The Daily - A Rough Election Night for the Democrats

Episode Date: November 4, 2021

On a major night of elections across the United States on Tuesday, the Republican Glenn Youngkin claimed an unexpected victory over his Democratic opponent, Terry McAuliffe, to win the governor’s race in Virginia.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?Guest: Alexander Burns, a national political correspondent for The New York Times. Sign up here to get The Daily in your inbox each morning. And for an exclusive look at how the biggest stories on our show come together, subscribe to our newsletter. Background reading: Reeling 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.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, why Democrats fared so poorly in so many different parts of the country in Tuesday's closely watched elections. I asked my colleague, national political correspondent Alex Burns. It's Thursday, November 4th. Hey, Mr. Burns. It has been a really, really long time since you were on the show.

In fact, I did some math. It's been eight months. Has it really? Yep. I've counted every single day with one of those dramatic Xs on the calendar. And it's extremely fitting that after all that time and all that bereftness on our part, you return on the day of the very first big election since you left.

I did not plan it out that way. No? But it did kind of work out. No. I just kind of ran out of time off. But here I am, just in time for these elections. So speaking of this election, it felt like all of us were focused pretty much exclusively

on the governor's race in Virginia and the story there about an unexpectedly close contest. So how did that all unfold for you? I think that's totally right. Going into the night really felt like Virginia was the main show. It's a state that's trended towards Democrats over the last decade. But where you had a Republican candidate, Glenn Youngkin, a newcomer to politics, a business guy, running an unexpectedly strong race against Terry McAuliffe, the former Democratic governor who's trying to make a political comeback. And it really seemed like the question hanging over the whole night was, can Glenn Youngkin pull off this distinctively

strong performance in a tough state? Right. And as the night went on, and as it became clearer and clearer that, yeah, Glenn Youngkin probably was going to pull that off, we start to look beyond Virginia. And we start to see evidence that maybe this isn't a singular event. Maybe there's something happening here that relates to the larger fabric of American politics and the position of the two parties beyond Virginia. And what was that? You start to see Republicans doing quite well in places where they typically have not done well for some time. Talk about close in our tally right now. There it is.

61 votes at this hour, separating Jack Cittarelli, the Republican challenger, Phil Murphy, the Democratic incumbent. There's a governor's race in New Jersey where the incumbent Democratic governor, Phil Murphy, a pretty popular guy, was trailing slightly for much of the night and into the morning to an obscure Republican challenger. It was a very tough night of election results for the Democrats and a major victory for the Republicans. You saw Republican candidates doing very well in the suburbs of New York City, in parts of Long Island, where the GOP has not been doing quite so well in recent years. On Long Island, two key races being decided in Nassau County for District Attorney Republican Ann Donnelly

is claiming victory over Democrat Todd Kaminsky. And in the race for Nassau County Executive, Republican challenger Bruce Blakeman is leading Democratic incumbent Laura Curran. Right now, Blakeman is ahead. And so as more information starts to trickle in, Virginia starts to look less and less like an isolated story of one guy on the Republican side running an upset campaign. And it starts to look more and more like Democrats in general are having a pretty rough night. And let's talk about why that is and how you explain that.

I know it's only been 24 hours, but we have a lot of data on your quick study. So what are the biggest factors in your mind as you assess what happened in those three places on Tuesday? Well, the single biggest backdrop for all of this is that we have a Democratic president who is not very popular right now, including in these states that voted for him a year ago. How not popular? points in 2020, and in Virginia, where he beat Donald Trump by 10 points, his disapproval ratings are pretty consistently higher than his approval ratings. And in some cases, by wide margins, the share of voters who say that the country is on the wrong track is massive in these states. People are frustrated and exasperated by the long tail of the coronavirus pandemic. The economy has not recovered as quickly as they expected it to. The public health restrictions

that we've been living with for so long have not gone away as quickly as people hoped. On top of that, this is the first election in half a decade where Donald Trump is not on the ballot either literally or figuratively. There's not this great motivating force for Democrats and for moderate voters who dislike Trump-style politics to get out there and repudiate the Republican Party the way there has been for so long. So you put all that together and what you get is areas that normally look relatively or very blue start to look considerably less friendly to Democrats. Let's get a little granular here and talk about how these factors you just identified show up in the results from Tuesday in these three places, Virginia, New Jersey, and Long Island. And here we should say, Alex, we are talking to you at 4 p.m. on Wednesday, so there is not a final call yet in a few of these races, most notably the New Jersey governor's race.

