Election results: Murphy hangs on in New Jersey as Democratic blame game over Virginia begins

GOP victory in blue-trending state heaps pressure on president struggling with approval ratings

Glenn Youngkin makes victory speech after winning Virginia governor race

Republican Glenn Youngkin has defeated Democrat Terry McAuliffe in a tight race for Virginia’s governor’s seat.

It is a blow for Joe Biden who had promoted Mr McAuliffe as “the proven leader who will move Virginia forward”. The president, whose national approval ratings are in the gutter, ignored reporters’ questions as he returned to the White House on Wednesday following his trip to Cop26.

Mr McAuliffe wanted to return to the office he left four years ago and tried to link Mr Youngkin to Donald Trump, hoping Democrats’ dislike for the former president would motivate them in a state Mr Biden carried by 10 points in 2020.

Mr Youngkin focused on culture-war topics like “election integrity” and how racial inequality is taught in school, appealing to Mr Trump’s base but avoiding campaigning with him in person. He benefited from high turnout in rural areas, according to the AP.

Meanwhile, Democratic governor Phil Murphy is in a dead heat in New Jersey against Republican challenger Jack Ciattarelli. And in New York City, Democrat Eric Adams defeated the GOP’s Curtis Sliwa in the mayoral race.

Key Points

• Biden ignores reporters’ questions as he returns to White House
• McAuliffe defeated in Virginia in key race for unpopular Biden
• Eric Adams is elected New York City mayor
• Minneapolis voters reject proposal to replace police
• Can either of the candidates for Seattle mayor truly tackle the city’s homelessness crisis?

[3 November 2021 10:36 · Jon Sharman]

Cincinnati joins Boston in electing first Asian-American mayor

Cincinnati has elected its first Asian-American mayor on the same day as Boston.

In Cincinnati, Aftab Pureval, 39, easily defeated former Democratic congressman David Mann.

"Tonight, we made history in Cincinnati," Mr Pureval told a large gathering of supporters. "Cincinnati is a place where no matter what you look like, where you're from, or how much money you have, if you come here and work hard you can achieve your dreams."

Previously Mr Pureval, the son of a Tibetan mother and Indian father, was county clerk, the first Democrat to serve in the role. He had left his job as a lawyer in 2015 to run for the office.

[3 November 2021 11:01 · Jon Sharman]

Democrats need to get bills passed to boost Biden’s approval rating, strategist warns

Democrats are reeling from electoral defeats this morning and Joe Biden, at a low ebb of popularity, has returned home from Cop26 to a storm of difficulties.

He must bring feuding Democratic progressives and moderates together on the $1.75 trillion social safety-net spending plan and a $1 trillion infrastructure bill.

Reuters-Ipsos' latest polling suggests 44 per cent of Americans approve of Mr Biden, down from nearly 60 per cent early in his presidency.

"It would be catastrophic for us not to start passing some legislation immediately," said Democratic strategist Bud Jackson.

"I'm confident that if we can get this stuff passed, the economy starts to turn around and the supply chains improve, there are opportunities for Biden's poll numbers to improve. But they're not going to recover until we get this passed," he said.

[3 November 2021 11:07 · Jon Sharman]

Biden entered White House shortly before 2am, but ignored reporters’ questions

Joe Biden got home from Cop26 at 1.38am on Wednesday (EPA)

Joe Biden did not respond to reporters who shouted questions about the election results as he returned to the White House in the early hours.

The president was coming home from the Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow.

According to a pool report, the president reentered the White House at 1.38am but “did not respond to shouted questions seeking a response about election results”.

The Associated Press had called the Virginia gubernatorial result – a defeat for Democrat Terry McAuliffe, who had been heavily promoted by Mr Biden – almost exactly one hour before that time.

Read on below for what Glenn Youngkin’s victory might mean for the president:

[3 November 2021 11:30 · Jon Sharman]

Virginia result foreshadows trouble for Biden, expert says

The defeat for Democrats in Virginia suggests there is trouble ahead for Joe Biden, according to an expert.

Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Centre for Politics, said: “People want Covid solved, supply chains solved, inflation solved, other economic problems solved,.

“They haven't seen what they expected to see, which was a very competent president putting a check mark next to each problem as he solved it. That's what people were expecting after Trump.”

[3 November 2021 12:00 · Jon Sharman]

Democrat Eric Adams wins New York City mayor’s race

#icymi

Democratic candidate Eric Adams – a former police captain and Brooklyn borough president – has defeated long-shot Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa in the race for New York City’s next mayor, who will face a major test in leading the city from a defining public health emergency that has magnified crises facing the nation’s largest city.

The 110th mayor of New York inherits city leadership in the middle of a coronavirus pandemic that has upended life for millions of residents – including the city’s schools and its thousands of students – and he will steward the nation’s most expensive police force amid international demands for reform when he enters office on 1 January.

[3 November 2021 12:26 · Jon Sharman]

Minneapolis mayoral race goes into overtime

The mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, is leading the vote count but is well short of the 50 per cent of ballots needed for outright victory.

