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      Why Republicans Won in a New York County Where Democrats Outnumber Them

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      Voters readily ousted Democrats in Nassau County on Long Island, electing Republicans down the ballot.It wasn’t the high taxes in Nassau County, or the recent changes to New York’s bail laws that drove Lizette Sonsini, a former Democrat, to vote Republican this year.Her reasons were more overarching.“I don’t like the president, and the Democrats are spending too much money on things like infrastructure, when really we need politicians who are going to bring more money back into this country,” said Ms. Sonsini, 56, of Great Neck.“Maybe if Democrats see how we’re voting in these local elections,” she said, “they will see we’re not happy with the way things are going.”Across the country, Democrats witnessed an intense backlash on Election Day, as the party suffered major losses in Virginia and in many suburban communities like Nassau County, where Democratic leaders were swept from office by Republicans — even though registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by 100,000.The Democratic county executive, Laura Curran, trailed her Republican opponent, Bruce Blakeman, by more than four percentage points; Mr. Blakeman has declared victory, but Ms. Curran has not conceded.The race for district attorney, a post that has been held by a Democrat since 2006, was won by the Republican Anne Donnelly, a 32-year veteran of the district attorney’s office with little prior political experience. She coasted to a 20-point win over Todd Kaminsky, a Democratic state senator and former federal prosecutor. And the race to replace the outgoing Democratic county comptroller went to a Republican, Elaine Phillips. Off-year elections are often hard for the party of the sitting president, but the results defied candidate expectations and bolstered arguments that President Biden’s unpopularity and the Democratic Party’s internecine battles were undermining its viability in the suburbs.“It’s almost like we’re back temporarily to the ’60s and ’70s,” said Lawrence Levy, executive dean of the National Center for Suburban Studies at Hofstra University, referring to a time when Republicans ruled the Nassau County roost. “The real question is how long this will last.”Four years ago, Democratic voters in Nassau County treated the 2017 election as an early referendum on President Donald J. Trump. They staged postcard-writing campaigns and held living-room fund-raisers, and an energized electorate pushed Ms. Curran to become only the third Democrat in 80 years to be county executive in Nassau.This year, the roles were reversed: The county has more than a million registered voters; 264,000 showed up and they voted overwhelmingly Republican, seemingly ousting Ms. Curran after one term.“There was a wave, there’s no doubt about it, even for an unapologetically pro-business, pro-public safety Democrat,” Ms. Curran said in an interview, referring to herself.In conversations with more than a dozen Nassau County voters this week, they cited their overall disapproval of the president, their distaste for vaccine mandates and a fear of funds being diverted from the police as factors in their decision to vote Republican. Concerns over Mr. Biden’s handling of Israel also arose several times.Among those voting Republican was Audrey Alleva, a 64-year-old Garden City resident with family in the military, who cited the president’s performance as a factor in her decision.“I don’t like the way President Biden handled the country leaving Afghanistan,” Ms. Alleva said.Sam Liviem, a 70-year-old Great Neck resident, cited other recent Democratic pushes as reason to cast his ballot for Republicans.“When liberals try to push ‘defund the police,’ when they try to take down statues of people from the past, when they want to wipe out history, you are going back to the law of the jungle,” Mr. Liviem said.Nassau County was recently ranked the safest county in the United States by U.S. News and World Report. But the Nassau Republican Party exploited fears about crime to drive voters to the polls, particularly in the case of Mr. Kaminsky, who supported changes in state bail laws that Republicans blame for the county’s recent rise in shootings, which have increased across the country during the pandemic.In 2019, New York State curtailed bail for many nonviolent defendants, who might otherwise have stayed in pretrial detention because they could not pay. But law enforcement authorities argued the law was overly broad and faulted it for not granting judges more discretion to detain defendants they considered a risk to public safety.Mr. Kaminsky supported the original bail reform bill. And, in a video of the 2019 Senate proceedings widely circulated by the Donnelly campaign, the senate deputy majority leader, Michael Gianaris, explicitly thanks four senators, including Mr. Kaminsky, for their support. That vote came to haunt Mr. Kaminsky during his campaign.Todd Kaminsky, a Democratic state senator, lost his bid for Nassau County district attorney in part because of his support of the state’s changes to bail laws.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesThough Mr. Kaminsky vastly outspent Ms. Donnelly on advertising that tried to portray him as a tough-on-crime former prosecutor — her campaign spent more than $800,000 on television and online ads, according to the state Board of Elections, while his spent about $1.3 million as of mid-October — the Donnelly campaign’s message stuck.In one ad, the Donnelly campaign recruited the mother of a shooting victim from Syracuse. “Senator Todd Kaminsky helped write the law that set my daughter’s killer free,” says the mother, Jennifer Payne, who also appeared in a 2020 ad for Representative John Katko, a Republican from central New York.In another Donnelly ad, viewers were met by ominous music and the mustachioed visage of John Wighaus, the president of the Nassau County Detectives Association, who held Mr. Kaminsky responsible for the release of “killers, rapists and violent thugs.”“I think crime was on everybody’s mind, I think bail reform was on everyone’s mind,” Ms. Donnelly said in an interview. She noted that concerns about crime in New York City, which bolstered the election of Eric Adams as mayor, played a role in Nassau.“It’s a regional issue,” Ms. Donnelly said. “It’s a countrywide issue.” Ms. Donnelly will be the county’s first Republican district attorney originally elected as a Republican since William Cahn in the 1960s, said Joseph Cairo, the county Republican chairman. (Denis Dillon, who served as Nassau County district attorney for three decades, was elected as a Democrat before switching to the Republican Party in the 1980s.)Ms. Curran argued anxiety about criminal justice issues seeped into her race, too.“This bail reform issue was very motivating to voters,” said Ms. Curran, who tried to distance herself from the bail legislation by appearing on “Fox and Friends” to decry the new law as an overreach.Laura Curran, the Democratic county executive, was blamed by her opponent for raising property taxes. Mark Lennihan/Associated PressIf state and national political issues inflamed the debate in Nassau County, local issues proved potent, too.Takeaways From the 2021 ElectionsCard 1 of 5A G.O.P. pathway in Virginia. More