Sure. The big race that has been called is the race in Virginia. And that is where you had Glenn Youngkin, the Republican candidate, walking this very, very careful line for the entire duration of the general election to include a whole lot of those centrist and center-right suburban and outer suburban voters who really abandoned the GOP in droves during the Trump era. And he did this in a couple big ways. One of them was just a classic Republican candidate playbook of running as an outsider business guy who's going to shake things up when he gets into government. He ran on some issues a pretty moderate message talking about increasing funding for education and increasing teacher salaries. These are messages that would be very familiar to Republicans in an earlier pre-Trump era of politics in a place like Virginia. And at the same time, he is sort of more quietly talking to Trump's base, in some respects, in coded language,

talking about parental choice and education, talking about critical race theory, subjects that do not necessarily appeal to a wide cross-section of the Virginia electorate, but that for voters on the right are just really important buttons for him to push. He never appeared with Donald Trump in the general election. He managed to keep Trump away from the state, and Trump agreed to stay away from the state despite Democrats trying so hard to bait him into the fight, because the strong conviction on the Democratic side was if Donald Trump sets foot in Virginia, if they get a photo of Donald Trump and Glenn Youngkin next to each other, that's just toxic in a state like that. But it just never happened. So in the home stretch of the race, you had Terry McAuliffe, the former Democratic governor,

race, you had Terry McAuliffe, the former Democratic governor, blanketing the airwaves with ads linking Youngkin to Trump, and it just did not quite stick. And so when you get a pretty complete set of results in, Glenn Youngkin wins the race, not a landslide, but by a couple percentage points. And this state that Joe Biden carried by 10 points just a year earlier, it looks a little redder everywhere. And you see less enthusiasm in Democratic areas to turn out and vote. You see in the big, dense suburbs, McAuliffe is still winning. There are still Democratic areas, but they look a little bit less blue than they did a year ago. And the rural areas look super, super red. Okay, let's turn now to New Jersey and how all the factors you've identified here played out in that race. So New Jersey is in some ways an even more staggering result. It looks like the Democrat, Phil Murphy, will likely prevail in the end. But he had every advantage in this race. He's a relatively popular governor. He's a very well-funded campaign. His Republican opponent is a guy named Jack Cittarelli, a former Republican state

legislator who, by any reasonable measure, is quite an obscure candidate. He's not a well-known figure. He doesn't have a personal fortune. He has very little muscle behind him from the National Republican Party. But the way the race unfolded, this Republican candidate is attacking Murphy for his management of COVID. What infuriated a great many New Jerseyans were the inconsistencies in the executive orders during the lockdown. He's revving up voters who feel like it's time to move on from all those public health restrictions. That one out of three small businesses in New Jersey, mom and pop shops that were in families for decades, have closed their doors forever. And he's also hitting some pretty traditional New Jersey Republican themes like property taxes. Everyone knows we're the highest taxed people in the nation.

And we think Phil Murphy got a pass four years ago, but he's been in office now for four years nearly. And we're going to remind people who he is, someone who thinks if taxes are your issue, we're probably not your state. He's basically telling you to leave. It is as close to a generic Republican campaign as we have seen in that state since Chris Christie left office. And what we start to see as the results roll in is, gosh, it sure seems to have worked in a lot of places.

And you see reflected across New Jersey some of the same dynamics we spoke about in Virginia, but actually on steroids. Democratic turnout is just down. The more rural parts of the state, voters show up in force. The big suburbs near New York City and in central New Jersey, they're still blue. Phil Murphy is still carrying them, but he's not carrying them the way he did four years ago. If this is starting to sound familiar, it's because it is very similar in the underlying dynamics to what we see in Virginia. Okay, and what about Long Island? And I must ask, why are we talking about Long Island and putting it in the same group as the august states of Virginia and New Jersey? If you ask yourself at this stage,

are we looking at a change in the national political environment? Or are we looking at a couple of governor's races where Democrats blew it for pretty narrow reasons. You could look to a place like Long Island and ask yourself, do we see the same dynamics there? Do we see more conservative and moderate suburban voters turning against the Democratic Party? And the answer is yes. There are a couple important races out there, a Nassau County executive, district attorney there, Suffolk County DA, where it seems that Democrats who appeared to be in a strong position a year ago or six months ago or six weeks ago, either lost or are trailing. Interesting. And particularly, this is counterintuitive in some

ways that you would think that the biggest, best funded election is the one to watch for, you know, signals of where things are headed. But in some ways, as you move down the ballot, that's where voters are just sort of pulling the lever for one party or the other because they don't know as much about the candidates. You know, people in Virginia, they know who Glenn Youngkin is. He spent tens of millions of dollars to educate them about that. You have some elections in New Jersey for the state legislature where entrenched Democrats are losing to total nobodies. That's not because the nobodies ran excellent campaigns. That's because the electorate soured on Democrats in that area. Right. And decided to turn to Republicans.

