Republican Jack Ciattarelli, left, shakes hands with Democrat Mikie Sherrill before a debate in September. The two are vying to become New Jersey’s next governor.Noah K. Murray/The Associated Press
A large crowd elbowed into Jimmy’s Old Town Tavern to devour Buffalo wings and watch the Virginia Tech football game over the weekend, only to be repeatedly subjected to competing political advertisements for Virginia’s gubernatorial candidates.
Talk about negative politics in the United States! The ads for the two finalists for the governor’s chair were mostly about how odious the other candidate is – same as the TV spots in New Jersey, the other state holding an off-year gubernatorial race.
That, and whether Donald Trump is merely a slight drag on the Republican Party or a heavy, unbearable burden at a time when he is flying high in the capital but his poll ratings are low in the country.
The eyes of the American political world are on these two states – one on the back porch of New York, the other on the front porch of the old Confederacy – and on the City of New York itself, where a 34-year-old democratic socialist may be on the verge of becoming the first Muslim mayor of the country’s largest metropolis.
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There are two certainties as voters go to the polls Tuesday: The winners will assert that these races foreshadow next year’s midterm congressional elections, and the losers will dismiss the results as idiosyncratic contests full of sound and fury signifying nothing.
They will be right about the sound and fury. In Virginia, Democratic former representative Abigail Spanberger and Republican Lieutenant-Governor Winsome Earle-Sears have been scorching each other for weeks. So, too, have the New Jersey candidates, Democratic Representative Mikie Sherrill and Republican former state assemblyman Jack Ciattarelli.
Democrat Abigail Spanberger, left, faces Republican Winsome Earle-Sears in the race to become Virginia’s next governor.The Associated Press
In both cases, the Republican candidates are so leery of even a slender separation from Mr. Trump that they have made themselves vulnerable to a cascade of advertisements highlighting their ties to a President who lost both their states all three times he ran and whose policies have special disfavour there.
“I think he’s right about everything that he’s doing,” Mr. Ciattarelli said during a New Jersey debate last month. He’s still paying for that remark.
The political cost of Mr. Trump’s initiatives, and of the government shutdown that is stretching into its sixth week, is evident just outside Washington, especially here in Virginia’s Fairfax County, where about 80,000 people have lost their government jobs or are without paycheques, and where the work of thousands of federal contractors has been interrupted. The state’s two major international airports, one of which is partly in this county, are snarled.
The government shutdown has disproportionally affected Virginia as a whole, as it has one of the largest numbers of federal workers – 147,358, according to the Library of Congress. That puts the state in a virtual tie with California for the number of government employees, though the latter has nearly seven times as many people.
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Besides the scores of Virginians out of work, many in other fields – who are showing real estate, selling appliances, dealing cars –are affected by the decline in spending power. The result is a foul mood among Virginians, who only four years ago sent Republican Glenn Youngkin to the 1811 Executive Mansion on Richmond’s Capitol Square, defeating Terry McAuliffe, who was closely identified with the Washington political establishment.
The economic strains here in the onetime capital of the Confederacy make this a more hostile environment for Ms. Winsome Earle-Sears than she might have faced in any other Southern state.
“Virginia’s gubernatorial election is always seen as something of a leading political indicator of the political health of the president who had been elected only a year earlier,” said Stephen Farnsworth, director of the Center for Leadership and Media Studies at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Va. “It often reflects buyers’ remorse about the choice the year before.”
Former U.S. president Barack Obama campaigns with Mikie Sherrill, the Democratic candidate for New Jersey governor.Kylie Cooper/Reuters
That is true also in the New Jersey contest, which will determine the successor to two-term Democratic Governor Phil Murphy. The most recent Quinnipiac University Poll found that 56 per cent of likely Garden State voters disapprove of Mr. Trump’s performance in office.
Indeed, Mr. Trump’s record has emerged as a silent partner for Ms. Sherrill, the Democrat in the race. One late-breaking factor: The President “terminated” the Gateway rail tunnel project between New Jersey and New York, one of the biggest public-works programs in the country.
“As ‘blue’ as New Jersey is in presidential elections, it is decidedly ‘purple’ when it comes to governors’ races,” said Benjamin Dworkin, director of the Institute for Public Policy and Citizenship at Rowan University in Glassboro, N.J.
“Republicans are feeling good because Phil Murphy has been in the governor’s office for eight years and since the 1960s this state hasn’t given a political party a third straight term. Democrats are feeling good because Donald Trump is in the White House. So both sides feel this is their year and things are very hot here.”
The two Democratic women – they once were roommates in Washington– are favourites to win, as is Democratic state assemblyman Zohran Mamdani in the New York mayoral race. Mr. Mamdani’s profile as a supporter of Palestinians in the Middle East conflict and his platform of rent freezes, free daycare, city-run grocery stores for the poor and tax hikes in “richer neighbourhoods” has made him one of the most controversial Democratic nominees for any major office in decades.
And yet his candidacy has the unusual quality of delighting both progressive Democrats and conservative Republicans – one because he embraces many issues of the left, and the other because he is a tempting target for Mr. Trump’s effort to portray Democrats as out of step with traditional American values.