51�Թ�

The lack of participation, experts said, can be attributed to many factors: it was an off-year election; the balloting process was new and extremely convoluted; the vast majority of more than 7,000 contenders for 881 federal judge positions — and for another 1,800 state jurist posts — were unknown.

Doug Heye, a Republican strategist, last Thursday posted on X: “With all the political news this week” — bad polls for Biden, boffo off-year election results for his party, new developments in Donald Trump’s legal morass and another Trump-less Republican presidential debate — “what’s happening in the House may be the most under the radar AND have the most consequences.”

In the Biden campaign’s view, the off-year election results are more analogous than current polling to the resources, investment and direct communication with voters that will go into the elections next year.

Just feet from Ms. McDaniel‘s front-row seat during the third Republican presidential debate in Miami, Mr. Ramaswamy suggested she “come on stage” to resign and labeled the GOP as “a party of losers” following off-year election losses in several states.

Democrats’ off-year election success was buoyed by abortion access being a core issue in a post-Roe era, a policy Republicans have struggled to find a unified stance on as abortion bans in red states drag down the GOP elsewhere at the ballot box.