In this post-election edition: Five ways that electoral politics changed Tuesday, the worst poll of Joe Biden's presidency so far, and the start of a war over congressional maps in Ohio and North Carolina.
2021 Election: Complete coverage and analysis ArrowRight
I'm just glad to see people paying attention to South Jersey, and this is The Trailer.
Let's take a step back. It's December 2020, and Terry McAuliffe is launching his third campaign for governor of Virginia. Surrounded by party leaders, all them who see him as the most electable Democratic candidate, McAuliffe promises the biggest investments in public education in the commonwealth's history, with a catchy slogan, taped onto his lectern.
“Our Kids. Our Schools. Our Future.”
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Step back a little further — June 2020. After the murder of George Floyd, and days of riots and demonstrations, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey leaves his apartment to meet the protesters assembled outside. Wearing a mask that reads “I Can't Breathe,” he listens to their demands.
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“Yes or no: Will you commit to defunding the Minneapolis Police Department?” a woman with a microphone asks. Frey says no, and is drowned out by boos. “He's up for reelection next year,” she says, “And if he says no, guess what we’re going to do next year.”
You know how this ends. McAuliffe lost his race, taking the Democratic ticket down with him, after Republican Gov.-elect Glenn Youngkin focused on changing what was taught in public schools. Frey won reelection, and a ballot measure that would have replaced the Minneapolis Police Department — not defunding, but making it possible to shrink it — was defeated. Every faction of the GOP had something to celebrate Tuesday. Every faction of the Democratic Party had to explain why it lost. Here are five ways that the ideas both parties had about the electorate changed, after the votes rolled in.
Republicans keep gaining among White voters without college degrees. They were the decisive voters in Virginia, and they surprised Democrats in New Jersey, where a Republican surge in South Jersey wiped out several powerful Democrats and nearly defeated Gov. Phil Murphy. In 2017, according to exit polls, Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam (D) won just 42 percent of White voters, and 80 percent of non-White voters. On Tuesday, McAuliffe ran two points behind Northam with non-White voters, four points behind him with White voters and seven points behind him with White women who didn't have college degrees. McAuliffe outperformed Northam, slightly, among college-educated White voters, but it didn't matter.
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Exit pollsters ignored New Jersey this year, but Republicans ran the furthest ahead of their 2017 margins in White, working-class areas. In lieu of data, the most dramatic example was the victory of Edward Durr, a truck driver who barely spent or raised money for his campaign, over New Jersey state Senate President Steve Sweeney. The Democrat had never been vulnerable in his Gloucester County district, where just 26 percent of voters are registered as Republicans. Durr's theory, laid out in an August interview, was that there was an untapped well of frustrated voters who simply hadn't been bothering to show up in off-year elections.
“Sen. Sweeney has never broken 32,000 votes,” he said, “and so I felt if he can’t even get half the district, that means there’s numbers out there to be taken.” Sure enough: Sweeney easily won reelection in 2017 with 31,822 votes, and had won 30,444 votes by Thursday morning, but his last Republican opponent had won around 22,000 votes, and Durr was winning nearly 33,000. (Mail ballots sent by Nov. 2 can be counted if they arrive before Nov. 8.)
The same story played out in race after race where the winning Democratic coalition of the past had included non-White voters, White liberals and a good number of more conservative White voters without college degrees. They lost the county executive's office in Pennsylvania's Erie County, which they'd held for 20 years, and lost in New York City neighborhoods and suburbs that had not been competitive since Rudy Giuliani was mayor.
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Turnout is up, but Republicans are getting more of it. It sounds wrong, but it's true: Terry McAuliffe won more votes than any other Democratic candidate for governor of Virginia. New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D) won more votes than he got in his 2017 victory — he's the first Democrat to win the job twice since the 1970s — and may surpass the 1,278,932 votes former governor Chris Christie won in his 2013 landslide. In their key races, Democrats spent what they needed, turned out who they needed and hit the sort of win number that, in other recent elections, would have delivered victory.
