“If you have a voter integrity operation in place on the front end and you have 93 percent of your precincts covered with trained poll watchers and election workers, the opportunity for voter irregularities drops dramatically,” Mr. Fredericks said. “The voter integrity team here will be used as model for the midterms.”
Takeaways From the 2021 Elections
Card 1 of 5A G.O.P. pathway in Virginia. The win by Glenn Youngkin, who campaigned heavily in the governor’s race on education and who evaded the shadow of Donald Trump, could serve as a blueprint for Republicans in the midterms.
A rightward shift emerges. Mr. Youngkin outperformed Mr. Trump’s 2020 results across Virginia, while a surprisingly strong showing in the New Jersey governor’s race by the G.O.P. candidate unsettled Democrats.
Democratic panic is rising. Less than a year after taking power in Washington, the party faces a grim immediate future as it struggles to energize voters and continues to lose messaging wars to Republicans.
A new direction in N.Y.C. Eric Adams will be the second Black mayor in the city’s history. The win for the former police captain sets in motion a more center-left Democratic leadership.
Mixed results for Democrats in cities. Voters in Minneapolis rejected an amendment to replace the Police Department while progressives scored a victory in Boston’s mayoral race.
Mr. Youngkin’s poll watchers, according to a Washington Post account of their activities during early voting, observed Virginia’s voting process and concluded it was free of the fraud that Mr. Trump and others baselessly claim exists. And there were no significant reports of voter intimidation from Republican poll watchers, as Democrats had feared.
What does all of this tell us?
In the current environment, when Republicans are furious with an increasingly unpopular Democratic president, if Democrats and the White House don’t figure out a way to turn their political fortunes around, it may not matter if Democratic candidates reach their turnout goals in the midterms.
Midterm elections over the past decade have hinged on whose voters are angrier. Right now, Democrats are arguing among themselves about legislation they’ve been negotiating for months, while Republicans have adopted a coded phrase as a stand-in to shout obscenities about Mr. Biden.
It’s not hard to predict which side’s voters will be more eager to turn out next year.
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