Elections Live Updates: N.J. Governor News and More – The New York Times

Tuesday’s elections left the Democratic Party reeling after Republicans won the governor’s race in Virginia and posed an unexpectedly strong challenge in New Jersey, inspiring fresh doubts among Democrats about their fortunes heading into next year’s midterm elections.

President Biden returned from his trip to Europe and was immediately greeted with a bracing reminder of his party’s shaky political footing. With his approval ratings sagging and Republicans eager to wrest back control of Congress, the president is facing an uncertain landscape on Capitol Hill, including whether he can persuade a key Democratic holdout, Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, to get on board with his $1.85 trillion social policy bill.

The most surprising unknown on Wednesday was the fate of the governor’s race in New Jersey, a state that Mr. Biden carried by 16 percentage points last year. Gov. Philip D. Murphy, a Democrat seeking a second term, was locked in a razor-thin contest with a little-known Republican challenger, Jack Ciattarelli, a former assemblyman.

The other governor’s race on Tuesday, in Virginia, offered foreboding signs of the political environment for Democrats more than nine months into Mr. Biden’s presidency.

A year after Mr. Biden won Virginia by 10 percentage points, former Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat, failed in his quest to win back his old office, losing to the Republican candidate, Glenn Youngkin, in a contest that was closely watched for what it could signal about voters’ satisfaction or lack thereof with the president and his party. Mr. McAuliffe conceded to Mr. Youngkin on Wednesday morning.

The setback in Virginia was the latest in a series of stumbles for Mr. Biden, who has faced criticism over the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and over the surge in migrants at the Southern border. And in Washington, he has struggled to unite Democratic lawmakers behind his social policy bill. With that measure in dispute, the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill that passed the Senate in August has been on hold in the House, depriving the party of an accomplishment that could have been promoted on the campaign trail this fall.

The dispiriting results for Democrats on Tuesday stoked fears in the party that the infighting in Congress was taking a toll with the public.

“The No. 1 concern voters have raised with me over the last several weeks has been inability of Congress and government in general to get things done at a time of great need for the country,” said Representative Tom Malinowski, a Democrat from a swing district in New Jersey. “So the best thing we can do in Congress is to pass these damned bills, immediately.”

Asked on Wednesday whether the Democratic loss in Virginia changed the House’s agenda, Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, “No, no.”

A number of other notable races remained unresolved.

The race for mayor of Atlanta was headed to a runoff. Felicia Moore, the City Council president, was the top vote-getter. But it remained unclear whom she would face in the runoff; Andre Dickens, a councilman, was vying with Kasim Reed, a former mayor trying to make a comeback, for the other spot in the runoff.

In Seattle, a Republican candidate for city attorney and a pro-police candidate for mayor each held large leads, as voters appeared to reject rivals who had sought more aggressive overhauls of policing and the criminal justice system.

If the results hold, Seattle would elect a Republican to citywide office for the first time in three decades, with a city attorney candidate, Ann Davison, who has vowed more prosecutions for low-level crimes in a traditionally liberal city grappling with homelessness.

The debate over policing also figured prominently in the race for mayor, with one candidate, Lorena González, endorsing steep cuts to the police budget last year and another, Bruce Harrell, advocating for the hiring of more officers. Early results showed Mr. Harrell in the lead.

Mike Baker contributed reporting.

Gov. Philip D. Murphy pulled ahead of his Republican challenger, Jack Ciattarelli, on Wednesday in the race for governor of New Jersey, but the contest was still too close to call and was emboldening national Republicans.

Mr. Murphy, a Democrat in his first term, trailed by more than 50,000 votes at one point after the polls closed on Tuesday night, an unexpected deficit in a race that a recent Monmouth University poll had him leading by 11 points.

But Mr. Ciattarelli’s once significant lead evaporated as results trickled in from Democratic strongholds, especially those in northern New Jersey like Essex County, which includes Newark. By Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Murphy held a slim 15,000-vote margin.

Central to the delay in calling the race is the number of outstanding mail ballots and provisional ballots still to be tabulated, with both campaigns looking at tranches of votes that had yet to be counted across the state.

