AP Photo/Andrew Harnik
- Republicans celebrated Glenn Youngkin's victory in VA and the neck-and-neck status of NJ's gubernatorial race.
- Strategists say the results show Republicans can run on issues like the economy and education.
- Democrats may no longer be able to win by making it just about Trump.
On Tuesday night, Glenn Youngkin became the first Republican to win a gubernatorial election in Virginia in more than a decade. And in New Jersey, Democratic incumbent Gov. Phil Murphy barely eked out a victory against Republican challenger Jack Ciattarelli, beating him by less than one point after a neck-and-neck race.
The results in two states that President Joe Biden won last November by 10 and 16 percentage points, respectively, are forcing Democrats to take a hard look in the mirror as the party gears up for a potentially bruising midterm election cycle.
It's not about Trump anymore
The 2020 presidential election was largely viewed as a referendum on then-President Donald Trump. The country was grappling with a raging pandemic and an unstable economy, as well as a president who for months peddled nonsense conspiracy theories about widespread voter fraud and election malfeasance. For many who went to the ballot box in November 2020, the choice wasn't so much a vote for Biden as one against Trump. That was evidenced by Republican gains in down-ballot races and in state legislatures across the country, even as Trump lost the national popular vote by more than seven million.
Now, the dynamic has shifted.
Biden's popularity has plummeted in recent months. His approval rating is currently 42.9%, according to FiveThirtyEight, and his disapproval rating is at 50.7%. That's a higher disapproval rating than almost every other president since the start of modern polling, with the exception of Trump, whose disapproval rating was nearly six percentage-points higher at the same point in his first term.
Youngkin's victory in Virginia was "not an embrace of the Republicans, it was a rejection of the Democrats," said the veteran Republican pollster Frank Luntz. Virginia has become a blue state in recent years, and for Republicans "to reverse that," Luntz continued, "is the voter saying to the Democrats in Washington who are not that far away, 'Enough already, stop.'"
Republicans can win by shedding Trump's 'baggage'
Trump on Tuesday night credited himself for Youngkin's win, thanking "MAGA voters" for propelling him to victory and mocking Democrat Terry McAuliffe for losing by making his campaign all about Trump.
But a closer look at Youngkin's campaign shows he walked a fine line between casting himself as his own man while working to keep Trump's support.
Youngkin "really moderated on economic issues," Sean McElwee, the co-founder of the left-leaning polling shop Data for Progress, told Insider. "He didn't talk about cuts to education, he talked about more funding for education and sort of softening the edges of the culture war issue so that a suburban voter didn't even know the hard-right versions of the Critical Race Theory scares."
Over in New Jersey, Ciattarelli also campaigned as a moderate Republican, voicing his support for Roe v. Wade and for undocumented immigrants obtaining driver's licenses.
If the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, Ciattarelli said during the campaign that "we will codify it here in New Jersey."
"I support a woman's right to choose," he added, though he said he opposes the Reproductive Freedom Act pending in the state legislature and that he believes it's too extreme.
And while he criticized Murphy's position on COVID-19 vaccine mandates, Ciattarelli also underscored that he's not in the same camp as more hardline Republicans.
"I'm not where Phil Murphy is" on COVID-19 measures, "but I'm certainly not where [Florida Gov.] Ron DeSantis is," Ciattarelli said in a recent interview with the USA Today Network New Jersey Editorial Board.
It's the economy, stupid
Both Democratic and Republican strategists and pollsters agreed that voters are very concerned about economic conditions under Biden. Voters are dissatisfied with a range of issues, including inflation, the supply chain, and wages.
"What's going to matter in 2022 is really where the economy is," Jeff Horwitt, a Democratic pollster with Hart Research Associates, told Insider. "When it comes to independents in the middle, 2022 and 2024 are really going to be about economic conditions and if they don't improve that's going to be a real challenge for Democrats."
Voters also appear to have uncoupled the COVID-19 pandemic from the economy, which hurts Democrats as the party holding the presidency and an exceedingly slim majority in Congress. Voters don't necessarily believe the economy will improve as the pandemic recedes.
"People definitely think Biden and the Democrats do a better job on COVID, but it's not linked as much to their overall assessments of performance, and it's not linked as much to the economy," Celinda Lake, a veteran Democratic pollster who advised Biden's campaign, told Insider. "COVID and the economy are not as tied and people feel like I want to get the economy going no matter what is happening on COVID."
Democrats need to get more done
Biden kicked his presidency off with a strong start, shepherding through the passage of the landmark $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, which delivered much-needed coronavirus aid to Americans, businesses, and state and local governments.
But since then, the Biden administration has struggled to produce tangible results and the president has faced sharp criticism on both domestic and foreign policy. The White House came under harsh scrutiny for its botched withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan, and Biden was also criticized for his confusing messaging on COVID-19 restrictions and vaccine mandates.
McElwee called Tuesday's Democratic losses "bruising," adding, "My big takeaway is that we should fucking do something about it. We should pass laws that make peoples' lives better and then we should tell them that we're passing laws to make their lives better."
Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic strategist and former senior communications aide to Hillary Clinton, echoed that view, telling Insider, "People are deeply cynical about anything a politician says they're going to do. So Democrats need to be able to show results of what they've done by being in power, not just tell people about what they want to do."
Facilitating access to the ballot box benefits both parties
Virginia Democrats took significant steps to expand voting access heading into this year's election, leading to historically high turnout - on both sides. As The Guardian's Sam Levine noted, they repealed voter ID requirements, implemented automatic voter registration and no-excuse mail-in voting, extended the deadline to receive ballots past Election Day, and used executive action to circumvent a lifetime ban on voting for those convicted of felonies.
This year's turnout in Virginia exceeded that of 2017 - another off-year election cycle - and Republicans made monumental gains this time around. But this election proved that higher turnout doesn't automatically benefit Democrats. Turnout in both Virginia and New Jersey was much higher among red, rather than blue, voters.
"It used to be that non-voters were much more Democratic than the overall electorate and so higher turnout benefited Democrats," said one Democratic pollster, who requested anonymity to speak candidly. "My estimate was that in 2020, non-voters as a group were actually more Republican than voters overall, by about two points."
That pollster attributes the shift in non-voters' behavior to Democrats' plummeting popularity among working-class voters, including people of color.
"This election, not even having Trump on the ballot, I think points to a much clearer general dynamic, which is that Democrats do a lot worse with working class people than they used to … and they also do substantially worse with non-white voters than they used to," he said.
Republicans leaned into the culture wars - and the voters listened
Both Republican and Democratic pollsters agreed that the GOP strategy of playing up the culture wars went in their favor.
"One of the central lessons from last night is that the culture war issues are animating the middle right now," said the GOP strategist Matt Mackowiak. "And Republicans spoke to those issues in ways that voters in the middle were receptive to. You've gotta be strategic and disciplined and Youngkin certainly was."
Ferguson said he expects Republicans to double down on a "divisive agenda as they go towards the midterms because they've got nothing else to sell."
"A year and half ago they decided not to have a party platform," he added, likely referring to the Republican Party's decision not to renew its platform heading into the 2020 election and simply adopting its 2016 platform. "Their only resort is these divisive cultural issues," Ferguson said. "Those issues can work if voters don't see a better alternative. But if Democrats are actually delivering on something and Republicans are more focused on dividing people against each other that can become a real vulnerability for them in the midterms."