One simple reason for the Republicans' good day

[Bloomberg]( Follow Us [Get the newsletter]( Get Jonathan Bernstein’s newsletter every morning in your inbox. [Click here to subscribe.]( The big headline in Tuesday’s off-year election is a good one for Republicans, with Governor-elect Glenn Youngkin leading a sweep of statewide offices in Virginia and possible capture of the lower house of the legislature. Meanwhile, Republican Jack Ciattarelli was doing surprisingly well in Democratic New Jersey, with the race too close to call as I write this. You’re going to hear plenty of explanations, but if you actually want to know what happened, it’s pretty straightforward. This is the [11th out of the last 12 times]( that the president’s party lost the Virginia gubernatorial election — the numbers in New Jersey are similar — and with President Joe Biden currently at 43% approval measured by public opinion polls, the result was pretty much what one would expect. If Biden is at 43% or lower a year from now, the chances are very good that Republicans will win big in the midterms. Of course, the next question is why Biden’s popularity has slumped, but the bulk of that is surely about the latest pandemic wave and a mediocre economic quarter. Sure, other things may have mattered on the margins, both for Biden’s popularity and the Virginia and New Jersey elections, and the margins can be extremely important when it comes to winning and losing. But the big picture isn’t very complicated. Republicans are doing well because there’s an incumbent Democrat president, and he’s not very popular right now. Just as Democrats did very well in 2017 with an unpopular Republican in the White House. That’s the bulk of what actually happened. But it’s not all that’s important. Political scientist Matt Glassman [explains](: And now the real politics begins — the politics of explanation/meaning. The bivariate result is obviously very important, but perhaps more important is how other officials — elected and not, in VA, in Washington, and elsewhere — understand it, and alter their actions/behaviors. Much of the early chatter among Democrats centered on the legislative battles on Capitol Hill. The most moderate Democrats blame the most liberal ones for stalling final approval of the infrastructure bill that’s already passed in the Senate with bipartisan support. The most liberal Democrats blame their party’s centrist Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Krysten Sinema of Arizona for failing to support the rest of the the party’s agenda. Congress scholar Josh Huder is right that any such explanation “overestimates (1) voters attentive to legislative politics, and (2) the amount of disarray in Congress.” But those who are involved in legislative politics are happy to use any weapon available, and so they’ll certainly try to make those interpretations stick. Some of these interpretations are transparently self-serving for the party actors involved (although they may also be sincere, given that people tend to believe what is in their interest). Others will try somewhat harder to find more plausible reasons for the Democrats’ bad day. But plausible or not, these understandings of election results can be incredibly important if they become widely accepted within the party. Party scholar Seth Masket’s wonderful book, [“Learning From Loss,”]( studied the ways that Democrats came to understand how they lost the 2016 presidential election, and how that produced a focus within the party on “electability” (defined in a particular way) that eventually heavily influenced the nomination of Biden in 2020. What’s important was not whether an interpretation is correct in some absolute sense, but whether the party, or at least important parts of the party, come to believe it. And all of this is as true for winning as it is for losing. Republicans, too, will examine what happened on Tuesday and their conclusions will affect how they behave. This year’s Republican rejectionism in Congress was a predictable consequence of their interpretation of their landslides after similar behavior in the 1994 and 2010 midterm elections following Democratic wins in 1992 and 2008. So whatever the parties wind up believing about Tuesday’s election results really matters. Will Republicans conclude that culture wars, including attacks on the way U.S. racial history is taught in schools, are the key to future victories? Will they listen to former President Donald Trump when he insists he was responsible for their success, or will they decide that keeping him at arm’s length or more was actually why things worked out well? Will they try to find ways to emulate Virginia and [avoid high-profile contested primaries](? Party actors trying to make these decisions are often both seeking more influence for themselves and the party groups they belong to and sincerely attempting to give the party a better chance to win future elections. So as we move on from these off-year elections, pay close attention to how the parties talk about what happened. Not because it will be correct or because it will be wrong — but because it will contain huge hints about what they’re going to do next. 1. Reva Dhingra, Mitchell Kilborn and Olivia Woldemikael at the Monkey Cage on [Biden and refugees](. 2. Jamelle Bouie on the [adoption of the U.S. Constitution](. 3. My Bloomberg Opinion colleague  Ramesh Ponnuru on [the Virginia elections](. 4. Perry Bacon Jr. on the [mayoral election in Boston](. 5. Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern on the [Supreme Court’s majority](. 6. And it was an election day here in San Antonio, so I voted. Again. Eight times, on eight state constitutional measures on the ballot that ranged from very obscure to extremely obscure. That’s the third election day I’ve had in this off-year, and I’m up to 13 votes cast in those three elections. Yes, that’s way too many. Get Early Returns every morning in your inbox. [Click here to subscribe](. Also subscribe to [Bloomberg All Access]( and get much, much more. You’ll receive our unmatched global news coverage and two in-depth daily newsletters, the Bloomberg Open and the Bloomberg Close. Before it’s here, it’s on the Bloomberg Terminal. Find out more about how the Terminal delivers information and analysis that financial professionals can’t find anywhere else. [Learn more](. You received this message because you are subscribed to Bloomberg's Early Returns newsletter. [Unsubscribe]( | [Bloomberg.com]( | [Contact Us]( [Ads Powered By Liveintent]( | [Ad Choices]( Bloomberg L.P. 731 Lexington, New York, NY, 10022