It's the only alternative they've got. We'll be right back. So Alex, let's talk about what these results mean for both parties as they think about their immediate political future, which for both parties are the midterm elections next year that could determine control of Congress. And let's start with the Republicans. What big lessons do you think national Republicans have taken from Tuesday? I think the bottom line for national Republicans looking at Tuesday is the notion that running a pretty traditional Republican campaign is enough to get the job done in some pretty tough places. You don't need to wear a red MAGA hat to get Donald Trump's voters out to the polls. They're going to be there for you if these races are any indication. And so if you count on the support from right-wing voters,

Trump voters in rural areas, and you modulate your pitch a little bit so that you sound somewhat more like Mitt Romney than Donald Trump, then there are other voters who are still open to you. That if there was this fear that Donald Trump absolutely demolished his party with independent voters for a generation, that sure doesn't seem to be the case looking at the results from this week. And I think, Alex, that was an open question, especially when it came to moderates. And I think, Alex, that was an open question, especially when it came to moderates. Did Donald Trump, especially after January 6th, especially after the role he played in the assault on the Capitol, essentially destroy his party's appeal to certain kind of moderate voters?

And it seems like you're saying the answer is no if the candidates running as Republicans keep their distance? Well, there are absolutely moderate voters who are off limits to Republicans now because of Donald Trump. But there are also some moderate voters who are willing to look at the GOP again and say, well, you know, I left them for a few years, but I like what this guy is saying about education and taxes. And so he doesn't seem too much like Trump.

But as you alluded to, the challenge there is you need to not seem too much like Trump. And, you know, if you were a national Republican and somebody said to you, you know, I can guarantee you that Donald Trump will not leave Mar-a-Lago for the entire calendar year 2022. higher calendar year 2022, I think you would feel pretty good about your chances in the midterm elections, just based on what we see about the national atmospherics right now. But obviously, nobody can guarantee that. There are already sort of signs from Trump the last few hours of sort of frustration that he doesn't seem to be getting credit for Glenn Youngkin winning in Virginia. Yeah, putting out statements saying, you know, the only reason why this race was even closed was because of the MAGA base, which is true, that if rural conservatives deserted Republicans in the absence of Donald Trump, that'd be very, very bad for the Republican Party.

But the amazing thing is that they didn't desert the Republican Party, and Donald Trump didn't go to Virginia to ask them to show up. So it does seem like there is a path here for relatively traditional Republican candidates to pull in that support from rural conservatives without campaigning like or with Donald Trump. But Alex, we know that Donald Trump has inspired a certain kind of Republican candidate to seek federal office, to run for House seats and Senate seats. So the question is,

are there lots of those candidates in the pipeline for this upcoming midterm that may not fit the pattern of the Youngkin or the Cittarelli? That's right. I mean, if Republicans could clone Glenn Youngkin and run him in every Senate race in 2022, that would be a really good strategy.

It is not one that's available to them. And Michael, it's worth noting here that a distinctive characteristic of both of these races was that there was not a long, drawn-out, competitive Republican primary where you had different ambitious conservatives pushing each other to the right and pushing themselves further and further towards Donald Trump. That's likely to

happen in many or all of the important federal elections next year. Hmm. Let's turn to Democrats. What does Tuesday's results mean for the Democrats as they fight to try to keep control of both chambers of Congress? Look, I think in the big picture, it is a very, very bracing message for Democrats who have tiny margins to defend in the House and Senate. Talking to Democrats today, I think there is this real sense that for them to have a shot at either chamber of Congress in 2022, they need to get to a place by, you know, next spring at the latest where voters really feel like the economy's on track, COVID is either a thing of the past or rapidly becoming a thing of the past. There is this sense that voters expect them to deliver and that they voted for Joe Biden because he said he was going to get the country out of COVID and get some stuff done. And they feel like that has mostly not happened yet. That's not to

