 | | Residents of Fairfax, Va., waited in long lines to cast a ballot early.Kenny Holston for The New York Times |
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Ever since Barack Obama swept into the White House on the strength of record turnout, it has been an article of faith among Democrats that the more people who vote, the better the party will fare. |
When turnout sagged, during the 2010 and the 2014 midterm elections, Republicans won wave elections. In 2016, fewer people voted than in 2012 and Donald J. Trump won the presidency, shocking Democrats and turbocharging a more explicit Republican argument that making voting harder would make it easier for the G.O.P. to win elections. |
Then turnout jumped again in the Trump years — in Virginia four years ago, in special elections and in the 2018 midterms. Joe Biden ousted Trump in a national election with record-high turnout. Republicans spent the next year, in states they control, fighting to make it harder to vote and promoting lies that the 2020 turnout had been stocked with fraudulent Democratic votes. |
How then to explain the election on Tuesday in Virginia, where Glenn Youngkin, now the Republican governor-elect, beat former Gov. Terry McAuliffe in a contest in which at least 25 percent more votes were cast than in any governor's race in the state's history? (The number will go up; mail-in ballots postmarked by Election Day will be counted as long as they are received by this Friday.) |
Making it easier to vote worked. |
In this week's election, McAuliffe won 200,000 votes more than Northam did when he won the 2017 election in a blowout. He won nearly 600,000 more votes than he did in 2013 when he beat Kenneth Cuccinelli II to become governor. He beat his internal turnout targets in Northern Virginia, Richmond and the Norfolk area. Turnout was strong in Black precincts, college towns and the suburbs, all traditional areas of strength for Democratic candidates. |
Yet Youngkin still got more votes, buoyed by turnout near presidential-election levels across rural Virginia and better than anticipated numbers in the outer suburbs of Washington. He won far more votes than McAuliffe's team or virtually any of the public polling had anticipated. |
"We're at a dangerous inflection point where we have one group of people who assumes turnout solves all of our problems and another group that wants to tune out whole swaths of voters," Guy Cecil, the chairman of the Democratic super PAC Priorities USA, told me on Thursday afternoon. "There are millions of people across the country who are inclined to vote for Trump or Republicans who don't vote." |
In some of the most important battleground states, like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, Cecil said, a majority of the voting-age public is white people without college degrees, a demographic that has been trending away from Democrats since 2008 and broke strongly against McAuliffe in Virginia, according to exit polling. |
If turnout in the 2022 midterms spikes in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, which both have Senate and governor's races on the ballot, it may not necessarily benefit the Democratic candidates. |
"Higher turnout among Democrats increases our chances of winning," Cecil said. "Higher turnout overall does not do that." |
For Republicans who have spent the last year proffering the false claim that Biden won the 2020 election only because of a major fraud scheme, the Virginia results required a bit of rhetorical gymnastics. |
Cuccinelli, the former Virginia attorney general who lost to McAuliffe in 2013, late Wednesday called for Youngkin and the incoming Republican majority in the state's House of Delegates to "reverse the Democrat-inflicted damage to voter integrity in our state." |
And John Fredericks, the conservative talk radio host who was chairman of Trump's 2016 and 2020 campaigns in Virginia, credited Youngkin's victory to his building an "election integrity task force" to monitor polling places across the state. |
"If you have a voter integrity operation in place on the front end and you have 93 percent of your precincts covered with trained poll watchers and election workers, the opportunity for voter irregularities drops dramatically," Fredericks told me on Wednesday. "The voter integrity team here will be used as model for the midterms." |
Youngkin's poll watchers, according to a Washington Post account of their activities during early voting, observed Virginia's voting process and concluded it was free of the fraud that Trump and others baselessly claim exists. And there were no significant reports of voter intimidation from Republican poll watchers, as Democrats had feared. |
What does all of this tell us? |
In the current environment, when Republicans are furious with an increasingly unpopular Democratic president, if Democrats and the White House don't figure out a way to turn their political fortunes around, it may not matter if Democratic candidates reach their turnout goals in the midterms. |
It's not hard to predict which side's voters will be more eager to turn out next year. |
 | | Some of President Biden's most loyal contributors have been feeling cast aside.Tom Brenner for The New York Times |
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Why big Democratic donors are increasingly grumbling about Biden. |
As Joe Biden hopped from Manhattan high-rises to Silicon Valley mansions to gather campaign checks in 2019, he developed a certain way of thanking the well-heeled donors who invested in his presidential campaign. |
The hardest part, he would say to them, was not just the money. It was putting their names and reputations on the line for him. And he would promise to "never, ever let you down," as he told donors at the home of a Hollywood executive in late 2019. |
Now, nearly 10 months into his presidency, some of Biden's most loyal contributors and top fund-raisers are feeling neglected, if not outright cast aside, according to more than 30 interviews with Democratic donors, fund-raisers and the operatives who work with them. |
With the loss of the Virginia governorship this week making plain the darkening political climate for Democrats, the White House has accumulated precious little good will among some of the party's most important financiers. |
Their frustrations also include impatience with the pace of substantive policy changes: One of the party's top donors is now signaling he is planning to withhold funds entirely over the languishing of voting-rights legislation. |
Donor grousing is nearly as old a tradition as campaigning itself. Wealthy and entitled contributors always want more influence and access than they have. But the sheer breadth of complaints about the Biden White House's operation is striking, and a source of increasing concern among allies and Democratic officials who fear it could cause a backlash among contributors that the party will need to mobilize soon for the 2022 midterm elections. |
"There is a basic chorus, which is we're forgotten and discarded," said John Morgan, a major bundler who hosted Biden at his home in Florida in May 2019. "It's very discouraging. We don't exist." |
The DealBook Online Summit |
Join us next week, Nov. 9-10, for two days celebrating the 20th anniversary of DealBook. We're bringing together some of the most influential minds in business, policy and culture to take stock of a world in the midst of rapid reinvention, grappling with the ripples of Covid and rewriting the rules in real time. |
Speakers will include, among others, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Matthew McConaughey, Tim Cook and Meghan Markle. |
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