Democrats’ punch in the gut in Virginia and scare in New Jersey could presage even tougher losses in next year’s congressional midterm elections. Results are still coming in, but Republicans could sweep statewide offices in Virginia — where they hadn’t won statewide since 2009. And they could take back the majority in the House of Delegates.
2021 Election: Complete coverage and analysis ArrowRight
Perhaps even more shocking for Democrats is New Jersey, where Gov. Phil Murphy (D) could lose to Republican Jack Ciattarelli. (Votes are still being counted, and it’s too close to determine results.)
Why are Democrats struggling so much politically right now? Here’s what we know about the national political landscape that played a role in such a bad election night for Democrats.
1. Biden hasn’t recovered his popularity after Afghanistan
It feels as though Biden can’t catch a break this summer. After the bungled Afghanistan withdrawal, the delta wave hit the United States hard. At the same time, a global supply-chain mess reached its peak and started causing shortages on grocery shelves and adding to inflation. Gas prices are high. Groceries cost more. Supply-chain problems and inflation could take well into the next year to untangle, and those are two things that directly affect consumers that Biden doesn’t have much of a say in to fix.
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So far, polls show Americans feel pretty meh when asked whether their lives have improved now that Democrats are in charge. Biden’s approval rating has been in the low 40s since this summer.
A Quinnipiac University poll from a month ago found that a majority of Americans disapprove of the job Biden is doing on the coronavirus, on the economy, as commander in chief, on taxes and on foreign policy. And two-thirds of Americans disapprove of his handling of immigration and the situation at the border with Mexico.
“There is no issue where Biden is gaining traction on,” Republican strategist Doug Heye said. “So on everything that is covid-related — inflation, jobs, education, the supply chain — all of this is bad news for Biden. And, meanwhile, he doesn’t have any real legislative wins to point to.”
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A good example of this dynamic filtering down to hurt Democrats is in New Jersey, where Murphy’s reelection bid is in serious jeopardy despite his consistently leading in the polls. In an interview with The Post’s David Weigel before Election Day, Murphy blamed his struggling popularity on slower economic growth because of the pandemic and supply-chain issues.
In Virginia, exit polls showed that Republican Glenn Youngkin won voters who prioritized just about every issue — taxes, the economy, education — except for the coronavirus. One Republican operative pointed to results that show military and veteran voters in the state unhappy with Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal. And Virginia’s coastline means lots of jobs are tied to shipping, and supply-chain issues mean these workers are on the front lines of the economic quagmire.
2. Democrats appear mired in legislative dysfunction
As his campaign for governor in Virginia started to flounder, Democrat Terry McAuliffe was basically begging Democrats in Washington to pass a bipartisan infrastructure bill.
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But it is stalled in Washington, held up by House liberals — members of McAuliffe’s own party. They have been holding on to it for months as leverage to win moderate Senate Democratic votes on a big, social safety net package.
That Democrats are holding up Democratic priorities underscores how much the party is struggling to make major legislative changes with its tenuous hold on power.
All the Democratic infighting potentially feeds into a Republican narrative — which really started with the Afghanistan withdrawal — that Democrats are not the competent governing party they promised to be.
One ray of hope for Democrats: Could the narrative of their messy leadership change if and when they pass major legislation reshaping the federal safety net for millions of Americans? A number of these policies are broadly popular.
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“This will be the first year of a presidency that rivals any presidency of the past 100 years,” Democratic operative Jim Kessler said last week, when it looked more likely that Democrats had a deal on their social spending package.
But that agenda could get much more difficult to pass as Democrats rethink their priorities, reports The Post’s Sean Sullivan.
In addition, Republicans looking to take back the House of Representatives next year have their own polling that shows that when framed through Republican talking points, Democrats’ social spending package can be politically unpopular with swing voters.
“I get that Democrats want to point to legislation as the magic bullet to get out of their rut, but the bigger problem for them is that they haven’t delivered — and what they want to deliver is politically toxic,” said Calvin Moore, communications director for the Congressional Leadership Fund, a PAC focused on helping Republicans take back the House. “They don’t have a winning message for swing voters, and they are hoping they can paper over that by screaming ‘Trump’ into the void. But it just doesn’t work.”
3. Republicans are taking up culture war battles — and winning
In 2020 — and, to some degree, in Virginia House of Delegates races in 2021 — it was “defund the police.” No, major Democratic candidates didn’t want to defund police departments. But Republicans led their attack ads in key congressional and Senate races with such rhetoric. Democrats struggled with how to respond. And even though Donald Trump lost the White House, Republicans performed surprisingly well down ballot and netted seats in the House.
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In 2021, Youngkin successfully grabbed on to an entirely different culture war battle and packaged it in a way that put Democrats back on their heels.
He combined critical-race-theory/coronavirus-safety-mandates/transgender-rights debates and turned it all — especially critical race theory — from an esoteric idea to something that felt more like a visceral threat to a number of parents. The through-line was a message that Democrats govern with such a heavy hand that parents won’t have a say in their own children’s education.
That particularly rankled voters in the pandemic era. Youngkin’s education attacks, Heye said, “come from a ground that was seeded by school closures, where every Virginia parent became a home-schooler overnight.” McAuliffe didn’t seem to grasp that when he said at a debate: “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”
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About half of Virginia voters said parents should have “a lot” of say in what their child’s school teaches, according to exit polls.
Youngkin has put together a playbook that Republicans running in House races in suburban and exurban districts are eager to follow, especially if talking about education helps them win back some of the female voters they lost when Trump was president.
It appears that was the case for Youngkin. In Virginia, McAuliffe won female voters by six points, according to exit polls. A year ago, Biden won Virginia women by 23 points.