Dem fears rise as Va. loss exposes party’s weakness
The menacing thunder could not get much louder for Democrats.
Few in the party had high hopes that their era of rule in Washington would last beyond the 2022 midterm elections. But the Republican resurgence Tuesday in Virginia — a state that President Joe Biden won by 10 percentage points last year — and surprising strength in solidly blue New Jersey offer a warning of the storm clouds gathering for Democrats.
For five years, the party rode record-breaking turnouts to victory, fueled by voters with a passion for ousting a president they viewed as incompetent, divisive or worse. Tuesday’s results showed the limitations of such resistance politics when the object of resistance is out of power, the failure of Democrats to fulfill many of their biggest campaign promises, and the still-simmering rage over a pandemic that transformed schools into some of the country’s most divisive political battlegrounds.
In Virginia, the Democratic nominee for governor, Terry McAuliffe, was beaten with relative ease by Glenn Youngkin, a Republican private equity executive and political newcomer.
In New Jersey, Gov. Phil Murphy, a Democrat, who narrowly won reelection, faced a stunningly close race after being expected to coast to victory. In Minneapolis, voters rejected a ballot measure pushed by progressives that would have replaced the Police Department with a public safety department.
In the coming days, Democratic anxieties and recriminations over the party’s loss in Virginia — the marquee race of the off-year elections — will echo from those suburban swing districts to Capitol Hill as the midterm map extends into areas once considered safer for Democrats.
Even before the race was officially called for Youngkin, Democratic strategists were calling for their party to examine whether continuing to focus on Donald Trump remained the best strategy, particularly after an election in which Biden promised his supporters that they would no longer have to worry about — or even think about — the round-theclock drama of the previous administration.
“The Democrats need to take a serious look at how we chose to engage with the Trump narrative,” said Dan Sena, a Democratic strategist who helped the party win the House in 2018. “This was an election where the Democrats did not lean into their accomplishments either in Virginia or nationally. And as we look to 2022, we’re going to have to ask some hard questions about whether that’s the right strategy.”
Off-year elections have never been perfect predictors of future success. And even before the Virginia race tightened in late August, the national environment looked inauspicious for Democrats, who may lose seats in redistricting and face the historical trend of a president’s party losing seats during his first term in office.
But in a state where elections tend to be interwoven with national politics because of proximity to Washington, it is hard to separate McAuliffe’s defeat from worsening views of the administration. In the week before Election Day, likely voters in Virginia disapproved of Biden’s job performance by 53% to 46%, according to a Washington Post-Schar School poll; 44% of voters in the state strongly disapproved of the president’s performance, compared with only 21% who strongly approved.
Even more worrisome for Democrats: Significant majorities now believe that the country is headed in the wrong direction.
Republicans argue that Democrats and McAuliffe’s campaign failed to address what is behind that sense of decline: increased costs of groceries and gas caused by inflation, continued frustration with schools, supply chain challenges, and crime.
Moderate Democrats argued that the defeat was a sign that Congress must immediately pass the party’s infrastructure bill, regardless of what happens with the shrunken version of Biden’s legislative agenda. The left blamed the failure of the party to push a broader agenda, including overturning the filibuster to pass liberal priorities like bills protecting the right to vote. Instead of grappling with thorny problems, Democrats cast back to their best motivator: Trump.
“This has been a negative Trump-focused scare tactic campaign, and I think the top line is the declining salience of that,” said Tré Easton, a senior adviser for Battle Born Collective, a progressive advocacy group. “You can’t scare people into the polls. You have to give people something to vote for.”