The incumbent Democrat has about 43 per cent of votes, against about 20 per cent for a pair of challengers. Election officials are set to begin sorting second- and possibly third-preference votes on Wednesday in the city’s ranked-choice system.

Mr Frey faced strong competition from the left. Seventeen candidates had entered the race, many taking issue with the way he has handled changes to the police department since George Floyd was killed by a Minneapolis officer last year.

Mr Frey positioned himself as a defender of keeping the police department – and was against the most liberal and vocal progressives who were seeking a symbolic victory in Floyd's city.

Voters soundly defeated a proposal to replace the police department, with about 56 per cent opposed.

[3 November 2021 12:47 · Jon Sharman]

Minneapolis voters reject proposal to defund police after George Floyd murder

#icymi

Minneapolis voters have rejected a proposal that would have radically restructured the city’s police department and replaced it with a new, non-violence focused public safety agency. It was a closely watched campaign in the nationwide conversation around whether to “defund the police”, writes Josh Marcus.

On Tuesday, voters in the city decided on what is known as Question Two, an amendment to the Minneapolis city charter that would eliminate a provision requiring a minimum number of police officers, and replace the MPD, now overseen by the mayor, with a new Department of Public Safety overseen jointly by the mayor and city council.

[3 November 2021 13:06 · Jon Sharman]

Sean Hannity left red faced after live shout out to Virginia Republicans falls flat

Sean Hannity and Fox News colleague Sara Carter were left red faced after failing to receive applause from a room full of Republicans who were celebrating Glenn Youngkin’s gubernatorial win in Virginia.

On Tuesday night, having declared Mr Youngkin’s closely fought win the start of a “red wave sweeping across the United States”, anchors for Fox News called on supporters of Mr Youngkin to cheer for Mr Hannity, writes Gino Spocchia.

“They love you here Sean, they love you,” Ms Carter told Mr Hannity, with Fox News’s footage flicking from the two reporters to shots of a cheering crowd of Mr Youngkin supporters.

[3 November 2021 13:25 · Alisha Rahaman Sarkar]

Trumps mock Biden over Virginia result and boast they’ll reclaim White House in 2024

Donald Trump and his camp have taken credit for the victory of Republican party candidate Glenn Youngkin in the Virginia governor’s race.

In a statement on Tuesday, the former president said he would like to thank his “base” for coming out and voting for the candidate.

“The MAGA movement is bigger and stronger than before,” he said, hinting at a possible rerun for the 2024 presidential elections.

In a separate statement gloating over the big night, Mr Trump said he didn’t even have to rally for first-time candidate Mr Youngkin because Democrat candidate Terry McAuliffe tied down his competitor to the former president.

“It is looking like Terry McAuliffe’s campaign against a certain person named ‘Trump’ has very much helped Glenn Youngkin. All McAuliffe did was talk Trump, Trump, Trump and he lost,” the former president said.

He added: “What does that tell you, Fake News? I guess people running for office as Democrats won’t be doing that too much longer.”

Despite endorsing Mr Youngkin, Mr Trump never travelled to Virginia to rally along with the Republican hopeful. Instead, he held a virtual rally on the eve of the election on Monday.

Mr Youngkin in campaign trails, however, kept his distance from the former president. He never used Mr Trump’s name in rallies and kept his focus on state issues such as education, taxes and washrooms for transgender persons in schools.

[3 November 2021 13:45 · Andrew Naughtie]

Youngkin’s victory in Virginia is ‘revenge of the parents,’ says Meghan McCain

In a column citing numerous misleading right-wing talking points, commentator and sometime View co-host Meghan McCain has celebrated Republican Glenn Youngkin’s shocking gubernatorial victory in Virginia as a triumph for conservative families.

“In the simplest terms possible,” Ms McCain wrote in her MailOnline column, “it is revenge of the parents.”

The Virginia campaign saw Mr Youngkin, who was endorsed by Donald Trump, hammer Terry McAuliffe hard on the issue over how much influence parents should wield over their children’s education, in particular whether or not they should be able to force schools to withdraw certain books and subjects they find offensive or disagreeable.

One of the key incidents Mr Youngkin cited was a campaign several years ago led by a mother who was outraged that her son’s school was teaching Toni Morrison’s Beloved, a classic of Black American literature that deals with the horrific reality of slavery.

“It’s the culmination of the past eighteen months of teachers unions shutting down schools and refusing to reopen them, the rise and spread of Critical Race Theory, the scandal of a girl’s rape in a bathroom by a boy wearing a skirt and the subsequent coverup by the teachers’ board, of parents being called ‘domestic terrorists’ for daring to dissent and finally Terry McAullif’s (sic) tone-deaf comment that ‘parents shouldn’t be involved in the classroom,” she wrote.

“It has all resulted in a historic win, a historic wave of red – the Red Wedding of all election wins for Republicans.”

However, the reality of the trends and incidents Ms McCain refers to is quite different than she and other Republicans have claimed.