Glenn Youngkin’s victory was only one indicator of much-larger trends.
Glenn Youngkin’s victory was only one indicator of much-larger trends.
T he results are clear: Republican Glenn Youngkin’s two-point victory in Virginia — a state Joe Biden carried by ten points just a year ago — was one part of a national backlash against Democrats.
Republicans made a clean sweep of judicial races in Pennsylvania. In Texas, a heavily Hispanic statehouse district that Biden carried by 14 points elected a Republican by two points on Tuesday. And the governor’s race in New Jersey — a state Biden won by 16 points — was still too close to call on Wednesday morning.
Any explanation of Tuesday’s results needs to account for Joe Biden’s tanking job-approval numbers. “The most important predictor of a party’s performance in a midterm is the president’s job approval rating,” Sean Trende of RealClearPolitics wrote on September 2. The title of that piece was “Biden’s Job Approval Has Entered Dangerous Territory.”
On August 2, the RCP average showed that 51.6 percent of voters approved of Biden’s job performance, compared with 43.4 percent who disapproved. By November 2, Election Day, those numbers had flipped to 43.0 percent approve, 51.1 percent disapprove.
What explains the shift? I’d suggest three issues more than anything else.
Afghanistan
Between the fall of Kabul on August 15 and the withdrawal of the last American troops from Afghanistan at the end of the month, Americans were gripped by the horrifying images and stories of what it looks like in real time to lose a war.
“Biden Is Betting Americans Will Forget About Afghanistan,” read the August 20 headline of an article at The Atlantic. The Twitter addicts who populate the journalistic profession — myself included — immediately moved on to cover other stories. But Afghanistan dealt a big blow to Biden, and it may have left an indelible mark:
There was some thought that Biden's approval rating would bounce back after Afghanistan faded from the headlines. Well, it's been a month, and his approval is worse than ever. https://t.co/lbNK4seRvE pic.twitter.com/DmNxtEuAaC
— Nathaniel Rakich (@baseballot) October 6, 2021
I doubt that the American people forgot the images of Afghans falling from airplanes and the reports that Biden had left behind hundreds of American citizens and tens of thousands of Afghan allies.
COVID
At the same time that America was leaving Afghanistan to the Taliban, the Delta wave of the coronavirus was rising in America, mask mandates were being reinstated, and vaccine mandates were being rolled out.
Biden was obviously wary of the politics of vaccine mandates until September. On July 23, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said that it wasn’t the role of the federal government to issue a vaccine mandate. But by September 9, the administration had changed its tune. President Biden announced that all employees of companies with 100+ workers would be required to be vaccinated or undergo weekly tests for COVID. A week after Biden announced the mandate, which as of this writing still hasn’t taken effect yet, the Delta wave peaked in the United States.
In Virginia, McAuliffe was, like Biden, reluctant to embrace mandates until the Delta wave. Polls showed support for mandates, but that didn’t mean support for mandates was guaranteed to net McAuliffe votes. The issue of government mandates could motivate the small minority of unvaccinated Americans (or parents who don’t want their young kids vaccinated) more than the majority of Americans who are protected by vaccination.
The bigger question is not how voters wanted politicians to respond to COVID last year or this fall, but how they generally want to live going forward. The next governor of Virginia will take office in January 2022 — nearly two years after the pandemic began. Going forward, will voters be more concerned about Democrats whose COVID policies are too restrictive or Republicans who are opposed to such restrictions? Tuesday’s results in Virginia and New Jersey are a good sign that voters nationwide are on net more opposed to the Democrats’ approach.
The Economy
Inflation is on the rise. People see this every time they go to the grocery store. In Virginia, Youngkin ran on eliminating the state tax on groceries, while McAuliffe ran on raising the minimum wage. At the same time, the Democrats who control the White House, the Senate, and the House remained much more interested in passing another $2 trillion social-spending bill than in doing anything to fix supply-chain problems and bring inflation down.
Advantage: Youngkin.
An NBC poll released last week found that voters nationwide still narrowly approved of Biden’s handling of COVID, 51 percent to 47 percent, down from 53 percent approve/44 percent disapprove in August. But Biden’s numbers on the economy had dropped to an astonishing 40 percent approve/57 percent disapprove, down from 47 percent approve/49 percent disapprove in August. Republicans held their greatest advantage on the economy since the NBC pollsters began asking voters about it in 1991: Voters preferred the GOP to Democrats by an 18-point margin.
In Virginia, McAuliffe hyped the threat that COVID posed to children. He ran hard on the issue of abortion, and he tried to paint Youngkin as a Trump acolyte. None of it worked, but with numbers like these on the economy, it’s hard to imagine that anything else could have. A backlash against Democrats was inevitable.