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      Republicans, Basking in Tuesday’s Victories, Diverge on What Comes Next

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      Looming over a gathering of Jewish conservatives in Las Vegas were questions about whether former President Donald J. Trump should remain the face of the party.LAS VEGAS — Two strikingly divergent visions of Republican political strength played out over the weekend at a conference of Jewish conservatives, the first major gathering of G.O.P. leaders since the party’s sweeping success in Tuesday’s elections. There were displays of blustery confidence. And there were calls for caution and restraint as party leaders tried to process their drastic gains.Looming over it all, and mostly addressed gingerly, was the uncertainty about whether Republicans could replicate their decisive gains with suburban voters, especially women, if former President Donald J. Trump remained the face of the party.Although a majority of the speakers at the annual conference of the Republican Jewish Coalition were effusive with their praise of the former president and spent much of the two-day gathering citing his administration’s most conservative policy achievements, others warned that Republicans who continued to give cover to his baseless claims about fraud in the 2020 election were jeopardizing the party’s recent success.The most notable Trump skeptic was former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, who urged Republicans to promote a “plan for tomorrow, not a grievance about yesterday,” and said that the party would be making a grave mistake if it did not recommit itself to truth-telling.“Winning campaigns are always the campaigns that look forward, not backwards,” Mr. Christie said, earning only a smattering of applause from the crowd. Noting the less-than-enthusiastic response, Mr. Christie implored the audience: “That deserves applause. Because if we don’t get it, we are going to lose.”The 2020 election, Mr. Christie said, “is over.”The most notable Trump skeptic was former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, who urged Republicans to promote a “plan for tomorrow, not a grievance about yesterday.” Caroline Brehman/EPA, via ShutterstockBut that was not the message delivered by most other speakers — a group that included more than a half dozen of the current and former governors and senators who are considered possible presidential contenders and leaders-in-waiting whenever Mr. Trump recedes from the spotlight.They offered much different interpretations of the results on Election Day last week, which delivered wins for Republicans in Democratic strongholds up and down the ballot — from Virginia, where they won the governor’s race for the first time since 2009, to Washington State, where a candidate running on a message of law and order prevailed in the contest for city attorney in Seattle. Republicans also picked up seats in municipal races across New York City and Long Island and came close to pulling off a colossal upset in the governor’s race in New Jersey.“The trend is unmistakable,” said Representative Kevin McCarthy, the House Republican leader who hopes to lead his party back into the majority next year. “A Republican wave is underway.”A year into the Biden administration, polling data, history and Tuesday’s results indicate the political climate has become highly unfavorable to Democrats, who have proved that they can beat Mr. Trump but have not convinced enough Americans that they can govern effectively.The election results last week only boosted the optimism of Republicans who already believed they were likely to win the small number of seats they needed to win control of the House next year and were in a strong position to win a majority in the Senate as well.That confidence was irrepressible at their gathering in Las Vegas this weekend, as Republicans predicted not only big gains in the 2022 midterm elections, but in 2024 as well.Senator Ted Cruz of Texas said the results last week foreshadowed a victory in the House and the Senate. He also praised the “extraordinary courage” and “steel backbone” that Mr. Trump displayed as president.Mr. Cruz giddily described the despondency he said he witnessed among his Democratic colleagues on Capitol Hill over the election last week and vowed that the 2022 midterms would bring about the day when “Nancy’s going to get on her broom” and “fly back to California.” That remark, referring to the first woman to hold the position of speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, drew a round of hearty laughter from the audience.Speaking with reporters after his speech on Friday night, Mr. Cruz pointed to how suburban mothers were “coming home to the Republican Party” as a hopeful sign of the party’s fortunes. “I think there are a lot of people across this country, including some soccer moms in Virginia who may have voted for Joe Biden, and looked at this past year and were horrified.”But he twice declined to say whether the G.O.P. could again expect similar results if Mr. Trump — who repelled suburban men and women in such high numbers in 2020 that it cost him several swing states — resumed his role as his party’s standard-bearer.Still, like many other top Republicans who have offered their analysis of the country’s suddenly jolted political landscape, Mr. Cruz indicated that he believed the poor public perceptions of President Biden and the Democratic Party were enough to guarantee Republican success.Ron DeSantis talked up his work as governor of Florida putting into effect policies that borrow from former President Donald Trump’s agenda.Caroline Brehman/EPA, via ShutterstockGov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who is frequently mentioned as a top contender for the Republican 2024 presidential nomination should Mr. Trump decide not to run, thundered against what he called a “Fauchian dystopia,” a reference to the government’s leading infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who is a proponent of the kinds of public health mandates and restrictions on everyday activity that many Republicans have opposed.Trump’s Bid to Subvert the ElectionCard 1 of 6A monthslong campaign. More

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      Election Results in Virginia Prove Things Can Get Worse for Democrats