Republicans not only made some converts — they turned out more voters. In Virginia, where the vote count is mostly complete, McAuliffe got 66 percent of Joe Biden's final vote total from 2020. Youngkin hit 85 percent of the final vote for Donald Trump. In Loudoun County, where Democrats badly miscalculated the impact of a school sexual assault case that generated months of news, Youngkin it 86 percent of Trump's total, and McAuliffe hit 63 percent of Biden's. In southwest Virginia, where Democrats had been losing since 2008 but hoped they'd bottomed out, the difference was even greater.
That was the story in New Jersey, too, with Durr's victory as the most dramatic example. In much of South Jersey, Republican nominee Jack Ciattarelli ran ahead of Christie's vote totals even from his 2013 election; Ciattarelli got more than 43,000 votes in Atlantic County, while Christie got fewer than 41,000. In the North Jersey suburbs that had swung hardest left during Trump's presidency, Ciattarelli actually got close to Christie's margins. He won't be governor for two reasons: Murphy won enough votes to hold the suburbs, and Ciattarelli didn't make Christie's inroads with non-White voters in places like Union City and Newark.
The Democratic Party is smothering the left. Three elections Tuesday offered breakthrough opportunities for the left-wing coalitions that had grown in numbers and influence since the summer of 2020. In Minneapolis, it was Question 2, which would have replaced the police department with a new department of public safety. In Buffalo, it was the race for mayor, where democratic socialist India Walton had won the Democratic nomination. In Seattle, it was a race for city attorney between a Republican who was a moderate Democrat until 2019, and a left-wing police abolitionist.
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The results were a 12-point loss in Minneapolis, a looming defeat in Seattle, and Walton winning just 41 percent of the vote against write-in candidates led by Mayor Byron Brown. (Seattle's mail votes take days to count, but Republican candidate Ann Davison leads by double digits.) And in each race, powerful local Democrats campaigned against the left, motivated by a combination of real disagreement and by fear that Republicans would exploit a left-wing victory. The New York Democratic Party never helped Walton, Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) never endorsed her, and while the Erie County Democrats did help her campaign, they lost the countywide race for sheriff — their biggest priority of the cycle — as Republicans linked their candidate to Walton.
Washington Democrats worried that Republicans would do the same if Nicole Thomas-Kennedy won in Seattle. A self-described abolitionist who imagined a future in which policing wouldn't be necessary, she promised to orient the office away from prosecuting petty crimes and toward “wage theft, corporate landlords and oil companies.” But Democrats imagined petty crime rising if she won, and highlighted tweets from before Thomas-Kennedy entered the race, in which she called police “pigs” and “serial killers” and said that “property destruction is a moral imperative.” (Some of the tweets were later deleted.)
Democrats were just as divided in Minnesota, where party figures split over Question 2 and worried that it would cost them if it passed. “Making structural reforms requires an actual engagement with the community on what you want to create,” Ryan Winkler, the Democratic majority leader in the Minnesota House of Representatives, said before the election. “That's what you do, rather than putting a question on the ballot that says: We'll figure it out later, we'll do the details later.”
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On Thursday, Minnesota Attorney Gen. Keith Ellison said the debate over police reform would continue — every candidate for mayor had said it would — but that the rhetoric of 2020 had badly hurt the cause. Austin had voted down a measure to hire more police, and Cleveland voters had passed a police accountability measure, but the idea of completely replacing a police department had been too easily demonized.
“I think allowing this moniker, ‘defund the police,’ to ever get out there, was not a good thing,” Ellison said in an interview. “It was not an accurate reflection of what is happening. Telling people to give up what they know for what they don’t know is a challenge.”
Non-White candidates are winning, but the “great awokening” is in trouble. Virginia elected its first Black female lieutenant governor, Winsome Sears, and its first Latino attorney general, Jason Miyares. Cincinnati elected its first Asian American mayor, Aftab Pureval. Boston elected its first female and first Asian American mayor, Michelle Wu. Pittsburgh elected its first Black mayor, Ed Gainey. All of those mayors-elect are Democrats; the winners in Virginia were Republicans. And they've had some fun with the instant spin, mostly from cable TV commentators, that Democratic losses on Tuesday were a function of “white supremacy” or “white nationalism.”