This year, New Jersey did not permit local election officials to begin “preprocesssing” ballots — which includes opening, verifying and scanning ballots — until Election Day, causing a massive backlog of more than 520,000 mail ballots to be counted in a single day. During the 2020 election in New Jersey, officials were allowed to begin processing 10 days before Election Day, which ensured a much smoother tabulation process.

New voting laws and voting equipment in use for the first time in the 2021 election also sparked confusion among both election workers and voters. New electronic poll books proved confusing for workers, forcing some voters to have to cast a provisional ballot. Other voters brought their mail ballot to their precincts, a voting method permitted in 2020 but not in 2021. Those voters were then forced to vote provisionally.

Coupled with high turnout, the slog of tabulation has left the result of the governor’s race, as well as multiple state legislative elections, unknown nearly 20 hours after polls closed in New Jersey.

According to the Murphy campaign on Wednesday afternoon, there are at least 30,000 mail ballots from multiple counties where the governor performed well that haven’t been counted, as well as results from in-person votes from 50 precincts in Essex County, another Democratic stronghold.

The Ciattarelli campaign is looking at 15,000 mail ballots that they say are outstanding in Monmouth County, a Republican stronghold. However, Democrats have fared better in mail returns across the state.

And both the campaigns and election officials expect the number of provisional ballots to be in the tens of thousands.

Democrats expressed optimism that Mr. Murphy would prevail.

“My takeaway overall in this election is that people want action,” Representative Josh Gottheimer, Democrat of New Jersey, said during an appearance Wednesday on CNN. Mr. Gottheimer said. “They want results, and they deserve results.”

At about 12:30 a.m., both candidates took the stages at their election-night parties to tell supporters that the results of the contest would not be clear until all provisional and vote-by-mail ballots were counted.

“We’re all sorry that tonight could not yet be the celebration that we wanted it to be,” said Mr. Murphy, surrounded by his family in Asbury Park’s Convention Hall. “But as I said: When every vote is counted — and every vote will be counted — we hope to have a celebration again.”

Mr. Ciattarelli, 59, said much the same thing, but appeared far more relaxed after outperforming every public opinion poll conducted during the campaign in a state where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by nearly 1.1 million voters.

“We have sent a message to the entire country,” Mr. Ciattarelli told supporters gathered in Bridgewater. “But this is what I love about this state, if you study its history: Every single time it’s gone too far off track, the people of this state have pushed, pulled and prodded it right back to where it needs to be.”

Kevin Armstrong and Lauren Hard contributed reporting.

BUFFALO, N.Y. — In a shocking reversal of political fortune, Mayor Byron W. Brown of Buffalo has seemingly triumphed in a write-in campaign for a new term, besting India Walton, a democratic socialist who had stunned Mr. Brown in a primary in June and had drawn national attention as a champion of progressive values.

Ms. Walton — a first-time candidate — conceded on Wednesday afternoon. “It seems unlikely that we will end up with enough votes to inaugurate a Walton administration in January,” she wrote on Twitter.

Mr. Brown, 63, declared victory late Tuesday, as ballots rolled in and it became apparent that write-ins would carry the day: With all precincts reporting, just over 41 percent of votes were for Ms. Walton and 59 percent were marked for “write-in,” or 23,986 to 34,273.

Mr. Brown campaigned for a fifth term with a feisty campaign and the help of a varied coalition of conservative and moderate supporters, as well as the backing of several prominent labor unions and a plan to distribute tens of thousands of ink stamps bearing the mayor’s name to allow voters to ink his name on ballots.

The apparent win for Mr. Brown — a centrist and a lifelong Democrat — is a stinging rebuke for the left wing of the party, both nationally and in New York, which had celebrated Ms. Walton’s unlikely win in June with volunteers and prominent backers flocking to her campaign in recent months.

That included Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, as well as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who represents parts of Queens and the Bronx but traveled to Buffalo last weekend to campaign on Ms. Walton’s behalf.

For all of that, Ms. Walton was likely hurt by her lack of help from state party leadership, as Gov. Kathy Hochul — a Buffalo native — and Jay S. Jacobs, the chairman of the New York State Democratic Committee, declined to endorse her.

