Virginia voters erroneously purged from the rolls by state authorities have been re-registered to vote, a spokesperson for the Virginia Department of Elections said today.
Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s elections staff said last month they had purged thousands of voters during list maintenance operations. The purged voters all had felony convictions but had had their voting rights restored; they were purged after state police reported probation violations as new felonies.
Nearly all states bar those serving felony prison sentences from voting, but Virginia is one of a handful of states that permanently bars those with felony convictions from voting unless they have their rights restored by the governor.
The Virginia State Conference NAACP and the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law sued Youngkin’s administration for more information on the state’s felony rights restoration process. They said in a Monday release that the documents they received reveal an arbitrary and opaque process.
Dorian Spence, a vice president at the Lawyers Committee, told NBC News they’ve encouraged voters who fear they may be affected to bring paperwork like their rights restoration letter with them to the polls.
If they are not on the voter rolls as expected, he said, they can use same-day voter registration and cast a provisional ballot.
Virginia could be a bellwether for abortion measures ahead of the 2024 election cycle as voters head to the polls Tuesday. NBC News correspondent Gary Grumbach reports.
A local Pennsylvania election puts national issues like abortion and Israel to the test
The county executive in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, doesn’t have much, if any, power when it comes to abortion rights. And the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas doesn’t fall under its purview, either.
Yet it’s those national issues that are likely to play a huge role in Tuesday’s election for the most powerful local office in the state’s second-most populated county.
Insiders and strategists on both sides have cautioned against drawing too many conclusions from the results of the Pittsburgh-area battle between Democratic former state Rep. Sara Innamorato and Republican former banking executive Joe Rockey, as well as a hotly contested district attorney battle in the county. But the races will take the temperature of a pivotal voting bloc ahead of next year’s presidential contest and test whether progressive momentum in this Democratic enclave of western Pennsylvania can march on or be met with blowback after years of advances.