Steve Helber/AP Photo
Vice President Kamala Harris waves to the crowd along with Democratic gubernatorial candidate former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, left, during a rally in Dumfries, Virginia, October 21, 2021.
Today, voters head to the polls for the first national Election Day since Joe Biden wrested the presidency from Donald Trump almost exactly a year ago. It’s the first chance for Democrats to prove if and how they can hold serve in a world without Donald Trump on the ballot, and the races invite an interesting contrast between how progressives and moderates are navigating politics in the post-Trump environment.
Of greatest interest to the national political press is Virginia, where continued Democratic control looks imperiled. Terry McAuliffe is running for another go-around as Virginia governor after serving in the role from 2014 to 2018; Virginia forbids consecutive terms for its state executive. Despite having had the last four years to think about it, McAuliffe seems to have scant rationale for why he should serve again, other than that he wants to, and, borrowing from the Democratic playbook of a year ago, that the other guy running is really bad. That’s a harder sell in an off-year, low-turnout affair.
No matter the result on Tuesday, the media has already decided that the election is a referendum on Democrats nationally. And barring something wildly unforeseen, that referendum will be a negative one. Biden won Virginia by ten points just a year ago. McAuliffe may need a miracle to win out over private equity baron and Donald Trump endorsee Glenn Youngkin, a candidate who seems to bring together the worst of both Trump’s and Mitt Romney’s Republican Party. Corporate lobbyists will be ready to nationalize the result if McAuliffe loses, as proof that Democrats have gone too far left and are being punished for it. Probably they will pepper in something about crime.
In reality, the race in Virginia has everything to do with astroturfed outrage over COVID restrictions and Toni Morrison books on school curricula, and nothing to do with negotiations over an infrastructure bill. Yet it’s been McAuliffe who has been dying to nationalize the race beyond school board drama, conjuring a scare story about a Trump clone taking over Richmond, to little avail.
It’s the first chance for Democrats to prove if and how they can hold serve in a world without Donald Trump on the ballot.
If Democrats suffer shock losses in Virginia, or shed their margin of victory, the aftermath ought to be a referendum on these out-of-touch campaign tactics. Gov. Ralph Northam and a new Democratic majority in the state legislature did use their trifecta to increase the minimum wage, add paid sick leave for home health care workers, legalize marijuana, abolish the death penalty, and become one of the first states to create a COVID-19 workplace standard. (They did decline to repeal the state’s right-to-work law after initially pledging to do so; McAuliffe doesn’t seem much interested in it either.)
A smart campaign might have run on the Democratic record and given voters something to vote for, rather than scolding them that the other guys are crazed fascists; it certainly wouldn’t leave voter turnout up to the motivating charms and oratory skills of former governors-turned-senators Tim Kaine and Mark Warner, current governor Northam, and once and future governor McAuliffe. (Warner is making the TV rounds preemptively blaming McAuliffe’s loss on congressional progressives for not passing an infrastructure bill, though it will surprise no one that voters in Virginia have not articulated federal highway funding as one of their top ten concerns.)
Almost unthinkably, the governor’s race in New Jersey also seems to be tightening. New Jersey is no Virginia—it’s reliably blue with a Democratic trifecta of its own—but incumbent governor Phil Murphy is up against history: If he wins, he will be the first incumbent Democrat to be re-elected in the state since 1977.
Murphy, a former investment banker, has similarly put together an impressive legislative track record while in power, raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, passing paid sick leave, implementing a millionaires tax, police reform, and a (means-tested) tuition-free community college program. Those things should sound familiar, because they’re all line item commitments promised by Joe Biden and national Democrats that they’ve failed to deliver. And that’s one reason Murphy is almost certainly going to win; the most recent polls show him prevailing over Republican Jack Ciattarelli by around ten points. Unlike in Virginia, Murphy hasn’t been sidetracked by COVID and culture war issues.
Interestingly, part of the reason Biden and company have failed on all of those things, however, is the New Jersey Democratic congressional delegation. North Jersey Rep. Josh Gottheimer, and senior Sen. Bob Menendez have both played unique, outsized roles in undermining Biden’s signature legislation. Gottheimer spearheaded a suicide mission that would have resulted in the entirety of the Build Back Better plan dying off by uncoupling it from the bipartisan infrastructure bill; Menendez has quietly been an essential actor in sabotaging the extremely popular drug pricing reform that Democrats have promised since 2006. As Biden’s popularity has waned, no blue state’s congressional delegation can take more credit for that than New Jersey’s.
Yet if Murphy loses—an extremely unexpected outcome—the chattering classes would likely not attribute a change in the national mood toward Democrats to the actions of its corporate-minded members.
Almost unthinkably, the governor’s race in New Jersey also seems to be tightening.
While moderates run the show at the top of state parties, it’s a different story in the cities. There are a number of left-wing candidates running for mayoral offices who are likely to triumph.
Michelle Wu’s campaign for the mayoralty of Boston is one of the more notable progressive campaigns of the cycle. Boston is a Democratic stronghold but has been represented by a conservative strain of blue for a long time. Wu has run on a citywide Green New Deal, lowering the voting age to 16, and making public transit free. She sports considerable youth support. Her opponent is Annissa Essaibi George, who has sought to differentiate herself by pledging more money for policing.
Other Democrat-on-Democrat citywide runoffs are staged along similar battle lines. Seattle’s Lorena González is running on a progressive platform that includes criticism of the city’s policing and advocates for higher taxes on businesses; Bruce Harrell is running a pro-police, business-friendly campaign in defense of single-family zoning. In Cleveland, progressive Justin Bibb is running against Kevin Kelley in a technically nonpartisan runoff, though Bibb is backed by progressive groups like Our Revolution Ohio and Kelley is backed by conservative unions like the Cleveland Building and Construction Trades Council and current Democratic mayor Frank Jackson. Elsewhere in the Midwest, Abdullah Hammoud could be the first Arab American mayor of Dearborn, Michigan, the city with the country’s largest Arab population. Incumbent Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey, who presided over the police force that murdered George Floyd, fights for another term on the same ballot that could see the Minneapolis Police Department disbanded and replaced with a Department of Public Safety.
New York is playing host to two high-profile races, with its classic upstate/downstate divide inverted. In Buffalo, democratic socialist India Walton, who won the Democratic nomination, faces off against incumbent Byron Brown, who’s running a write-in campaign funded in part by the New York Republican Party: bipartisanship, at last. The state’s Democratic leadership has sat out the campaign, refusing to endorse Walton, proving in undeniable terms that “vote blue no matter who” is an edict that only applies when moderate and conservative candidates are on the ballot. If Walton loses, as polling indicates she will, it will add yet another demerit to the shameful record of the state Democratic machine in 2021, which has already endured the resignation of Andrew Cuomo and the refusal of party chair Jay Jacobs to heed calls to resign after comparing Walton to former KKK leader David Duke.
Meanwhile, Eric Adams will handily win the race for New York City mayor, after eking out a narrow victory in a crowded Democratic primary featuring numerous scandal-tarred progressives. His win launched an entire school of thought surrounding the value of a Clinton-style tough-on-crime Democrat. He’s proclaimed himself the future of the Democratic Party and is running all but unopposed, given the weakness of the Republican Party in New York City. But turnout and margin will be worth watching; they’re likely to be low.