And while Ms. Walton had begun to draw the support of more Democratic establishment figures like Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, she was unable to translate the energy of her surprising primary victory into a general election win. She could not match the power of Mr. Brown’s incumbency and a campaign that tapped into a more moderate base that he persuaded to get to the polls.

In many ways, Ms. Walton’s candidacy has underscored a deeper rift in the Democratic Party, which has seen moderates like President Biden and Eric Adams, the mayor-elect of New York City, repeatedly scuffle with more left-wing candidates and elected officials.

Ms. Walton, 39, would have been a trailblazing mayor, as the first woman and the first Black woman to lead New York’s second largest city, as well as the first socialist to lead a major American city in decades.

She has an evocative life story as a single mother and labor organizer, a narrative that she leaned on in advertisements, some of which were paid for by groups like Working Families Party, a labor-backed organization that often supports progressive candidates.

The strength of her primary campaign surprised Mr. Brown, who largely refused to acknowledge her candidacy, having won past campaigns comfortably in a city in which Democrats far outnumber Republicans.

The mayor’s blasé attitude changed radically, however, after Ms. Walton’s win, as he announced a write-in campaign, and attempted a legal push to get himself put on the ballot. That ballot effort failed after a pair of judges ruled against Mr. Brown in September. Still some political observers here predicted that Mr. Brown was the favorite, if only because of his 16 years in office and widespread name recognition.

Lauren D’Avolio and Dan Higgins contributed reporting from Buffalo.

MINNEAPOLIS — Mayor Jacob Frey, a Democrat who led Minneapolis when a police officer murdered George Floyd and the city was overwhelmed by rioting last year, was elected to a second term, The Associated Press projected on Wednesday. Mr. Frey also had opposed efforts to abolish or replace the local police force.

The election in Minneapolis, an overwhelmingly Democratic city, was shaped by Mr. Floyd’s death in May 2020, by a sharp rise in homicides afterward and by disparate views on how to address public safety. Voters on Tuesday also rejected an amendment to replace the city’s Police Department with a new safety agency focused on public health.

In the days after Mr. Floyd’s death, Minneapolis became the center of a national debate on whether to defund policing and invest in new options for emergency response. A veto-proof majority of the City Council quickly pledged to abolish the Police Department, though some members later backtracked.

From the start, Mr. Frey, a former professional runner and City Council member, called for a more incremental approach to improving law enforcement. He supported efforts to hire mental health workers to respond to emergencies and to curtail some low-level police stops, while defending a need to maintain a Police Department.

“We’ve got to stop this pendulum from swinging violently back and forth between defund and abolish the police on one side, and do nothing, status quo on the other,” Mr. Frey said in an interview before the election. “Those are not the two options.”

But Minneapolis had been shaken by police shootings and protests before, and many residents said that little seemed to change. When Mr. Frey won his first term four years ago, he pledged to improve police-community relations that had been frayed by the killings of Jamar Clark, a Black man fatally shot in 2015 during a fight with officers, and Justine Ruszczyk, a white woman whose death in 2017 led to an officer being convicted of manslaughter.

Sheila Nezhad, one of Mr. Frey’s challengers, worked as a street medic during the unrest last year and supported the amendment to replace the police force. Ms. Nezhad said Mr. Frey had failed to rise to the moment and listen to the demands of protesters.

“People took to the streets because their voices were not being heard through the quote-unquote ‘appropriate’ channels, through city government,” Ms. Nezhad said. “Whatever we do next has to make sure that we have as many voices included as possible.”

Though more than a dozen candidates ran against him, Mr. Frey retained significant support among Minneapolis residents wary of reinventing or downsizing the police force. On the city’s North Side, where shootings have been a fact of life, the Rev. Jerry McAfee criticized how the mayor had engaged with community groups, but said he still preferred him to the wide field of challengers.

“Jacob is still the best person,” Mr. McAfee said. “The other ones that they’re trying to push, they’re going to push this agenda of basically defunding the police, and I’m not with that.”

A year after voters elected President Biden and pushed Republicans fully out of power in Washington, the G.O.P. rebounded with a strong election night on Tuesday, highlighted by Glenn Youngkin’s victory in Virginia’s governor’s race.

Here is a run-down of election results from some of the closely watched races around the country on Tuesday.