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      Republicans ran up the margins in rural Virginia counties, the latest sign that Democrats, as one lawmaker put it, “continue to tank in small-town America.”HOT SPRINGS, Va. — The increasingly liberal politics of Virginia had been a sore spot for residents of this conservative town of 499 people nestled in the Allegheny Mountains. But this past week, as Republicans stormed to marquee victories powered in part by turnout in rural areas like Bath County, local voters cheered.“We got our Virginia back,” said Elaine Neff, a 61-year-old resident. “And we haven’t had a win in a long time.”Ms. Neff said she cried from a mix of happiness and relief after the election. She does not want to take the coronavirus vaccine and believes Glenn Youngkin, the winning Republican candidate for governor, will relax state mandates. Outside a nearby grocery store, Charles Hamilton taunted the Democrats.“We’re a county of old country folk who want to do what they want,” said Mr. Hamilton, 74. “They found out the hard way.”Charles Hamilton said his vote for Glenn Youngkin was really a proxy vote for Donald Trump.Eze Amos for The New York TimesIn the jigsaw puzzle that is electoral politics, Democrats have often focused their energy on swingy suburbs and voter-rich cities, content to mostly ignore many white, rural communities that lean conservative. The belief was, in part, that the party had already bottomed out there, especially during the Trump era, when Republicans had run up the numbers of white voters in rural areas to dizzying new heights.Virginia, however, is proof: It can get worse.In 2008, there were only four small Virginia counties where Republicans won 70 percent or more of the vote in that year’s presidential race. Nowhere was the party above 75 percent. This year, Mr. Youngkin was above 70 percent in 45 counties — and he surpassed 80 percent in 15 of them.“Look at some of those rural counties in Virginia as a wake-up call,” said Steve Bullock, the Democratic former governor of Montana who made a long-shot 2020 presidential run, partly on a message that his party needed to compete in more conservative parts of the country. “Folks don’t feel like we’re offering them anything, or hearing or listening to them.”Mr. Youngkin not only won less populated areas by record margins — he was outpacing former President Donald J. Trump’s 2020 showing in even the reddest counties, including by six percentage points in Bath County — but he also successfully rolled back Democratic gains in the bedroom communities outside Washington and Richmond, where many college-educated white voters had rejected Republicanism under Mr. Trump.The twin results raise a foreboding possibility for Democrats: that the party had simply leased the suburbs in the Trump era, while Republicans may have bought and now own even more of rural America.Republicans have never had a demographic stronghold as reliable as Black voters have been for Democrats, a group that delivers as many as nine out of 10 votes for the party. But some Democratic leaders are now sounding the alarm: What if rural, white voters — of which there are many — start voting that reliably Republican?Hot Springs, population 499, is a conservative place nestled in the Allegheny Mountains.Eze Amos for The New York Times“It’s not sustainable for our party to continue to tank in small-town America,” said Representative Cheri Bustos, the Illinois congresswoman who led the House Democratic campaign arm in 2020.“We’ve got a branding problem as Democrats in way too many parts of our country,” said Ms. Bustos, who is retiring from a downstate and heavily rural Illinois seat that Mr. Trump carried twice. She called it “political malpractice” and “disrespectful to think it’s OK to run up the score in big cities and just neglect the smaller towns.”There is no easy solution.Many of the ideas and issues that animate the Democratic base can be off-putting in small towns or untethered to rural life. Voters in Bath County, many of whom are avid hunters and conservative evangelicals, have long opposed liberal stances on gun rights and abortions. Some Democrats urge the party to just show up more. Some believe liberal ideas can gain traction, such as universal health care and free community college. Others urge a refocus on kitchen-table economics like jobs programs and rural broadband to improve connectivity. But it is not clear how open voters are to even listening.Representative Dean Phillips, a Democrat who flipped a Republican-held seat outside Minneapolis in 2018, said that when it comes to issues that concern rural America, his party is afflicted with a “disease of disinterest.”He especially lamented how his party’s strategists routinely tell candidates “to fish where the Democratic fish are instead of taking that canoe out a little further out on the lake.”“For a party that predicates itself on inclusivity,” he added, “I’m afraid we’re acting awfully exclusive.”Mr. Phillips called for Democrats to include “geographic equity” in their agenda along with racial and economic equity, noting that he is a proud member of the state’s Democratic Party, which is formally known as the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. “I’m a D.F.L.-er and yet the F’s and the L’ers aren’t voting for us,” he said..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}The rural share of the vote in America has been steadily shrinking, but remains sizable enough to be politically potent. National exit polling in 2020 estimated that one in five voters lived in rural or small-town America. The Democratic data firm TargetSmart, which categorized voters based on population density, labeled 30 percent of the electorate as rural.But while some Democratic politicians now recognize the scope of their rural problem, the words of voters in Bath County expose the difficulty in finding solutions. In interviews with a dozen white, rural voters who backed Mr. Youngkin, policy was less important than grievance and their own identity politics. And the voters, fueled by a conservative media bubble that speaks in apocalyptic terms, were convinced that America had been brought to the brink by a litany of social movements that had gone too far.A Confederate statue stands next to the sheriff’s office in Hot Springs.Eze Amos for The New York TimesA monument to Confederate soldiers stands next to the sheriff’s office in Hot Springs, a visual representation of the cultural gap between its residents and the Democratic base. The town is accessible only by a two-lane highway that winds through mountains near the West Virginia border. It’s best known for The Homestead, a luxury resort founded in the late 1800s that has hosted golf tournaments, conferences for the United Nations and presidents, including William Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt.Ms. Neff, who owns a hardware store adorned with images of Mr. Trump as Rambo and the Terminator, was in Washington on Jan. 6 to support the former president — but refused to go into further detail. Citing false evidence, she called the coronavirus vaccine a “poison” and said she worried that Democrats were planning extermination camps of Mr. Trump’s supporters.Karen Williams, a Bath County resident who manages vacation rentals, said she resented the current Virginia governor, Ralph Northam, a Democrat, for keeping schools shut down during the pandemic, embracing progressive policies focused on race and removing Confederate statues and monuments. She called this an example of critical race theory, a graduate-level academic framework that has become shorthand for a contentious debate on how to teach race and racism in schools.White children “are no longer allowed to be kids, we’re treating them like little monsters,” Ms. Williams said.Mr. Hamilton, a veteran of the Vietnam War, said his vote for Mr. Youngkin was really a proxy vote for Mr. Trump. Of President Biden, he said, “the best thing that can happen is to get him and that woman out of there.”John Wright said he had become so frustrated with the mainstream media that he consumes only pro-Trump programming.Eze Amos for The New York TimesJohn Wright, a 68-year-old retiree, said he listened only to pro-Trump programming.“I don’t care if the media said the moon was full of cheese, and there was an astronaut who brought back some cheese,” Mr. Wright said. “If the media said it, I won’t believe it.”Takeaways From the 2021 ElectionsCard 1 of 5A G.O.P. pathway in Virginia. More

