Abigail Spanberger

Abigail Spanberger’s victory in the Virginia gubernatorial election should come as no surprise. In the last 50 years, the state has only once elected a governor who belongs to the same party as the president. While the outcome might not be out of the ordinary, it doesn’t bode well for the Republican party in next year’s midterms – Spanberger won by a 15-point lead, much wider than the two-point margin of the 2021 race. Spanberger is a former CIA officer who served three terms in Congress. Her opponent Winsome Earle-Sears has served as Virginia’s lieutenant governor since 2021, but failed to connect with voters in the way that Virginia’s incumbent Governor Glenn Youngkin did.

Americans head to the polls today, with gubernatorial elections in Virginia and New Jersey and mayoral elections in New York City and Minneapolis. The races are being talked of as an early test for Trump, a bellwether for the public mood after a breakneck ten months back in the Oval. A qualifying remark. Each of these races are taking place in traditionally blue cities and states – Virginia has not voted for a GOP presidential candidate since 2004; New Jersey since 1988; Minnesota since 1972. Still, these places – even New York – trended strongly purple at the last election; in this sense, today’s elections will be a test of the so-called “vibe-shift" and its extent.

The Virginia state elections had looked predictable. Nearly every poll showed the Democrats poised to win all three executive offices of governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general. Then, a series of violent texts from the Democratic candidate for attorney general surfaced. In 2022, then-delegate Jay Jones had texted his Republican colleague Carrie Coyner saying that if he had a gun and two bullets, in a room with Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot and then-Virginia House Speaker Todd Gilbert, he’d shoot Gilbert twice. Then he called Coyner to say he wanted Gilbert’s wife to watch their children die in her arms.  Coyner expressed her horror over text. But Jones kept going: “Yes, I’ve told you this before. Only when people feel pain personally do they move on policy”.

Former British prime minister Tony Blair is the quintessential Davos man. In the sixteen years since he left office, he has criss-crossed the globe, giving speeches and advising sometimes unsavory clients. And yet this week he has delivered a dissenting comment on the issue that his fellow conference-hoppers spend a lot of time worrying about. Blair has caused a bit of ruckus in the UK this week thanks to an interview with center-left magazine the New Statesman in which the former Labour Party leader questions the wisdom of unilateral action on climate change.

Republicans are currently on track to end up with 214 seats in the House of Representatives in January. As of this writing, they’ve already netted seven gains, are leading in an additional nine races, and will pick up one more with two Republicans in a runoff for Louisiana’s 5th District.If it all holds, it would amount to an astonishing 17-seat gain for the GOP and the Democrats holding the smallest House majority in two decades. Cook Political Report predicted Democrats would expand their 232-seat majority by 10 to 15.