FAIRFAX, Va., (Reuters) – Republicans pushed Democrats out of the Virginia governorship and did unexpectedly well in heavily Democratic New Jersey yesterday, signaling trouble for President Joe Biden’s party heading into next year’s congressional elections.
Republican Glenn Youngkin, a former private equity executive, beat former Governor Terry McAuliffe in Tuesday vote, with the Democrat conceding on Wednesday morning. Youngkin had distanced himself just enough from former President Donald Trump to win back moderates who had supported Biden just a year ago.
In New Jersey, incumbent Democrat Phil Murphy held a narrow lead over Republican challenger Jack Ciattarelli, even though registered Democratic voters outnumber Republicans there by more than 1 million.
Both saw strong gains in the suburbs from independent voters who had been turned off by Trump’s style of politics. The results in states that Biden won easily in 2020 suggest that Democrats’ razor-thin majorities in Congress are highly vulnerable in the 2022 elections.
Republican control of both, or even one, chamber of Congress would give the party the ability to block Biden’s legislative agenda during the final two years of his current term in office.
The loss also gives Trump an opportunity to point to Virginia as a repudiation of Biden as he sets the stage for another possible presidential run in 2024.
Despite the losses, the top Democrats in Congress vowed to push ahead on Biden’s legislative agenda, hoping to pass twin bills worth a combined $2.75 trillion to rebuild the nation’s roads and bridges, as well as bolster the social safety net and fight climate change. They have already been held up by months of infighting between Democrats’ progressive and moderate wings.
Some senior Democrats said the party would need to do a better job of explaining the benefits of those programs. The party was seen as failing to do on Obamacare during the 2010 midterm elections that then-President Barack Obama called a “shellacking” for his party.
“We are going to learn from history,” Representative Hakeem Jeffries, who heads the House Democratic Caucus, told reporters on Tuesday. “We are going to message with simplicity and repetition.”
In another contest, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey won a second term in Tuesday’s election, emerging from a crowded field of candidates after a tumultuous year dominated by the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder by a white city police officer.