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      Democrats Need to Confront Their Privilege

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      One of the Democratic Party’s core problems is that it still regards itself mainly as the party of the underdog. But as the information-age economy has matured, the Democratic Party has also become the party of the elite, especially on the cultural front.Democrats dominate society’s culture generators: the elite universities, the elite media, the entertainment industry, the big tech companies, the thriving elite places like Manhattan, San Francisco and Los Angeles.In 2020, Joe Biden won roughly one-sixth of the nation’s counties, but together those counties generate roughly 71 percent of the nation’s G.D.P.As the Democrats have become more culturally and economically dominant, many people at tippy-top private schools and super-expensive colleges have flamboyantly associated themselves with the oppressed. Thankfully, that has moved society to more aggressively pursue social and racial justice. Unfortunately, a tacit ideology — sometimes called wokeness — has been grafted on to this pursuit.It includes the notions that society is essentially a zone of conflict between oppressor and oppressed groups, that a person’s identity is predominantly about group identity and that slavery is the defining fact of American history.Because they dominate the cultural commanding heights, including some departments of education and the largest teachers’ unions, progressive views permeate schools, museums, movies and increasingly the public stances of large corporations.The Republican Party, like many right-populist parties across the Western world, has become a giant vessel of resistance against cultural, urban and information-age elites. Glenn Youngkin, the Republican who was just elected governor of Virginia, expressed that resistance when he said, “I believe parents should be in charge of their kids’ education.”When Democrats seem to be magnifying the education establishment’s control of the classroom and minimizing the role of parents, there’s going to be a reaction. Some of the reaction is pure racism, but a lot of it is pushback against elite domination and the tacit ideology.The results of Tuesday’s elections show again that resistance against the elites can be a powerful force propelling Republicans to victory. In the final weeks leading up to Youngkin’s victory, education became one of the top issues for Virginia voters.The results also put the Donald Trump phenomenon in a new perspective. Trump was necessary to smash the old G.O.P. and to turn the party into a vanguard of anti-elite resistance. But by 2020, with his moral degradation and all the rest, he was also holding back Republicans. If Republicans can find candidates who oppose the blue oligarchy but without too much Trumpian baggage, they can win over some former Biden voters in places like Virginia and New Jersey.Democrats would be wise to accept the fact that they have immense social and cultural power, and accept the responsibilities that entails by adopting what I’d call a Whole Nation Progressivism.America is ferociously divided on economic, regional, racial and creedal lines. The job of leaders is to stand above these divides and seek to heal them. The job of leaders is not to impose their values on everyone else; it is to defend a pluralistic order in which different communities can work out their own values.From F.D.R. and L.B.J. on down, Democrats have been good at healing economic divides. The watered-down spending bill struggling its way through Congress would be an important step to redistribute resources to people and places that have been left behind.But Democrats are not good at thinking about culture, even though cultural issues drive our politics. You can’t win a culture war by raising the minimum wage. In fact, if politics are going to be all culture war — as Republicans have tried to make them — I suspect Democrats can’t win it at all.Democrats need a positive moral vision that would start by rejecting the idea that we are locked into incessant conflict along class, cultural, racial and ideological lines. It would reject all the appurtenances of the culture warrior pose — the us/them thinking, exaggerating the malevolence of the other half of the country, relying on crude essentialist stereotypes to categorize yourself and others.It would instead offer a vision of unity, unity, unity. That unity is based on a recognition of the complex humanity of each person — that each person is in the act of creating a meaningful life. It would reject racism, the ultimate dehumanizing force, but also reject any act that seeks to control the marketplace of ideas or intimidate those with opposing views. It would reject ideas and movements that seek to reduce complex humans to their group identities. It would stand for racial, economic and ideological integration, and against separatism, criticizing, for example, the way conservatives are often shut out from elite cultural institutions.Democrats will be outvoted if they are seen to be standing with elite culture warriors against mass culture warriors, or imposing the values of metropolitan centers. On the cultural front especially, they have to be seen as champions of the whole nation.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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      Republican Truck Driver Beats Sweeney in N.J. Election

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      Mr. Sweeney, the second most powerful lawmaker in New Jersey and a Democrat, lost his bid for re-election to Edward Durr, a driver for a furniture chain.For nearly a decade, Stephen M. Sweeney, the second most powerful lawmaker in New Jersey, seemed truly unassailable. He boasted deep ties to the most feared political power broker in the state and unyielding support from the influential building trade unions. Four years ago, the state’s teachers’ union spent more than $5 million to unseat him. He won by 18 points.This year, his challenger was Edward Durr, a truck driver for Raymour & Flanigan, a furniture chain, who had never before held office. His campaign video was shot on a smartphone.Yet Mr. Sweeney, the State Senate president and a Democrat, was ousted in a shocking political upset by Mr. Durr, a Republican, as voters opted for a political unknown in a result that immediately rattled the political moorings of the state. Voters also nearly ousted Gov. Philip D. Murphy; the governor narrowly won re-election over his Republican challenger, Jack Ciattarelli, leading by 1.6 percentage points.But it was Mr. Sweeney’s loss that was perhaps best emblematic of the predicament facing Democrats in suburban, exurban and rural communities.The Associated Press called the race on Thursday morning, as Mr. Durr maintained a 2,298-vote lead over Mr. Sweeney with all precincts counted.Though Mr. Sweeney’s district in the southwestern part of the state has never been deeply blue like the northeastern counties, it has reliably elected a Democrat since its creation in 1973, save for one year when the Democratic incumbent switched parties.Mr. Sweeney held a vise grip on the district, largely