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      McAuliffe Showed How You Lose Gracefully in Virginia

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      Glenn Youngkin’s victory over Terry McAuliffe in the Virginia governor’s race surprised many people in a state that has been trending blue for years. Republican candidates also won the other top races in the state, for lieutenant governor and attorney general.All three races were high-profile, closely fought affairs. Yet there were no claims of fraud by the losers, no conspiracy theories about Venezuelan despots rigging voting machines, no spurious lawsuits demanding recounts. As of Wednesday afternoon, at least, the State Capitol in Richmond stands untouched.How refreshing to see adults accepting defeat with grace.And the stakes were plenty high. Democrats across the country had grown increasingly anxious over the polls coming out of Virginia, and for good reason. It’s considered a bellwether for the midterm elections, and Tuesday’s vote served as the first major referendum on the Biden era.The McAuliffe campaign’s reaction to his crushing loss? Gird yourselves. “Congratulations to Governor-elect Glenn Youngkin on his victory,” Mr. McAuliffe said in a statement Wednesday morning. “I hope Virginians will join me in wishing the best to him and his family.”Come again? Republican turnout was way up in key precincts; surely Mr. McAuliffe was teeing up to make some wild accusation about partisan operatives stuffing ballot boxes. “While last night we came up short, I am proud that we spent this campaign fighting for the values we so deeply believe in,” the statement said.It’s almost like listening to a foreign language, isn’t it? Over the past year, Americans have been subjected to an endless temper tantrum by one of the country’s two major political parties — a party now led by people who have apparently lost the capacity to admit defeat. One year to the day since the polls closed in 2020, Donald Trump still hasn’t formally conceded that election. He couldn’t even muster the dignity and decorum to hand over the presidency to Joe Biden in person, skipping town on Inauguration Day like a crook on the lam.This can’t-accept-defeat mentality began in earnest before the 2016 election, which Mr. Trump said was rigged even after he won, and it has set the tone for all that has come since. It emboldened the absurd and dangerous campaign of lies about election fraud in 2020, which notably focused on the big cities where larger numbers of Black voters live. It led directly to the deadly Jan. 6 riot that Mr. Trump incited at the U.S. Capitol. And it continues to infect the party 10 months later, as top Republicans still refuse to acknowledge Mr. Biden as the legitimately elected president and Republican-led states pass laws to make it easier for their legislatures to overturn the will of the voters if they don’t like the result.Speaking of election fraud, Republicans have been strangely quiet on the topic this time around. Interesting how that works: When a Democrat wins, it’s ipso facto proof of fraud. When a Republican wins — presto! — the election is on the level. This is how so many top Republicans managed to keep a straight face in 2020 as they argued that votes for Mr. Biden were fraudulent even while votes for winning Republican candidates farther down the same ballot were magically untainted.Hey, Republicans! This does not have to be so hard. All you have to do is value American democracy more than you value your own party’s hold on power. I guarantee that Democrats want to win just as badly as you do, and yet they take their lumps like grown-ups.Here are some examples to learn from: In 2016, Hillary Clinton conceded less than a day after polls closed, even though she was running neck and neck with Mr. Trump in key swing states and was sitting on a popular-vote lead that would eventually swell to nearly three million votes. President Obama called Mr. Trump in the middle of the night to congratulate him; this is the most basic stuff of peaceful democratic transitions, and yet Mr. Trump could never bring himself to do it.Or recall what Vice President Al Gore did on Dec. 13, 2000, conceding one of the closest elections in more than a century after the Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 to stop the vote counting in Florida. “I accept the finality of this outcome, which will be ratified next Monday in the Electoral College. And tonight, for the sake of our unity as a people and the strength of our democracy, I offer my concession,” Mr. Gore said in a nationally televised address that should stand as one of the most important moments in American history.Alas, Republicans these days seem more intent on deflecting criticism than on hearing it. Cue the references to Stacey Abrams, who refused to concede the 2018 Georgia governor’s race after losing to her Republican opponent, Brian Kemp. Agreed, that wasn’t good. It also wasn’t good that Mr. Kemp, as the secretary of state at the time, was in charge of running the election in which he was a candidate. After her defeat, she and others accused him of suppressing turnout by purging Georgia’s rolls of more than 1.4 million inactive voters. It’s worth noting that Ms. Abrams was not the incumbent and that no major Democratic figures publicly supported her refusal to concede.Losing is hard. It happens to everybody. But a concession is not just a symbolic gesture. It is the sine qua non of representative democracy — a literal enactment of the loser’s acceptance of the legitimacy of his or her opponent. When a single candidate refuses to concede, it’s corrosive. When a sitting president and much of his party refuse to, it can turn deadly, as the world saw on Jan. 6.I’m no fan of Mr. Youngkin, but he won fair and square, just as Mr. Biden did a year ago. Maybe Mr. Youngkin’s victory will remind his party that it can still prevail in closely fought elections and accept the ones they lose. Meanwhile, Republicans should read Mr. McAuliffe’s statement and remember why it’s so important to lose gracefully.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      What Youngkin's Win in the Virginia Governor Race Means for Democrats