Virginia governor’s race

Businessman Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, defeated former Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat who struggled to generate enthusiasm among liberals at a moment when conservatives are energized in opposition to Mr. Biden.

The victory by Mr. Youngkin, a first-time candidate in one of only two gubernatorial races before next year’s midterm election, may provide his party with a formula for how to exploit President Biden’s vulnerabilities and evade the shadow of former President Donald J. Trump in Democratic-leaning states.

New Jersey governor’s race

Former Assemblyman Jack Ciattarelli, a moderate Republican, surprised many analysts with a strong showing in the race for governor in New Jersey against Gov. Philip D. Murphy, a Democrat seeking a second term who was ahead in most public polling before Tuesday’s contest.

By late Wednesday morning, Mr. Murphy had pulled ahead of Mr. Ciattarelli, but the race was still too close to call.

New York City

In the city’s mayoral race, Eric Adams, a former police captain and Brooklyn borough president, easily dispatched his long shot Republican candidate, Curtis Sliwa, to become only the second Black person elected mayor in the city’s history.

And Alvin Bragg was elected Manhattan district attorney. He will become the first Black person to lead the influential office, which handles tens of thousands of cases a year and is conducting a high-profile investigation into former President Donald J. Trump and his family business.

Boston mayor’s race

Michelle Wu easily defeated City Councilor Annissa Essaibi George to become the first woman, first person of color and first person of Asian descent to be elected mayor in Boston. The city has been led by an unbroken string of Irish American or Italian American men since the 1930s.

Minneapolis police ballot item

Minneapolis residents rejected an amendment that called for replacing the city’s long-troubled Police Department with a new Department of Public Safety, The Associated Press projected.

The ballot item emerged from anger after a Minneapolis police officer murdered George Floyd last year, galvanizing residents who saw the policing system as irredeemably broken.

Buffalo mayor’s race

Mayor Byron W. Brown of Buffalo, an incumbent four-term Democrat, declared victory on Tuesday night in his write-in campaign to defeat his own party’s official nominee, India Walton. On Wednesday afternoon, Ms. Walton, a democratic socialist, conceded.

San Antonio state seat

A Democratic stronghold in San Antonio flipped to a Republican in a runoff for a seat in the Texas House on Tuesday.

John Lujan, a 59-year-old retired firefighter who had briefly held the seat before, beat Frank Ramirez, a 27-year-old former legislative aide, by fewer than 300 votes, according to a tally released by the Bexar County Elections Department. About 70 percent of the largely working-class families Mr. Lujan will represent, in the 118th District, identify as Hispanic.

“This speaks loudly that people are concerned about conservative values,” Mr. Lujan told his supporters. “You know, we want to secure our border, we want to grow our economy.”

Voters in cities across the country made milestone choices on Election Day, elevating Asian Americans, Arab Americans, African Americans and women to top municipal offices.

That was particularly true for three cities in the Detroit area, which chose Muslim and Arab Americans as mayors for the first time. The area is home to some of the country’s largest Muslim and Arab American communities.

In Dearborn, Wayne County’s unofficial election results showed Abdullah Hammoud, a 31-year-old state Democratic lawmaker and the child of Lebanese immigrants, with 55 percent of the vote.

“Dearborn, we won!” Mr. Hammoud posted on Twitter.

In Hamtramck, whose City Council in 2015 became the first in the country to have a Muslim majority, Amer Ghalib, a 42-year-old health care worker who immigrated from Yemen, defeated the longtime incumbent, Karen Majewski. Mr. Ghalib will be Hamtramck’s first mayor in a century who is not Polish, according to The Detroit Free Press.

“History has been made,” read a post on Mr. Ghalib’s Facebook page.

In Dearborn Heights, the mayor, Bill Bazzi, a 58-year-old Lebanese immigrant who was appointed to his position by the City Council, was elected to a full term.

Among the other milestone elections across the country, according to news reports:

• In Lima, Ohio, Sharetta Smith, a Democrat, was elected the city’s first Black mayor and first female mayor.

• Michelle Wu, a Democrat, won Boston’s mayoral race to become the first woman and the first person of color elected to lead the city.