composed of blue-collar suburbs just south of Camden and poorer, rural areas, thanks to powerful allies and a decidedly moderate record, playing up his background as an ironworker and union leader.But as support for Democrats eroded in the suburbs and evaporated in rural areas in both New Jersey and Virginia, Mr. Sweeney found himself facing a surge in Republican voters and a loss in support from the working-class backing he had so often relied on; being a Democratic lawmaker during an era of coronavirus lockdowns, mandates in schools and dysfunction in Washington was enough to erode what was once unshakable backing.In Gloucester County, Catherine Biasiello, 70, said she is a registered Democrat who voted for Mr. Durr because she is unhappy with the state’s high tax rate, and because she disapproves of the state’s closure of public schools during the pandemic.Ms Biasiello, 70, who lives in West Deptford, said Mr. Sweeney “could have stepped up” to oppose the school shutdowns but did not. “He could have influenced the governor,” she said.Mr. Sweeney’s loss amounts to a seismic restructuring of political power and influence, leaving a substantial vacuum in the State Legislature; he had held the post of senate president, with the ability to set the legislative agenda, for nearly 12 years.In the Trump era, Republicans were seen as doomed to a permanent minority in New Jersey, as voters’ deep contempt for the former president was strong enough to turn the long-held Republican suburbs blue; Democrats flipped four House seats in the 2018 midterm elections.But the surprising defeat of Mr. Sweeney, coupled with Mr. Murphy’s slim margin of victory and unexpectedly tight races involving popular rising Democratic stars in the state like Vin Gopal, a state senator from Monmouth County, reveals a Republican Party that seems to be marching back to relevance..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}Mr. Ciattarelli’s efforts and spending led the way, allowing lesser candidates like Mr. Durr, who lives in a house next to his mother in southern New Jersey, to gather momentum.Mr. Durr told news outlets that he had spent $153 on his campaign, but financial disclosure reports indicate he spent roughly $2,200 on his race. His meager campaign included the 80-second campaign video, where he accentuated his working-class roots with an opening scene of his stepping down from his truck cab, and ending with his riding away on a motorcycle. His victory was announced on the same day Mr. Durr was on a shift driving his truck.With barely any attention given to the race, Mr. Durr remained largely unvetted and unknown to the general public. On Thursday, old posts on social media by the candidate began circulating, including one reflecting support for “both sides” of the violent racist rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 and another condemning Islam and disparaging the Prophet Muhammad.Mr. Durr did not respond to several requests for an interview. But in an impromptu news conference outside of his house on Thursday, Mr. Durr nodded to an electorate he saw as angry.“It didn’t happen because of me,” he said. “I’m nobody. I’m absolutely nobody. I’m just a simple guy. It was the people. It was a repudiation of the policies that have been forced down their throats.”Mr. Durr then took his three pit bulls on a walk.His campaign, which largely consisted of his video, lawn signs and door knocking, projected more grievance than platforms, taking issue with the coronavirus policies of Mr. Murphy and claiming Mr. Sweeney “sat by and watched.” He also focused on the state’s high cost of living.“The Senate president has spent 20 years in Trenton: higher taxes, increasing debt, and a rising cost of living,” Mr. Durr says in his video.Mr. Sweeney, in a statement released on Thursday, did not concede.“The results from Tuesday’s election continue to come in, for instance there were 12,000 ballots recently found in one county,” Mr. Sweeney said. “While I am currently trailing in the race, we want to make sure every vote is counted. Our voters deserve that, and we will wait for the final results.”Democrats, of course, still maintain single-party control over the entire state government, but Mr. Sweeney’s loss nonetheless shocked the forces that have long controlled Trenton.Rarely did a governor’s priority reach the floor without Mr. Sweeney’s approval.In the first two years of Mr. Murphy’s term, before the pandemic settled in, Mr. Sweeney served as an obstacle to the governor’s expansive progressive agenda, further burnishing his moderate Democratic bona fides by pushing back on increases in budget spending and a plan to tax the wealthy. While Mr. Murphy was largely able to come to an agreement with Mr. Sweeney and enact his agenda, the Senate president was often the most powerful counter force in a state controlled by Democrats.“He was able to impose his will on legislation,” said Joe Vitale, a Democratic state senator. “He was a force of nature. So it will be a loss for those of us who respect him and support him.”Mr. Sweeney was closely allied with George E. Norcross, an insurance executive and powerful power broker whose stranglehold on southern New Jersey politics lead many to see him as a shadow governor. The two remained close during both Mr. Murphy’s administration and former Gov. Chris Christie’s eight years. Without Mr. Sweeney at the helm of the Senate, and with other Democratic losses in the southern part of the state, Mr. Norcross may no longer possess the ironclad control to shape state policy, though he still counts numerous legislators as allies.In an interview, Mr. Norcross described Mr. Sweeney as “the Lyndon Johnson of the State Legislature” who “brought order to the chaos.” He said the sudden swelling of Republican turnout and independents’ anger “happened with such warp speed, that there was nothing that could have been anticipated or done, because it’s not like we didn’t have the money available to do it.”He added that the Democratic Party will need to change, both in the state and around the country, to win back voters.“The Democratic Party is going to have to, and candidates for office are going to have to, redefine themselves as fiscally responsible legislators and ones that are going to spend government money wisely and not recklessly as is portrayed,” Mr. Norcross said. “They can’t be defined as wanting to defund police or socialist.”Mr. Sweeney’s loss sets up a wide open race for his successor. Nicholas Scutari, a Democratic state senator from northern New Jersey, is seen as a possible candidate to replace Mr. Sweeney in the senate leadership. Troy Singleton, a Democratic state senator from southern New Jersey, also has been mentioned as a possible replacement, among many other candidates.Ed Dobzanski, 56, a union truck driver from Gibbstown, N.J., said he voted for Mr. Sweeney because of the Senate president’s long support for trade unions, but he thought his rival’s victory reflects a public desire for change.“I think this is a backlash of the same people being in the same positions a long time,” he said. “People just wanted change, they are tired of career politicians.”Jon Hurdle contributed reporting from West Deptford Township, N.J. More

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      Republicans Are Going to Use Dog Whistles. Democrats Can’t Just Ignore Them.

