Democrats suffer a thorough drubbing at the polls

ONE YEAR ago, America’s Democrats were celebrating: Joe Biden had just made Donald Trump a one-term president. This year’s (much smaller) election day left them in a considerably grimmer mood. In Virginia, Glenn Youngkin became the first Republican to win a gubernatorial race since 2009. Democrats are on course to lose the lower chamber of the statehouse, as well as races for lieutenant-governor and attorney-general. In New Jersey, Phil Murphy, the incumbent governor, came within just a percentage point of losing despite winning by 14 points in 2017. The party’s progressive wing fared even worse: voters in Minneapolis rejected a measure to replace the city’s police department with a “Department of Public Safety,” and a socialist mayoral candidate in Buffalo, New York lost to her defeated primary opponent who was running as a write-in candidate. Partly these results simply hew to form: the party in power tends to fare poorly in off-year elections. But the size and shape of the defeat augurs ill for Democrats’ chances of holding their congressional majorities in next year’s midterm races.