There was a political earthquake Tuesday, and the epicenter was Virginia. Or was it Washington, DC? National Review’s John McCormack makes the case that it was the latter.

The results are clear: Republican Glenn Youngkin’s two-point victory in Virginia — a state Joe Biden carried by ten points just a year ago — was one part of a national backlash against Democrats.

Republicans made a clean sweep of judicial races in Pennsylvania. In Texas, a heavily Hispanic statehouse district that Biden carried by 14 points elected a Republican by two points on Tuesday. And the governor’s race in New Jersey — a state Biden won by 16 points — was still too close to call on Wednesday morning.

Any explanation of Tuesday’s results needs to account for Joe Biden’s tanking job-approval numbers. “The most important predictor of a party’s performance in a midterm is the president’s job approval rating,” Sean Trende of RealClearPolitics wrote on September 2. The title of that piece was “Biden’s Job Approval Has Entered Dangerous Territory.”

On August 2, the RCP average showed that 51.6 percent of voters approved of Biden’s job performance, compared with 43.4 percent who disapproved. By November 2, Election Day, those numbers had flipped to 43.0 percent approve, 51.1 percent disapprove.

What explains the shift? I’d suggest three issues more than anything else.

He goes on to list Afghanistan, COVID, and the economy as the three big issues cause the president’s plummeting popularity.

Between the fall of Kabul on August 15 and the withdrawal of the last American troops from Afghanistan at the end of the month, Americans were gripped by the horrifying images and stories of what it looks like in real time to lose a war. …

At the same time that America was leaving Afghanistan to the Taliban, the Delta wave of the coronavirus was rising in America, mask mandates were being reinstated, and vaccine mandates were being rolled out.

Those mandates came despite assurances from the White House as late as July 23 that the federal government couldn’t impose them.

The bigger question is not how voters wanted politicians to respond to COVID last year or this fall, but how they generally want to live going forward. …

Inflation is on the rise. People see this every time they go to the grocery store. In Virginia, Youngkin ran on eliminating the state tax on groceries, while McAuliffe ran on raising the minimum wage. At the same time, the Democrats who control the White House, the Senate, and the House remained much more interested in passing another $2 trillion social-spending bill than in doing anything to fix supply-chain problems and bring inflation down.

McCormack concludes:

In Virginia, McAuliffe hyped the threat that COVID posed to children. He ran hard on the issue of abortion, and he tried to paint Youngkin as a Trump acolyte. None of it worked, but with numbers like these on the economy, it’s hard to imagine that anything else could have. A backlash against Democrats was inevitable.

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