What Went Down During The 2021 Elections

Given how close the governor’s race in New Jersey is, we’ve calculated how the candidates are doing relative to 2020 presidential benchmarks. Murphy now leads by about 0.3 percentage points, which isn’t much, but you’d still probably rather be Murphy than Ciattarelli at this point. That’s because a couple of Democratic-leaning counties — Essex (Newark) and Mercer (Trenton) — still likely have a fair number of votes left to report, which should be good news for Murphy. Still, our benchmark analysis suggests Murphy is way outperforming what he needs from Hudson County, the second-bluest county in the state, after Essex. Murphy has a margin akin to Biden’s in 2020 there, even though he’s running behind Biden pretty much everywhere else. That raises questions about whether some of the remaining vote in Hudson might actually be friendlier to Ciattarelli than you’d expect in such a major Democratic-leaning county. But with a lack of clarity on what of the remaining vote is still left to count — many Democratic-leaning mail-in and early votes but also some Republican-leaning Election Day ballots, too — we can’t know with certainty how things will shift from here.

I wrote a little while ago about how Democrats had axed paid family leave as part of their big spending bill — well, it looks like that might not be the case anymore. Now there are reports that Democrats are adding four weeks of paid family and medical leave to their reconciliation bill. It’s possible that the timing is coincidental, but it’s really interesting to think about this move in the context of their loss in Virginia last night, and the role of education and parental anger in that race. Is this an attempt to show parents who are running on fumes after 20 months of unpredictable-to-nonexistent childcare that Democrats are there for them? A way to prevent some of the clear frustration that parents are feeling from backfiring against them again? If that’s the case, I’m not sure that four weeks of paid leave will do the trick — but it’s interesting to think about the political chess here.

In Virginia, I was struck by the extent to which Youngkin was able to improve double-digits on Trump’s performance in many different counties across the state. It wasn’t just one demographic or region where he was able to make significant inroads — he gained in urban, suburban and rural areas. He gained in counties with high percentages of college-educated whites as well as in counties with high percentages on non-college-educated whites. There’s also some evidence suggesting that he may have gained a decent amount of ground with Black voters. This suggests that Republicans might be able to contest a wide array of districts and states in next year’s midterm elections if the political environment stays poor for Democrats.