• Aftab Pureval, the child of an Indian father and a Tibetan mother, was elected as Cincinnati’s first Asian American mayor.

• In New York, Alvin Bragg, a Democrat and former federal prosecutor, was elected Manhattan district attorney, becoming the first Black person to lead the office.

• Ed Gainey, a Democratic state lawmaker in Pennsylvania, was elected as the first Black mayor of Pittsburgh.

• In Kansas, Tyrone Garner, a first-time candidate, won a close race for mayor to become the first Black official to lead Kansas City and Wyandotte County, which share a government.

• Winsome Sears, a Republican, was elected lieutenant governor of Virginia. She will be the first woman and the first Black woman to hold the position.

A Republican candidate for city attorney and a pro-police candidate for mayor each held large leads in Seattle’s election on Wednesday, as voters appeared to reject rivals who had sought more aggressive overhauls of policing and the criminal justice system.

If the results hold, Seattle would elect a Republican to citywide office for the first time in three decades, with a city attorney candidate, Ann Davison, who has vowed more prosecutions for low-level crimes in a traditionally liberal city grappling with homelessness.

Ms. Davison was running against Nicole Thomas-Kennedy, who had praised those who perpetrated property destruction during last year’s policing protests and has called for eventually abolishing the criminal justice system as it is currently structured. Ms. Davison held a lead with 58 percent of the vote on Wednesday morning.

The debate over policing also featured prominently in the race for mayor, with one candidate, Lorena González, endorsing steep cuts to the police budget last year and another, Bruce Harrell, advocating for hiring more officers. Early results showed Mr. Harrell in the lead with 65 percent of the vote.

The results were not yet conclusive, with many votes left to be counted in an all-mail voting system in which ballots can be postmarked on Election Day. Later votes historically skew toward more liberal candidates, sometimes changing results by double digits but not to the degree that would close the gaps shown in Tuesday’s results.

In a city that typically elects only Democrats, Ms. Davison entered the city attorney’s race after having switched last year to the Republican Party. She recorded a “WalkAway” video for a social media campaign led by Brandon Straka, a prominent Trump supporter who pleaded guilty this year to disorderly conduct during the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. But Ms. Davison worked to distance herself from the national Republican Party leadership, saying she voted for President Biden in the 2020 election.

Ms. Thomas-Kennedy, a self-described “abolitionist,” had vowed to pursue fewer prosecutions of misdemeanor crimes. Last year, during racial justice protests, she had posted on Twitter about her “rabid hatred” of the police and called property destruction “a moral imperative.”

While the city’s major Democratic groups endorsed Ms. Thomas-Kennedy, some prominent leaders in the party broke ranks to endorse Ms. Davison, including former two former governors, Gary Locke and Christine Gregoire.

Seattle’s elections are technically nonpartisan, but many candidates run with a party preference. The last Republican to serve as mayor left office in 1969. The last Republican to serve as city attorney departed in 1989. And the last Republican to serve on the City Council left office in 1991.

Along with policing, the race for mayor focused on the issue of homelessness in a region that has seen years of soaring housing prices. Researchers have counted a 50 percent increase in tents within the urban core since the start of the coronavirus pandemic.

Mr. Harrell, a former member of the City Council, has called for removing homeless encampments from public spaces. Ms. González, the current Council president, said she would not pursue forced removals from city parks. Both have said they want more shelters and alternative housing.

A slew of initiatives aimed at the addressing the nation’s housing crisis passed on Tuesday, a test run for ballot choices in 2022 as more cities and states take aim at rising rents, a continued explosion in short-term rentals and the depressed housing stock nationwide.

The epicenter of the action was in the West, particularly in Colorado, where housing prices have skyrocketed in recent years, with short-term rentals helping lead the way. In Leadville, a scenic former silver mining town, voters overwhelmingly approved a new 3 percent tax on visitors staying in hotels, motels and short-term rentals, which will be used to create more affordable housing.

Measures to increase fees on short-term rentals passed in Telluride, Avon and Ouray; Vail approved a sales tax increase for housing.

“If folks want to play in the beautiful mountains of Colorado, then individuals must also be able to live and work in those same towns,” said Corrine Rivera Fowler, the director of policy and legal advocacy at the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center.