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      Less than a year after taking power in Washington, the party faces a grim immediate future, struggling to energize voters without a presidential foil and losing messaging wars to Republicans.The menacing thunder couldn’t get much louder for Democrats.Few in the party had high hopes that their era of rule in Washington would last beyond the midterm elections next year. But the Republican resurgence on Tuesday in Virginia — a state that President Biden won by 10 percentage points last year — and surprising strength in solidly blue New Jersey offer a vivid warning of the storm clouds gathering as Democrats look warily to the horizon.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.The Republican Glenn Youngkin, a former private-equity executive, defeated the Democrat Terry McAuliffe in the race for Virginia’s governor.Melissa Lyttle for The New York TimesIn 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, 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.Perhaps most strikingly, the crushing setbacks for Democrats in heavily suburban Virginia and New Jersey hinted at a conservative-stoked backlash to the changing mores around race and identity championed by the party, as Republicans relentlessly sought to turn schools into the next front in the country’s culture wars.For Democrats, the results on the nation’s single biggest day of voting until the midterms next year raised alarms that the wave of anti-Trump energy that carried them into power has curdled into apathy in a base that is tired of protesting and is largely back at brunch. Or, in what would be even more politically perilous, that the party’s motivation has been replaced by a sense of dissatisfaction with the state of a country that has, despite all of Mr. Biden’s campaign promises, not yet returned to a pre-Covid sense of normalcy.Virginia Shifts Right in Race for GovernorThe Republican candidate for governor, Glenn Youngkin, received much stronger support in every corner of the state than President Trump did in 2020. Mr. Youngkin defeated former Gov. Terry McAuliffe, the Democrat, according to The Associated Press. More

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      New Jersey’s Governor’s Race is Too Close to Call

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      Gov. Philip D. Murphy pulled ahead of his Republican challenger, Jack Ciattarelli, on Wednesday in the race for governor of New Jersey, a contest that was still too close to call and was emboldening national Republicans. Mr. Murphy, a Democrat in his first term, trailed by more than 50,000 votes at one point after the polls closed on Tuesday night, an unexpected deficit in a race that a recent Monmouth University poll had him leading by 11 points. But Mr. Ciattarelli’s once significant lead had evaporated as results trickled in from Democratic strongholds, especially those in northern New Jersey like Essex County, which includes Newark. With 88 percent of the expected vote counted, Mr. Murphy led by 1,408 votes as of 10 a.m. on Wednesday, according to tallies reported by The Associated Press.By dawn on Wednesday, Democrats expressed optimism that Mr. Murphy would survive once all the votes were counted.Representative Josh Gottheimer, Democrat of New Jersey, predicted that Mr. Murphy would win during an appearance Wednesday on CNN while acknowledging the restlessness of voters.“My takeaway overall in this election is that people want action,” Mr. Gottheimer said. “They want results, and they deserve results.”At about 12:30 a.m., both candidates took the stages at their election-night parties to tell supporters that the results of the contest would not be clear until all provisional and vote-by-mail ballots were counted.“We’re all sorry that tonight could not yet be the celebration that we wanted it to be,” said Mr. Murphy, surrounded by his family in Asbury Park’s Convention Hall. “But as I said: When every vote is counted — and every vote will be counted — we hope to have a celebration again.”Mr. Ciattarelli, 59, said much the same thing, but appeared far more relaxed after outperforming every public opinion poll conducted during the campaign in a state where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by nearly 1.1 million voters.“We have sent a message to the entire country,” Mr. Ciattarelli told supporters gathered in Bridgewater. “But this is what I love about this state, if you study its history: Every single time it’s gone too far off track, the people of this state have pushed, pulled and prodded it right back to where it needs to be.”At 4 a.m., the candidates remained in a statistical dead heat, with about 12 percent of votes still uncounted.Regardless of who wins, the razor-thin margin has made clear just how divided voters are about the tough policies Mr. Murphy imposed to control the spread of the coronavirus, and his liberal agenda on taxation, climate change and racial equity.Mr. Murphy, a wealthy former Goldman Sachs executive and ambassador to Germany, had campaigned on the unabashedly left-leaning agenda he pushed through during this first term.But the defining issue of the campaign was the pandemic, which has killed about 28,000 residents, hobbled much of the region’s economy and disrupted the education of 1.3 million public school students.Mr. Murphy was one of the last governors to repeal an indoor mask mandate and among the first to require teachers to be vaccinated or submit to regular testingMr. Ciattarelli, a former assemblyman, made Mr. Murphy’s strict pandemic edicts a centerpiece of his campaign. The Republican opposed Covid-19 vaccine mandates and mandatory masking in schools, and he blamed Mr. Murphy’s early lockdown orders for hurting small businesses and keeping students out of school for too long.Kevin Armstrong and Lauren Hard contributed reporting. More

