Voters send a message to the far-left

The message from voters in Tuesday's elections slammed into Democrats like an express train, and now elected officials, candidates, and consultants will have to sort out what it all means for the next campaign.

The headline race on Tuesday was the contest for governor of Virginia, a face-off between former governor and longtime Democratic power player Terry McAuliffe and financier Glenn Youngkin, a Republican first-time candidate. Because the election for Virginia's governor is held in odd-numbered years ahead of the midterm congressional elections, it has long been seen as something of a crystal ball showing the future of the legislative majority in Washington.

Youngkin's victory over McAuliffe, who was leading in polls until recently, marked the first time in a decade that Republicans had won the governorship of Virginia. The Associated Press VoteCast poll surveyed voters in the state and found that their toppriority issue was the economy, cited by 34%. Coming in a distant second was COVID-19 at 17% followed by education at 14%.

Yet Virginia's unemployment rate in September was down to 3.8%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average is near its all-time high, so voters concerned about the economy may be thinking about the difficulty of buying groceries and gasoline. Gas prices in Virginia currently average $3.29 for a gallon of regular, up from $2.04 a year ago.

Inflation is tearing into the paychecks and savings of ordinary working people, and it's worse for those who are retired and living on a fixed income. While exit polling clearly showed that McAuliffe lost ground with parents of K-12 children with his comments about keeping parents away from decisions about their kids' education, the return of economic anxiety in the electorate appears to be a story that crossed state boundaries.

In New Jersey, an unexpected startlingly close election for governor saw incumbent Democratic Governor Phil Murphy barely win his race against longshot Republican former Assemblyman Jack Ciattarelli. “We're a liberal state, but reserve the right to change our mind,” explained John Farmer, Jr., director of Rutgers University's Eagleton Institute of Politics.

That's what worries congressional Democrats and emboldens minority-party Republicans. If voters have “changed their minds” about President Joe Biden, whose disapproval rating has surged above 50% just 10 months into his administration, the 2022 midterm elections could be a House and Senate eviction crisis for Democrats.

“Great innovations should not be forced on slender majorities,” Thomas Jefferson warned, and whatever the merits of the progressive agenda, the Democrats' singledigit majority in the House and 50-50 governing majority in the Senate simply do not represent a permit from the voters to speed in the carpool lane toward everywhere the most liberal wing of the Democratic party wants to go.

In addition to warning signs on the issues of the economy and education, the defund-the-police movement fared badly. In Seattle, voters elected law-and-order candidate Ann Davison as city attorney over Nicole ThomasKennedy, a public defender who described herself as a police “abolitionist.” Minneapolis voters rejected a measure to replace the city's police department with a “Department of Public Safety.”

New York voters elected former NYPD captain Eric Adams as the city's next mayor.

Republicans would be unwise to read into the election results a broad mandate for every policy they support.

The message from a divided electorate may simply be, “Slow down and let us live.”