Other cities and counties around the country passed similar initiatives. In coastal Lincoln County, Ore., where tourism is a major economic driver, the sole item on the ballot was a measure that would require the phasing out of short-term rental homes in unincorporated residential areas — and it prevailed in spite of a large spending campaign by opposing groups. Houses used for short-term rentals have pushed up rents n tourist towns, making them unaffordable for workers. In some cities, houses targeting short-term rentals have been built faster than cheaper units for lower-income residents.

In both Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minn., residents approved rent-control measures, and in Boston, Michelle Wu won the mayor’s race after calling for a form of rent control.

Other cities approved funding measures such as bond issues or dedicated tax revenue for housing. In Albuquerque, voters approved new bonds that would finance the construction and rehabilitation of low- and moderate-income housing.

Experts expect more of the same in the next election cycles.

“As housing availability decreases and housing costs increase in cities, especially big cities across many states, voters will continue to see more housing-related measures on the ballot,” said Josh Altic, the ballot measures project director at Ballotpedia.

Glenn Youngkin, a Republican business executive, marched to victory in Tuesday’s election, delivering his party the governorship of Virginia and highlighting a strong night for Republicans less than a year after voters pushed them fully out of power in the nation’s capital.

The outcome in Virginia, combined with an unexpectedly close contest in New Jersey, where the governor’s race remained too close to call, delivered a jolt of encouragement for Republicans and a stark warning sign for the Democrats less than 10 months into President Biden’s term.

Here are five takeaways from Tuesday’s contests and what the results could mean for 2022, when control of the House, Senate and 36 governorships will be on the ballot:

Youngkin’s success across the state offers a G.O.P. pathway.

Republicans suffered repeated down-ballot losses in the past four years, as the party grappled with how to motivate a base deeply yoked to Donald J. Trump without alienating the suburban voters who came to reject the former president’s divisive style of politics.

Enter Glenn Youngkin and his fleece vest.

Mr. Youngkin pulled off something of a surprise and rare feat: He drove up the Republican margins in white and rural parts of the state further than Mr. Trump had, cutting into the edge of the Democratic nominee, former Gov. Terry McAuliffe, in suburban areas. He even flipped some key counties entirely.

Mr. Youngkin had campaigned heavily on education and seized on Mr. McAuliffe’s remark that he didn’t “believe parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” Mr. Youngkin used the comment, made during a debate, as an entryway to hammer his rival on issues like race and transgender rights in schools. The issues simultaneously motivated the G.O.P. base while casting the matter to moderates as an issue of parental rights.

All politics are presidential. But Biden loomed larger than Trump.

To the extent that the Youngkin victory provided a fresh G.O.P. blueprint, the surprisingly strong showing in New Jersey by the Republican candidate, Jack Ciattarelli, who was virtually tied with Gov. Phil Murphy, a Democrat, made plain that the political environment had seriously degraded for Democrats nationally.

A national NBC News poll in late October showed that 45 percent of registered voters approved of the job Mr. Biden was doing, compared with 52 percent who disapproved.

Such diminished standing offered Republicans an opportunity even in traditionally blue territory.

Strategists in both parties said that the Virginia race was heavily shaped by Mr. Biden’s falling approval rating, and that the downward Democratic trajectory had begun when the president stumbled through the troubled pullout of American troops from Afghanistan.

Mr. McAuliffe and the Democrats never recovered.

The G.O.P. margins make it even more worrisome for Democrats in 2022.

The headline, of course, is that Mr. Youngkin won. But for political strategists focused on the midterms in 2022, his final margin is every bit as revealing about the trajectory of the two parties.

Because Mr. Biden carried Virginia by 10 percentage points in 2020, a Youngkin victory represents a Republican improvement of more than 10 percentage points in exactly one year.

Just as worrisome for the Democrats is that of the 36 governorships up for grabs in 2022, eight are now held by Democrats in states that had a smaller Democratic margin of victory in 2020 than Virginia, according to an election memo for donors from the Republican Governors Association. That list includes three of the most crucial presidential battlegrounds: Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.

The political middle still matters.

The American electorate is increasingly polarized, and a shrinking sliver of voters oscillates between the two major parties. But those voters still matter. For every vote that flips to the other side, a campaign must find two new voters to make up for the lost ground.