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Rarely has a political party gotten so much advance notice of how the opposition will run, then failed to do anything about it. In late 2020, before McAuliffe launched his campaign with a focus on education, Donald Trump issued executive orders creating a commission on “patriotic education” and banning racial sensitivity training by government contractors. After Trump lost, some of his policy staffers launched campaigns to defeat liberal school boards. Even before he won the GOP nomination, Glenn Youngkin attacked “critical race theory,” which is not taught in public schools but has been used by educators to shape how they teach and which programs they prioritize. That picked up during what's been called “great awokening,” as White liberals became more concerned about racial inequality and more convinced that the systems they inherited, from policing to public education, were inherently racist.
Democrats, led by McAuliffe, responded by pretending there was no backlash. Deep into October, with early voting underway, the campaign emphasized that he had laid out specific education plans many months before Youngkin, and that polling showed more voters trusting him on the issue. And Republicans had some trouble unifying all of their education arguments into something coherent — that test scores were declining during the pandemic, that educators might be dumping advanced math classes, that transgender students should not be allowed to play sports according to their gender identity, and that graphic sexual material was making it into school libraries.
McAuliffe's debate gaffe, “I don't think parents should be telling schools what they can teach,” allowed Youngkin to bring all of his critiques together; his final ads portrayed a collapse of public education, linking it to McAuliffe and the campaign for racial “equity.” In one ad, a clip of McAuliffe talking about racial disparities in school resources was cut down to one phrase — “We have a racist system.”
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Nearly every Democrat, up to the president and the vice president, has used similar language about the need to close racial achievement gaps. While votes are still being counted, conservatives won more school board races than they lost, in general, and the Democrats who won said they engaged the critique instead of pivoting. In Wisconsin, where 2022 Republican gubernatorial candidate Rebecca Kleefisch backed recall efforts in a conservative Milwaukee suburb, Democrats accused them of injecting partisan politics into what should be nonpartisan, and won.
“The messaging was, don’t make children political pawns,” said Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler, “and that really resonated.”
Joe Biden wanted to be a campaign boost to Democrats, and he isn't. When he ran for president, and was asked how he would get Republicans to back parts of his agenda after they stymied Barack Obama, Biden usually had the same answer. He'd negotiate, and if they blocked a popular item on his agenda, he'd campaign against them.
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“You have to go out and beat these folks if they don’t agree with you, by making your case — and that’s what presidents are supposed to do,” Biden said at a summer 2019 candidate forum. “Persuade the public. Move people as to what’s going on.”
After Tuesday, unless there's a turnaround in Biden's approval rating, that's not a tenable strategy for him. New Jersey and Virginia Democrats invited the president into their races, even as he slipped in polls. A $4 million buy by the Republican Governors Association in New Jersey came as their data showed his numbers cratering with independents, and one of Ciattarelli's final ads linked Murphy to the president, arguing that both were failing.
We'll have final numbers next week, but based on what's been counted, Republican candidates for governor carried most of the U.S. House districts that Democrats flipped in 2018, like Rep. Abigail Spanberger's Virginia seat outside of Richmond and Rep. Andy Kim's New Jersey seat outside of Philadelphia. The National Republican Congressional Committee added 13 seats to its target list after the election, including places where Biden won by double digits; Democrats dismissed that, but there's no part of the country where they came out of Tuesday night stronger.
In competitive districts, and in the states where the 2022 battle for the Senate will be fought — Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Florida — Biden's just not popular. A theory of power that Biden used throughout his 2020 campaign simply isn't workable anymore.
Reading list
“The summer of 2020 brought calls to address racism aggressively. The fall 2021 elections show how hard that has been,” by Matt Viser and Cleve R. Woodson Jr.
The hangover of the “great awokening.”
“This truck driver just defeated New Jersey’s most powerful lawmaker,” by Matt Friedman
Edward Durr, superstar.