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      The Virginia election results should shock Democrats into confronting the powerful role that racially coded attacks play in American politics. No candidate would think of entering an election without a winning message on the economy or health care. Yet by failing to counter his opponent’s racial dog whistles, Terry McAuliffe did the equivalent, finding himself defenseless against a strategy Republicans have used to win elections for decades.Crucially, the Republican nominee, Glenn Youngkin, was able to use racially coded attacks to motivate sky-high white turnout without paying a penalty among minority voters. This appears to solve the problem bedeviling Republicans in the Trump era: how to generate high turnout for a candidate who keeps Donald Trump at arm’s length, as Mr. Youngkin did.Before Tuesday night, conventional wisdom held that racially coded attacks could well spur higher white turnout but that those gains would be offset by losses among minority voters. Mr. Youngkin proved this assumption false. He significantly outperformed other Republicans among white voters, especially women: In 2020, Joe Biden beat Mr. Trump among white women in Virginia by 50 percent to 49 percent, but according to exit polls, Mr. Youngkin beat Mr. McAuliffe among them by 57 percent to 43 percent. At the same time, Mr. Youngkin suffered no major drop-off among minority voters — if anything, he appeared to slightly outperform expectations.This should terrify Democrats. With our democracy on the line, we have to forge an effective counterattack on race while rethinking the false choice between mobilizing base voters or persuading swing voters.It will not work to ignore race and talk about popular issues instead. Mr. McAuliffe’s closing message was a generic appeal on infrastructure and other issues that poll well. He was following the strategy known as popularism, which has gained in influence since the 2020 election, when Democrats’ disappointing down-ballot performance was attributed to rhetoric like “defund the police.”In the heat of a campaign, popularism fails because Republicans will not let Democrats ignore race. Mr. Youngkin dragged race into the election, making his vow to “ban critical race theory” a centerpiece of his stump speech and repeating it over the closing weekend — even though in Virginia the prominence of C.R.T., which teaches that racism is woven into the structures of American society, was vastly exaggerated.Some Democrats may resist accepting the centrality of race, pointing to the bearish national political environment and cyclical patterns. This would be a mistake for two reasons. First, C.R.T. helped create the rough national environment, with Fox News hammering it relentlessly; and cyclical explanations, like thermostatic public opinion (a longstanding tendency for voters to drift toward the views of the party out of power on some issues), do not explain Democrats’ loss of support in the suburbs or the strong turnout. Voters in New Jersey, where a stronger-than-expected Republican performance caught Democrats off guard, have been inundated with C.R.T. hype by Fox News, too.Second, the past half-century of American political history shows that racially coded attacks are how Republicans have been winning elections for decades, from Richard Nixon’s “law and order” campaign to Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queens” and George H.W. Bush’s Willie Horton ad. Many of these campaigns were masterminded by the strategist Lee Atwater, who in 1981 offered a blunt explanation: Being overtly racist backfires, he noted, “so you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract.” C.R.T. is straight out of the Atwater playbook.In recent years, it has become commonplace in Democratic circles to think that our diversifying population has relegated such attacks to the past. The theory goes that Democrats can counteract racist appeals by encouraging high turnout among people of color. This interpretation took a ding in 2016 and a bigger hit in 2020, when Mr. Trump shocked many people by making major inroads with Latinos. Latinos recently became the largest population of color, and Democrats cannot win on the national level without winning them by large margins. Yet from 2016 to 2020, Democrats saw a seven-point drop in support among Latinos, according to the Pew Research Center.How did the most racist president of our lifetime outperform a more generic Republican like Mitt Romney with Latinos? Research by Equis Labs suggests that Latinos found Mr. Trump’s populist message on the economy appealing.And as Mr. Trump showed — and Mr. Youngkin confirmed — racially coded attacks do not necessarily repel Latino voters. They may even attract them. One of us, Ms. Gavito, was among the first to flag this disturbing trend. In focus groups in battleground states during the lead-up to the 2020 election, pollsters with Lake Research tested a message that denounced “illegal immigration from places overrun with drugs and criminal gangs” and called for “fully funding the police, so our communities are not threatened by people who refuse to follow our laws.” Both whites and Latinos found this message persuasive, but Latinos found it appealing at significantly higher rates than whites.This, then, is the Democrats’ problem: The fact that Republicans can drag race into the conversation with ease kicks the legs out from under the idea that Democrats can succeed by simply talking about more popular things. And the fact that racially coded attacks spur turnout among white voters without necessarily prompting a backlash among minority voters undermines the idea that mobilizing a diverse electorate can win elections for Democrats.That’s the bad news. The good news is, we know what a path forward looks like.First, Democrats must separate our (accurate and necessary) analysis of structural racism from our political strategy in a country where the electorate remains nearly 70 percent white — and as much as or more than 80 percent white in states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Instead of ignoring race while Republicans beat us silly with it, Democrats must confront it and explain that powerful elites and special interests use race as a tool of division to distract hard-working people of all races while they get robbed blind. Then pivot back to shared interests. The pivot is critical: Without it, Democrats are simply talking past voters, while Republicans play on their racial fears.This strategy is known as the “race-class narrative,” pioneered by Prof. Ian Haney López of Berkeley, the author Heather McGhee and the messaging expert Anat Shenker-Osorio (whom we have worked with). To be clear, Democrats should not seek to impose