For years, it was the Democrats in Virginia who were obsessed with cutting into the margins in Republican strongholds and the suburbs.

Yet in 2021, Mr. McAuliffe ran as a mainline Democrat. He deployed Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Barack Obama and Stacey Abrams in a bid to rally his party’s partisan faithful.

If Mr. McAuliffe was seemingly singularly obsessed with his base, the Youngkin campaign homed in on an issue that Democrats typically dominate: education. That focus helped him make incursions into Democratic territory.

Democratic ideological factions face off in cities.

Several municipal races pitted the progressive and moderate wings of the Democratic Party. The contests offered mixed results.

In Buffalo, India Walton, who was seeking to become a rare democratic socialist elected to a mayoralty, conceded to Mayor Byron W. Brown, who waged a write-in campaign to keep his job after losing to Ms. Walton in the Democratic primary.

In Minneapolis, voters rejected an amendment to transform the city’s Police Department into a new Department of Public Safety. At the same time, the city’s moderate Democratic mayor, Jacob Frey, won a second term.

In Seattle, Bruce Harrell, a former City Council president, was leading his more progressive rival, Lorena González.

The left did score some wins. In Boston, Michelle Wu, who was running with the backing of progressives, won the mayor’s race. And in Cleveland, Justin Bibb, a 34-year-old with progressive backing, is set to become mayor as well.

President Biden returned from his second foreign trip since taking office aiming to celebrate the return of American leadership on the global stage and hoping for Democratic victories in key elections in Virginia and New Jersey. It didn’t work out like that.

Instead, just as Mr. Biden stepped off Air Force One early Wednesday morning, Glenn Youngkin delivered a victory speech as the first Republican to win the governorship of Virginia in more than a decade. In New Jersey, an unexpectedly strong Republican showing against Gov. Philip D. Murphy made the race too close to call. And a central piece of Mr. Biden’s agenda remained stalled after Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, raised new doubts about what was thought to be an agreement over a $1.85 trillion climate change and social safety net bill.

The political losses meant that within hours, Mr. Biden went from celebrating the reassertion of American credibility in Rome to contending with growing anxiety in his own party back home.

The results in Virginia and New Jersey did not just expose the party’s limitations in relying on anti-Trump sentiment to galvanize voters, but also highlighted a growing concern for Democrats and the White House: that the failure to pass Mr. Biden’s agenda or make good on his campaign promise of overcoming the pandemic had fueled dissatisfaction among voters.

Mr. Biden’s approval rating has declined across the board in recent months amid concerns about rising inflation, a seemingly everlasting pandemic, the United States’ botched withdrawal from Afghanistan and an increase in immigrant crossings at the southwest border.

In a sign of the administration’s need for a victory, Mr. Biden made a last-minute visit to Capitol Hill on Thursday just before flying to Europe to implore a fractured Democratic Party to embrace his spending package, which would invest in universal prekindergarten, child care and combating climate change.

But Mr. Biden faced challenges even as he traveled to the Group of 20 summit last week, as House liberals demanded legislative language and assurances from key Senate centrists that they would back the larger social spending package before the liberals would vote for a separate, Senate-passed $1 trillion infrastructure investment. Then, this week, after liberals signaled support for votes on both bills, one of the Senate holdouts — Mr. Manchin — delivered a blistering news conference outlining his concerns with the larger package and saying he would not be pressured by their demands.

That left Mr. Biden without a major piece of his domestic agenda that he could use to rally foreign allies, and it left Democrats without a win they could promote to voters.

Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic nominee for governor of Virginia, had begged the White House and Speaker Nancy Pelosi to push for the passage of the infrastructure bill.

“The people have spoken,” Ms. Pelosi said on Wednesday.

Asked whether the Democratic loss changed the House’s agenda, she added, “No, no.”

Mr. Biden did try to help in the election, traveling to Virginia days before his foreign trip in an effort to increase turnout among Democrats.

The president barely mentioned the infrastructure and social spending proposals. And instead of relaying a concrete message from the Democratic Party, he focused on criticizing his predecessor, former President Donald J. Trump.

That proved ineffective, as Republicans won the statewide election for the first time since 2009.