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      Terry McAuliffe Concedes in Virginia Governor's Race

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      Former Gov. Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic candidate for governor in Virginia, conceded on Wednesday morning to his Republican opponent, the businessman Glenn Youngkin, as the Republican Party claimed the state’s governorship for the first time in more than a decade.“While last night we came up short, I am proud that we spent this campaign fighting for the values we so deeply believe in,” Mr. McAuliffe said in a statement.He added, “While there will be setbacks along the way, I am confident that the long-term path of Virginia is toward inclusion, openness and tolerance for all.”With his victory, Mr. Youngkin, 54, presented his party with a formula for how to exploit President Biden’s vulnerabilities and evade the shadow of Donald J. Trump in Democratic-leaning states. A wealthy former private equity executive making his first run for office, he elevated education and taxes while projecting a suburban-dad demeanor to demonstrate he was different from Mr. Trump without saying so outright.With Mr. Trump out of office, Mr. McAuliffe struggled to generate enthusiasm among liberals at a moment when conservatives are energized in opposition to Mr. Biden.The Associated Press called the race for Mr. Youngkin shortly after 12:30 a.m. Wednesday morning, hours after the polls closed on Tuesday night.Mr. Youngkin’s surprise victory in Virginia represents the starkest warning yet that Democrats are in danger. It was likely to prompt additional congressional retirements, intensify the intraparty tug of war over Mr. Biden’s agenda and fuel fears that a midterm electoral wave and Mr. Trump’s return as a candidate are all but inevitable.“The MAGA movement is bigger and stronger than ever before,” Mr. Trump said in a statement Tuesday night. More

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      Governor Murphy Speaks at Election Night Rally

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      Whether it’s reporting on conflicts abroad and political divisions at home, or covering the latest style trends and scientific developments, Times Video journalists provide a revealing and unforgettable view of the world.Whether it’s reporting on conflicts abroad and political divisions at home, or covering the latest style trends and scientific developments, Times Video journalists provide a revealing and unforgettable view of the world. More

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      Catch up on Election Day results from around the United States.

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      The governor’s races in Virginia and New Jersey and the New York City mayoral election were among the highlights.After voters elected President Biden and pushed Republicans fully out of power in Washington, the party rebounded with a strong election night on Tuesday, highlighted by Glenn Youngkin’s victory in Virginia’s governor’s race.Here is a run-down of election results from some of the closely watched races around the country on Tuesday.Virginia governor’s raceBusinessman Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, defeated former Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat who struggled to generate enthusiasm among liberals at a moment when conservatives are energized in opposition to Mr. Biden.The victory by Mr. Youngkin, a first-time candidate in one of only two gubernatorial races before next year’s midterm election, may provide his party with a formula for how to exploit President Biden’s vulnerabilities and evade the shadow of former President Donald J. Trump in Democratic-leaning states.New Jersey governor’s raceFormer Assemblyman Jack Ciattarelli, a moderate Republican, surprised many analysts with a strong showing in the race for governor in New Jersey against Gov. Philip D. Murphy, a Democrat seeking a second term who was ahead in most public polling before Tuesday’s contest.The race was too close to call early Wednesday.New York CityIn the city’s mayoral race, Eric Adams, a former police captain and Brooklyn borough president, easily dispatched his long shot Republican candidate, Curtis Sliwa, to become only the second Black person elected mayor in the city’s history.And Alvin Bragg was elected Manhattan district attorney. He will become the first Black person to lead the influential office, which handles tens of thousands of cases a year and is conducting a high-profile investigation into former President Donald J. Trump and his family business.Boston mayor’s raceMichelle Wu easily defeated City Councilor Annissa Essaibi George to become the first woman, first person of color and first person of Asian descent to be elected mayor in Boston. The city has been led by an unbroken string of Irish American or Italian American men since the 1930s.Minneapolis police ballot itemMinneapolis residents rejected an amendment that called for replacing the city’s long-troubled Police Department with a new Department of Public Safety, The Associated Press projected.The ballot item emerged from anger after a Minneapolis police officer murdered George Floyd last year, galvanizing residents who saw the policing system as irredeemably broken. More