Democrats awoke Wednesday to a sobering reality. A year after celebrating victory in the 2020 elections, their slender congressional majorities are now even more at risk than they feared, and it is not clear that President Biden or his party has a workable plan to rebalance a political landscape tilting significantly against them.
Republican Glenn Youngkin’s victory over Democrat Terry McAuliffe in Virginia’s gubernatorial election was not a total surprise. Nervous Democrats could sense it coming for weeks. But the full impact of the loss in a state that Biden won by 10 points just 12 months ago, along with a far closer gubernatorial race than anyone expected in New Jersey, which Biden won by 16 points, triggered alarms across the party. …
Democrats would be foolhardy to underestimate what happened Tuesday. To lose a state like Virginia, which has been trending Democratic for a decade, and to struggle so much in New Jersey suggests that, unless things change, only the bluest of states or districts are likely to be safe in 2022. CONTINUED
Dan Balz, Washington Post
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