a racial-justice frame; to the contrary, research found a focus on racial justice to be less persuasive than the race-class narrative. The strategy we suggest here is a middle way: It is more powerful than a racial-justice-only frame but also more powerful than a strategy that ignores race altogether. Race is the elephant in the room, and Democrats must stop fooling themselves into thinking that they can prevent it from becoming an issue.Second, Democrats must put aside the false choice between the tactics of persuasion and mobilization and embrace them both. By confronting race as a tool of division, and then pivoting to shared interests, Democrats can offer an optimistic, inspiring and even patriotic vision. This is the approach that rocketed Barack Obama to the White House. As an African-American, Mr. Obama was never allowed to ignore race. Forced to confront it, Mr. Obama offered Americans a vision that mobilized a broad, diverse coalition — while also persuading white voters. In 2008, Mr. Obama won the highest share of the white vote since Bill Clinton in 1996.Race has infused American history and politics since our founding. It threads through most aspects of daily life, and stirs up complicated feelings that Americans of all backgrounds find difficult to discuss. But Virginia showed that race is impossible to ignore.The simple fact is that Republicans have long used race to achieve victory, and Democrats are fooling themselves if they think they can avoid it. Democrats have to get real about race, and forge a way to win.Tory Gavito (@torygavito) is president of Way to Win, a donor network focused on expanding Democrats’ power in the Sun Belt, and lead of the Latinx Justice Fund. Adam Jentleson is the executive director of Battle Born Collective, a progressive strategy organization, a former deputy chief of staff to Senator Harry Reid of Nevada and the author of “Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy.”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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      N.Y. City Council Sees Historic Changes, and Republicans Gain Ground

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      Concerns over public safety and pandemic restrictions helped some Republicans win seats on the New York City Council, which will also be one of the city’s most diverse councils ever.Election Day was expected to be something of a historic moment for the New York City Council. The city’s legislative body was poised to welcome its first South Asian members, its first Korean American members, its first Muslim woman and its first out L.G.B.T.Q. Black women. For the first time, it would have more women than men.Most of that did happen on Tuesday, but not exactly in the way that was anticipated. At least two of the women newly elected to the Council were Republicans — part of a trend that saw the party unexpectedly gain seats for the first time since 2009.Though Democrats cruised to victories in the vast majority of races, Republicans defended the three City Council seats they held, including one that Democrats sought to flip. They also picked up a fourth and remained competitive in three other races that, with some ballots yet to be counted, remained too close to call on Wednesday night.Even in two races where incumbent Democrats were running for re-election on multiple party lines, they received more votes on the Republican ballot line than the Democratic one.The results reveal the extent to which Republicans were able to garner support in more moderate and conservative districts by focusing on a few salient issues — a dynamic that was also at play in races nationwide.Elected officials and strategists from both parties said that the competitive Council contests were largely shaped by similar issues: concern over public safety, frustration over pandemic-related guidelines including vaccine mandates, and alienation from a Democratic Party that some voters worry has left them behind as the left wing has ascended.“There is a lack of a clear message of what the Democratic Party stands for,” said Ken Sherrill, a professor emeritus of political science at Hunter College.Councilman Justin Brannan, a potential contender for Council speaker next year, was in a close race against his Republican rival, Brian Fox.Holly Pickett for The New York TimesOthers said that low turnout had likely been a factor, and that Democrats had to do more to draw voters to the polls.“We can’t take our electorate for granted and just assume that because we’re in a blue state that all voters will follow us,” said Sochie Nnaemeka, the New York State director of the left-leaning Working Families Party. “We have to always be fighting.”Still, the broader contours of the next City Council remain unchanged from expectations. As it has been for decades, the 51-member body will be dominated by Democrats, many of them new faces from the party’s left wing. The city is poised to have one of the most diverse councils in its history, with at least 30 women holding office.The showing from Republicans is unlikely to alter the city’s immediate political direction. If Republicans picked up the final three races, they would have seven seats — their largest faction since the mid-1990s, but likely not enough to pose a major threat to Democratic priorities. Eric Adams, the Democratic candidate, handily won his election for mayor, and four of the five borough presidents will also remain Democrats, with Staten Island, a conservative stronghold, the exception.Among the still undecided races was a re-election bid by Councilman Justin Brannan, a Democrat who is a contender to become City Council speaker next year and whose Brooklyn district includes Bay Ridge, Dyker Heights, Bensonhurst and Bath Beach. On Tuesday night, he was 255 votes behind his opponent, Brian Fox, though at least 1,456 returned absentee ballots, about 1,000 from registered Democrats, have yet to be counted.In an interview on Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Brannan said that he believed that low turnout — about 24,000 people voted in person and 3,300 requested absentee ballots in a district where 105,000 are registered — was a factor in the tight margin of his race.But he also said the close race was demonstrative of the headwinds that Democrats had faced nationally and accused his opponent of trying to “harness these national culture wars” over hot-button issues like policing and vaccine mandates.During the campaign, Mr. Fox staunchly opposed vaccine mandates. His campaign also seized on the slogan “Justin Brannan defunded the police,” a reference to the budget negotiations last year in which city officials agreed to shift roughly $1 billion from the Police Department. Most council members, including Mr. Brannan, voted for that budget. He also voted for this year’s budget, which added $200 million back to the police budget.In Bay Ridge on Wednesday, Evan Chacker, 49, who owns an online education business, pointed to Mr. Brannan’s vote as a principal reason that the councilman lost his support.