SUBURBAN SMACKDOWN — Virginia isn’t expected to be competitive in next year’s presidential election. But don’t let a sleepy presidential cycle fool you — next week’s legislative races are some of the hottest contests since President Joe Biden took office. All 140 seats across the two legislative chambers are up for grabs on Tuesday, and both Democrats and Republicans in Virginia believe they have a path to complete control of the state legislature. There’s roughly a dozen-and-a-half battleground seats between the state House and Senate, and the demographics of many of them mirror where 2024 will be fought: Swingy, suburban districts that have raced away from former President Donald Trump. What makes these Virginia districts interesting is that they’ve shown they could still vote Republican. GOP Gov. Glenn Youngkin improved on Trump’s margins in basically every key district identified by the Virginia Public Access Project and outright won many of them, en route to his upset win of the governorship two years ago. Should Republicans pull off the sweep Tuesday night, they’ll have complete control of state government in a commonwealth that is fairly reliably blue on the federal level. Virginia’s off-year elections are often seen as the best bellwether ahead of the following year’s federal elections. And that’s for good reason: Both parties are testing out messages that we will almost assuredly see on a much grander scale next year. For Democrats, it has been another campaign focused on abortion rights. Democratic television ads mentioned abortion about 2.5 times more frequently than the party’s second most talked about issue, education, according to data from the advertising tracking firm AdImpact. The big difference this time is that Republicans are punching back — rather than ignoring — the issue that sank them during the midterms. Youngkin’s political operation has spearheaded a push for Republicans in the state to rally around a 15-week ban, with exemptions for rape and incest, launching a seven-figure ad campaign promoting it and calling Democrats the real extremists. Democrats shoot back that the 15-week proposal — which is more strict than the state’s current law — is really a Trojan horse for even harsher limits down the road. The messaging, Youngkin’s top aides told me and my colleague Steven Shepard last month , is not intended for Republicans to suddenly win on abortion, but to neutralize the issue. And abortion still isn’t their top issue: The bread and butter of GOP advertising remains crime and public safety in the state. Tuesday’s contests here — and in other big statewide races like Kentucky — will also stress test how much Biden’s low approval ratings actually hurt Democrats at the ballot box. Since the end of Roe, the answer has been not particularly: Democrats overperformed in the midterms and ran well ahead of Biden in a series of special elections over the last year. Biden is unpopular in Virginia; In a mid-October survey from The Washington Post/Schar School , just 43 percent of registered Virginia voters approved of the job Biden was doing, and 55 percent disapproved. But there also hasn’t been much of “Biden as the boogeyman” advertising in Virginia, a contrast to what we’re seeing in the much redder Kentucky, where Republicans are relentlessly trying to nationalize the governor race there ahead of Tuesday. But should Democrats lose on Tuesday in Virginia, it would still be an ominous sign for Biden — and the Democratic Party more broadly — for 2024. And there’s one more, ahem, 2024 elephant in the room: The push by some Republican donors to get Youngkin to launch a white knight presidential campaign in an effort to stop Trump in the primary. Setting the almost logistically infeasible move aside for a moment, the braying for Youngkin from a vocal but apparent minority of the GOP makes sense. Here’s a guy who has shown he can win in a blue-ish state, who has connections to donors (and the personal wealth) to run a huge campaign, and has demonstrated raw political talent. Youngkin has given the same answer for the last year-plus when asked about the presidency: He’s humbled, but he’s focused on Virginia’s legislative elections. You don’t have to squint too hardly to see how that’s not a no. But he’s also been disciplined about not really straying from that answer — so much so that when I joined Youngkin on the trail two weeks ago at a rally in a suburban office park parking lot outside of Richmond, none of the assembled press bothered to even ask about his aspirations for the other side of the Potomac, lest we waste our valuable gaggle time. But by this time next week, that excuse will be gone. And Youngkin will either be robbed of a political mandate by a Democratic win (or a split decision) — or the begging and pleading for him to get into the race from donors desperately looking for a savior will only grow. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com . Or contact tonight’s author at zmontellaro@politico.com or on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @ZachMontellaro .
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