Behind the election results

538 - With the sizable shifts toward the GOP across the commonwealth, Virginia’s result wasn’t just about Youngkin... One inescapable fact about this election is that it took place in an environment that was favorable to Republicans. There’s no better indicator of that than President Biden’s poor approval rating, which stood at about 43 percent coming into Election Day in FiveThirtyEight’s presidential approval tracker. Republicans were already more likely to show up in reaction to having a Democratic president, and Biden’s struggles likely turned off some independent voters, too, as the exit poll found they went for Youngkin by 9 points, 54 percent to 45 percent.

Youngkin improved on Trump’s performance with white voters (both men and especially women), who also made up a bigger share of the electorate this year compared to 2020, according to the Virginia exit polls. White Virginians accounted for 74 percent of voters, up from 67 percent last year. In particular, Youngkin did significantly better than Trump among white women with “some college or less,” per the exit polls: He carried that group 75 percent to 25 percent, greatly improving on Trump’s 56 percent to 44 percent performance with them.

The simplest way, though, to describe how Youngkin won is basically that he just performed better across the board, and did so via both turn out and vote choice. At least according to the exit polls (which aren’t always reliable, so we’ll be looking at this question in other ways in the coming days), the electorate that turned out in 2021 was older and whiter than the one that turned out in 2020, and more friendly to Republicans in other ways. And Youngkin improved on Trump’s performance with a host of demographic groups across that electorate.

New Yorker - Had Virginia’s been the only major election held last night, that might have been the story: a turn in the Republican Party, back toward its traditional self. But a second gubernatorial contest, in New Jersey, followed a similar pattern, suggesting deeper problems for the Democrats. The incumbent Democrat, Phil Murphy, won the 2017 election by fourteen percentage points—slightly less than the margin by which Biden defeated Trump in New Jersey in 2020. Murphy was expected to handily defeat his opponent, a former legislator from Raritan named Jack Ciattarelli, who campaigned largely by challenging Murphy’s response to the pandemic, but on Wednesday morning the race remained too close to call. This had nothing to do with Youngkin, and little to do with the culture-war issues that had surfaced in the Virginia race.

It is beginning to seem that Biden’s Presidency is in trouble. In the course of the summer, his public approval collapsed: in June, a little more than fifty per cent of voters approved of the job he was doing and a little more than forty per cent disapproved, but those numbers have now reversed. “Biden has nearly the worst approval ratings of any president on record at this stage of his presidency,” the Times election guru Nate Cohn tweeted late last night

Washington Post - In five of the past seven post-presidential Election Days, the party that over-performed its presidential vote margins from the previous year in these races went on to flip the House, the Senate or both a year later.

Republicans only need to win five House seats and one Senate seat to do that. Tuesday showed they have the wind at their back, and they don’t need much of a gust.