“We have law enforcement in the family,” he said. “He voted to defund the police.”In the Bay Ridge neighborhood of Brooklyn, the “defund the police” movement drove some voters away from Democratic candidates like Councilman Justin Brannan.Anna Watts for The New York TimesVincent Dardanello, the owner of a Sicilian cafe called Amuni, said that taxes and public safety were top issues for him, and that he had voted for Mr. Fox out of party loyalty, even though he knew and liked Mr. Brannan.“I’m a Republican, pretty much straight through,” Mr. Dardanello, 45, said.The debates were similar in other districts where Republicans won or exhibited strong showings, including in District 32 in Queens, the last Republican-controlled seat in that borough.During the campaign, which attracted spending from outside groups, Joann Ariola, the head of the Queens Republican Party, touted her support for the police, her commitment to protecting and improving the city schools’ gifted and talented program, and her focus on quality-of-life issues.Her Democratic opponent, Felicia Singh, a former teacher backed by left-leaning groups, kept her focus on education, the environment and the need for resources for often-underserved communities. Ms. Ariola, who sought to portray Ms. Singh as too left wing, won easily, by thousands of votes.Joann Ariola won her bid for a open Council seat in southeast Queens, in a race to replace the departing Republican, Eric Ulrich.Jackie Molloy for The New York TimesThe race to fill the seat in District 48 in southern Brooklyn, home to many Orthodox Jews and Russian and Ukrainian immigrants, reflected some changing political winds in parts of the city.Voters in the district have gradually shifted to the right, and the area favored former President Donald J. Trump in 2020. Inna Vernikov, a lawyer who decried vaccine mandates and to whom Donald Trump Jr. lent support, defeated Steven Saperstein there, giving Republicans a fourth seat on the Council.Races remained close in District 19 in Queens, where Vickie Paladino, a Republican community activist, leads Tony Avella, a former Democratic state senator and councilman. The Democratic candidate in District 47 in Brooklyn, Ari Kagan, was ahead of his Republican opponent, Mark Szuszkiewicz, by just 283 votes. Many absentee votes remain outstanding in both races.The winners of those races will join a City Council stuffed with Democrats who won easy victories in their races. Among them are five Asian Americans, the most in the body’s history, including Julie Won and Linda Lee in Queens, who are the Council’s first Korean American members; Shahana Hanif in Brooklyn and Shekar Krishnan in Queens, the first South Asian members; and Sandra Ung in Queens, who is Cambodian American. Ms. Hanif will also be the first Muslim woman to serve on the Council.The incoming council members come from across the liberal spectrum. They include moderate incumbents like Francisco Moya, as well as a number of former left-wing activists with no previous ties to City Hall like Tiffany Cabán and Kristin Richardson Jordan, an activist who, with Crystal Hudson, is one of the first two Black L.G.B.T.Q. women on the Council.Kristin Richardson Jordan will become one of the first two Black L.G.B.T.Q. women on the City Council. Rainmaker Photos/MediaPunch/IPX, via Associated PressMs. Jordan, who narrowly won victory in her primary, said on Wednesday that her win reflected the priorities of voters in her Upper Manhattan district: affordable housing, criminal justice reform and equality in education. Those differ from the chief concerns stated by voters in districts where Republicans were more competitive.Christina Greer, a political scientist at Fordham University, said that as a whole, the Council results highlighted what has long been true: that while conservatives have been muted in the city’s political discourse, they have always been something of a force.Ms. Greer also said that the results illustrated the difficulty of characterizing the city’s electorate in broad strokes.“We have to recognize that there’s several shades of blue in New York City,” she said.Julianne McShane More

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      A Rough Election Night for the Democrats

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      Asthaa Chaturvedi, Neena Pathak, Diana Nguyen and Listen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherAt first, most of the attention on a major night of elections across the United States on Tuesday was on an unexpectedly close contest in the Virginia governor’s race.Once it became clear that the Republican candidate, Glenn Youngkin, had successfully faced down Terry McAuliffe, a Democratic former governor, the focus switched to problems for the Democrats elsewhere.As the night went on, it became clear that the contest in Virginia was not a singular event — Republicans were doing well in several unlikely places.What do the results tell us about the current direction of American politics?On today’s episodeAlexander Burns, a national political correspondent for The New York Times.Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic candidate and former Virginian governor, lost his contest against the Republican’s Glenn Youngkin.Doug Mills/The New York TimesBackground readingReeling from a barrage of unexpected losses, an array of Democrats have pleaded with President Biden and his party’s lawmakers to address the quality-of-life issues that plagued their candidates in Tuesday’s elections.There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.Transcripts of each episode are available by the next workday. You can find them at the top of the page.Alexander Burns contributed reporting.The Daily is made by Lisa Tobin, Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Larissa Anderson, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, M.J. Davis Lin, Austin Mitchell, Neena Pathak, Dan Powell, Dave Shaw, Sydney Harper, Daniel Guillemette, Robert Jimison, Mike Benoist, Liz O. Baylen, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Kaitlin Roberts, Rachelle Bonja, Diana Nguyen, Marion Lozano, Soraya Shockley, Corey Schreppel, Anita Badejo, Rob Szypko, Elisheba Ittoop, Chelsea Daniel, Mooj Zadie and Rowan Niemisto.Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Cliff Levy, Lauren Jackson, Julia Simon, Mahima Chablani, Sofia Milan, Desiree Ibekwe, Erica Futterman, Wendy Dorr, Elizabeth Davis-Moorer, Jeffrey Miranda and Maddy Masiello. More