erase the real accomplishments of the administration with the rescue plan and a mass vaccination campaign. That's clearly not what voters are thinking about right now when they're focused on what does my life look like today versus what I want it to look like today. That would suggest that the passage of these giant bills still under negotiation by Democrats could propel the Democrats to that place you're describing where they are getting stuff done. I think there's a range of opinions in the Democratic Party about just how much getting stuff done in this particular way will help them. They could get the reconciliation

package and the infrastructure bill done and still get shellacked in the midterm elections because it's just hard for the president's party in the midterm elections. That's just how things tend to work in this country. But if their entire domestic legislative agenda collapses, that would clearly be a humiliation for the party. It would be a really dark stain on Joe Biden's record in his first year in office. And I think that's the point where you would start to see Democrats get profoundly pessimistic about their chances in 22. And look, I think they're having a bit of a wake-up call moment here that they were successful in the 2020 presidential race because Joe Biden was able to put together this big coalition that ran from center-right white women in the suburbs who really disliked

Donald Trump to a range of voters of color of many different ideologies, to very, very left-wing young progressives, and they all locked arms against Donald Trump. What we're seeing is that when the Democrats have to go up against Republicans who aren't Donald Trump and who aren't acting in outrageous and offensive and divisive ways day after day after day, it's harder to hold that coalition together. And it's not like they had a whole lot of room to spare in 2020. They held together that coalition just long enough to win the presidential race, but it was not an amazing year for them down ballot. And that's what they're looking at next year if they can't figure out a way to put that coalition back together.

Right. And it leaves them in the seemingly quite strange position of perhaps wanting Donald Trump to get more and more involved in Republican politics and perhaps even do the thing that Democrats say they dread him doing, which is announce he's running for president immediately. — Terry McAuliffe said it himself on the eve of the election in Virginia, that, you know, it'd be bad for our political culture if this happened, but it would have been helpful to him, Terry McAuliffe, if Trump were back on Twitter. — That's a very honest acknowledgement.

It really is. And just the sense that that was a big tool that they had for half a decade. But there is an element to this that is totally predictable, Michael, that these states, New Jersey and Virginia, typically swing against the president's party the year after a new president comes into office. We saw it happen. Barack Obama came into office in 2008, having won both states. In 2009, both of them voted for Republican governors. Happened eight years later with Donald Trump. He gets into office.

He doesn't carry New Jersey or Virginia. But the next year, his party gets utterly clobbered in both states. There is just a pendulum nature to the way American politics works that I think a lot of Democrats hoped would not apply because Donald Trump is this disruptive, outrageous, offensive figure to so many voters. And one of the things that I think we found out this week is that while Trump distorts the nature of our politics in a lot of ways, gravity still kind of applies. Hmm.

Unless he's front and center. That sounds like a challenge to the former president. Alex, thank you very much, as always. We appreciate it. Thanks, Michael. It's good to be back. On Wednesday night, the Democratic candidate for governor of New Jersey, Phil Murphy, was declared the winner by a slim margin of less than a single percentage point. Meanwhile. Look, think about what we're talking about here.

People are upset and uncertain about a lot of things. and uncertain about a lot of things, from COVID to school to jobs to a whole range of things and the cost of a gallon of gasoline. During a news conference, President Biden acknowledged his party's poor showing on Tuesday and the reality that without Trump on the ballot, winning elections in states like Virginia will be harder for Democrats.

Maybe. No, I know we did, but I was running against Donald Trump. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. Madam President, this is a low, low point in the fourth time this year, Senate Republicans used the filibuster rule to block debate on a voting rights bill. The bill that was blocked,

which is named after John Lewis, the civil rights leader and former House member, is designed to counter a series of state laws passed by Republicans that restrict access to the ballot box. Just a single Republican, Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, voted to allow the bill to be debated. And the city of New York has reached a deal to rescue thousands of taxi drivers from crushing debt, much of it created through reckless loan practices documented in a 2019 investigation by The Times.

Under the deal, the largest single holder of cab driver's loans will reduce the amount that each driver owes from an average of about $500,000 per driver to $170,000. Today's episode was produced by Asta Chaturvedi, Nina Potok, Diana Nguyen, and Luke Vanderploeg. It was edited by Lisa Chow and engineered by Chris Wood. Original music by Marion Lozano. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro.

See you tomorrow. Thank you.