The outcome of elections in 2022 and 2024 are tied in large part to events the President can influence but not control: the state of the COVID pandemic, the health of the US economy and in particular the mix of price hikes and supply shortages amidst COVID exhaustion we’ve seen increasingly in 2021. But there are already steps Democrats can and really must start taking to lay the groundwork for strong showings. One really critical one comes out of the $1.2 trillion bipartisan Biden Infrastructure Bill passed late Friday evening. It goes without saying that Democrats should run on the contents of the bill. There’s tons of funding for repairing roads and bridges, replacing all the country’s lead pipes, broadband and much more. But just as critical is using it as a cudgel against Republicans – something GOP fury at the 13 representatives makes crystal, crystal clear.

To understand this you don’t have to go any further than looking at the announcements Republicans put out announcing their decisions to vote against the bill.

Let me explain.

After far too long a week, a bit of reality world is in order.

In his apparently humiliating near defeat, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy’s margin appears to be 50.9% to 48.3% over Jack Ciattarelli. In Virginia the margin of Glenn Youngkin’s triumph appears to be 50.8% to 48.5% over Terry McAuliffe.

We can add to this that Murphy is the first Democratic Governor of New Jersey to be reelected in 44 years. Meanwhile, going back 48 years the party which does not hold the presidency has won the Virginia’s race all but one time. That was when Terry McAuliffe won in 2013.

A rather bizarre development in Virginia. On election day Glenn Youngkin’s 17 year old son twice tried to vote illegally. Indeed, he attempted to do so – twice – in a precinct where his family doesn’t even live.

Yesterday CNN headlined that President Biden returned to a Democratic “nightmare”. The Times Peter Baker said Biden was returning to a “different country”. There’s no doubt Democrats had a rough night. They lost a close governor’s race in Virginia, a state they have come to see increasingly as home turf. They also narrowly lost control of the state House of Delegates which they first took control of in 2019. And while Democrat Phil Murphy won in New Jersey, Republicans made a very close race of it, in large part by a big drop off in Democrats showing up to vote.

As I wrote Tuesday night, this isn’t a surprising result. The President’s popularity is underwater. Polls say the public sees the country going in the wrong direction – a reality regardless of whether you or I think it is an accurate perception. But let’s also get real: the incumbent President’s party has consistently lost these two governorships every cycle for more than 30 years. The one exception was Terry McAuliffe in 2013. Murphy’s victory in New Jersey sees the first Democrat reelected governor in that state in 44 years.

A lot of progressives across the country as well as in Buffalo were enthused by what a few months ago had seemed like the near certainty that India Walton, a self-described democratic socialist who won the Democratic primary against longtime Mayor Byron Brown, would be the next Mayor of Buffalo. But it appears that Mayor Byron Brown has managed a comeback victory as a write-in candidate.

(Neither Republicans nor New York’s various minor parties fielded candidates. So Walton was literally the only name on the ballot. Brown’s campaign spent about $100,000 on rubber stamps with his name to hand out to voters.)

One anecdote doesn’t capture a state. But I wanted to pass on this note from a TPM alum …

I read and enjoyed your piece on McAuliffe’s loss. I think it’s all on target, atop the fact that McAuliffe just isn’t a base moving guy on his own.

It may not have changed the result given the headwinds at play, but from where I sit in the Northern VA suburbs of DC, it also seems like McAuliffe and the VA Dems got completely out-hustled and out-campaigned, while leaving their reliable voters to do the work for them.

The networks haven’t called it. But the numbers crunchers I watch have. What do we make of this result? My main reaction is that we should not be surprised that Youngkin won. By this I do not mean that this morning I would have told you this was going to be the result. In fact, I had an inkling in the last day or so that McAuliffe might pull it out. I mean on the larger canvass: this shouldn’t surprise us.

Why? Let me explain.

I just saw this comment from my friend Chris Hayes …

My unified theory of American social and political life is that we’ve lived through and are living through a once-in-a-century trauma/disruption and the results of that are going to revereberate throughout almost every facet of politics for a while.

I agree with this, with this additional and I believe critical fact: the pandemic hit during a period of intense social and political turbulence and instability in the United States. Not only Trump’s presidency, the escalation of destabilizing actions during his presidency but remember that the pandemic struck within days of the end of the President’s impeachment trial.

Today is the day for those off-year elections which in addition to electing governors and mayors and various other officials are taken as harbingers of the political climate going into the following year’s midterm elections. Attention tends to focus on New Jersey and Virginia. Democrat Phil Murphy looks set to win handily in New Jersey. But Virginia, where incumbents can’t run for reelection, looks way too close to call. There are two governing patterns in Virginia. One is that it is an increasingly Democratic state. Joe Biden won it by 10 points and it went narrowly for Hillary Clinton in 2016 even as she lost Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. The other pattern is that it tends to be won by the party not currently holding the presidency. The guy who broke that latter pattern, ironically, is none other than Terry McAuliffe, who won in 2013, a year after President Obama was reelected.

Now we see which of those patterns will hold.

We went into the weekend thinking Congress was finally on the verge of passing a substantially reduced Build Back Better bill, at roughly $1.75 trillion. Joe Manchin was likely more involved in that negotiation than any other member of Congress. He just held a press conference on the Hill in which he not only refused to support it but actually trashed the whole proposal in entirely new ways – now saying he can’t vote on any version of it until he learns more about what’s happening on inflation, gets a report from the CBO and other complaints. He demanded a vote on the so-called BIF and said he’s open to voting against the whole Biden reconciliation bill.

One other dimension to this is that Manchin’s announcement came just as Democratic leadership seemed on the verge on getting House progressives to believe that they had the outlines of a recon bill covered and thus vote for the BIF in advance of a recon bill. In other words, he was about to get what he has claimed to have wanted: passing the BIF bill before reconciliation and still having leverage to shape the reconciliation bill after the rest of the party has surrendered its leverage. The odds of that happening now seem close to nil.