“A night of firsts: Black, Asian American candidates make history in mayoral elections,” by Christine Armario
Democrats and Republicans diversify their ranks.
“Newsom's recall survival formula fizzles elsewhere,” by Jeremy B. White, Isabella Bloom and Graph Massara
There are some subtle differences between California and Virginia.
“A sobering reality hits Democrats after election losses,” by Dan Balz
A party that was bracing for defeats got more than it expected.
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Poll watch
“Which party do you think would do a better job on…” (NBC News, 1,000 adults)
Border security
Democrats: 21%
Republicans: 48%
Controlling inflation
Democrats: 21%
Republicans: 45%
National security
Democrats: 24%
Republicans: 45%
The economy
Democrats: 27%
Republicans: 45%
Being effective and getting things done
Democrats: 22%
Republicans: 35%
Immigration
Democrats: 30%
Republicans: 39%
Election security
Democrats: 31%
Republicans: 30%
Voting rights
Democrats: 40%
Republicans: 35%
Abortion
Democrats: 39%
Republicans: 29%
Education
Democrats: 39%
Republicans: 29%
Coronavirus
Democrats: 38%
Republicans: 26%
Climate change
Democrats: 41%
Republicans: 17%
If the first half of this list looks familiar, you may be a House GOP staffer, because those numbers made it into presentations all week about the party's strategy to win in 2022. Some of these issues haven't been part of NBC polling for years — “inflation” was last asked about in 1991, when Republicans enjoyed a similar-size lead on the question. But a few show a reversal of Democrats' fortunes since they won the 2020 elections. The GOP advantage on “crime” is up by 10 points since last year, and the advantage on “economy” is up by five points. On immigration, an issue that Democrats had a single-digit advantage on throughout Donald Trump's presidency, Republicans have taken the lead. On “education,” Democrats have an advantage, but the lowest one since early 2004.
Redistricting
Republicans controlled the redistricting process in both Ohio and North Carolina 10 years ago, and drew maps that packed Democrats into just a few districts despite — at the time — a roughly 50-50 split in presidential voting. The party's new maps in both states are even more aggressive, creating just two safely Democratic seats in Ohio (out of 15) and just four in North Carolina (out of 14).
In Ohio, where the House and Senate GOP majorities have drawn slightly different maps, the lines are more compact than what the party drew in 2011. One reason is the widening gap between partisan support in rural areas and cities, especially in eastern Ohio, where Democratic support collapsed after 2012. The GOP's old map gave Rep. Tim Ryan (D) a safe seat by connecting Youngstown and the Mahoning Valley to deep-blue Akron, and gave Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D) a safe seat by connecting her base in Toledo to parts of Cleveland.
The new maps wipe out both of those seats, linking Toledo to closer, and more Republican, parts of central Ohio; Akron and Youngstown would be in separate, Republican-leaning districts. Two new, compact districts that incorporate most of Columbus and Cleveland would be overwhelmingly Democratic, but the other 13 seats would have voted either narrowly or overwhelmingly for Donald Trump in 2020.
Democrats denounced the proposals, and reiterated their threat to sue over them; Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R) told reporters he wasn't sure if the maps would “fly.” In North Carolina, where Gov. Roy Cooper (D) does not have a veto over maps drawn by the legislature, the Republican product looked a lot like Ohio's: three safe Democratic seats that concentrate voters in Charlotte and the Research Triangle (Durham, Chapel Hill and Raleigh), nine seats that backed Trump in 2020 and one more Democratic district in the Black Belt that would be more competitive for the GOP than the current one, held by Rep. G.K. Butterfield.
Both maps are likely to face Democratic lawsuits as soon as the ink is dry. “I hear it is perfect weather to be in court in North Carolina,” tweeted Democratic elections attorney Marc Elias, as the GOP's map moved through the legislature. Democrats still have a one-seat majority on North Carolina's Supreme Court, after losing seats in 2020, and Democrats picked up seats on the Ohio Supreme Court since the last round of redistricting.
Countdown
… 70 days until the election in Florida’s 20th Congressional District
… 119 days until the first 2022 primaries