In Southern Brooklyn, a New York City Council seat long held by Democrats flipped to Republican control. On Wednesday morning, two other Democratic seats nearby still hung in the balance, including a race where the incumbent — a likely candidate for Council speaker — was trailing.

On Long Island, Democrats were wiped out at every level of government.

And in Buffalo, a democratic socialist who had been hailed by left-wing leaders as a future face of the party appeared to be headed to a defeat after the long-serving moderate Democratic mayor ran a write-in campaign aided by Republican voters.

As national Democrats grappled with losing the Virginia governor’s race and confronted a far closer race than expected for governor of New Jersey, New York Democrats of varying ideological stripes were dealt one stunning blow after the next on election night. While Eric Adams and fellow Democrats easily won races to retain control of City Hall and the City Council overall, Republicans made significant inroads across a state perceived by much of the country to be a liberal stronghold.

Statewide, voters appear to have soundly rejected a pair of constitutional amendments meant to liberalize access to the ballot in future elections — a major national priority for the party — that Democrats had believed would sail to approval. Democrats were left to grapple Wednesday morning with how they lost so many local seats that had been safely in their corner for years, with the potential for the greatest Republican presence on the New York City Council since Rudolph W. Giuliani was mayor.

And to Democrats already worried about next year’s midterms, there were abundant warning signs that the moderate suburbs that had increasingly shifted left in the Trump era were going to be far more difficult to maintain without a polarizing Republican president on the ballot.

“There’s no way to sugarcoat this: This was a shellacking on a thumping,” said former Representative Steve Israel of New York, a former chair of the House Democratic campaign arm.

Nowhere was that clearer than on Long Island, where Democrats lost a pair of district attorney races, a county executive who had been widely seen as a strong incumbent was trailing her Republican opponent Wednesday morning and other local seats tilted toward Republicans.

NEWPORT NEWS, Va. — Democrats across Virginia expressed profound disappointment on Wednesday after Republicans romped to an unlikely victory in the governor’s race, an ominous sign for the Democratic Party ahead of next year’s midterm elections.

But one group refused to be blamed for the party’s poor showing: Black voters and elected officials.

Fears about Black turnout and a lack of enthusiasm did not materialize in Tuesday’s results, as former Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat, ran close to expected totals in the state’s majority-Black areas. Instead, Black state leaders and voters who backed Mr. McAuliffe said the results were a sign that the party could not rely on minority voters to cover its cratering totals in more white areas of the state, particularly in rural communities that voted heavily for Glenn Youngkin, the Republican businessman who won the governor’s race.

“I believe that Black voters are easily the first target for when things don’t go for how they want it to go,” said Marcia Price, a member of the Virginia House of Delegates who won re-election.

“It’s a trash take to look at us and not the middle,” she said. “The middle said Youngkin is more palatable than Trump and they were willing to take a chance with him.”

Ms. Price’s words reflect a sense among the state’s Black political class that communities of color are often blamed when Democrats lose.

At the grass-roots level, voters in Newport News also said that their support for Mr. McAuliffe did not mean they were satisfied with the performance of Democrats in Washington.

Several voters cited a radio advertisement that had been playing on local stations saying Black voters should not back Mr. McAuliffe because Democrats cared about Black communities only during election season. They rejected the ad’s plea to stay home but said the general theme resonated, and they urged Democrats in Congress to pass bold legislation on President Biden’s core campaign promises, including climate change, police reform and economic investments in Black communities.

“A lot of people are upset with Biden,” said William Joyner, a 54-year-old Democrat. “We have high gas prices. Everything is so expensive right now.”

He added, “Biden made promises to Black people he hasn’t kept yet.”

Tony McCright, 68, who also voted for Mr. McAuliffe, said there was a sense among Black voters that they were voting for Democrats only out of necessity.

“Republicans are happy to come together to do the wrong thing,” Mr. McCright said, “but Democrats never come together to do the right thing.”

CHANTILLY, Va. — Former President Donald J. Trump never appeared in public with Glenn Youngkin, Virginia’s new Republican governor-elect. Other than delivering a six-minute speech during a conference call with supporters on Monday and issuing a few written statements, Mr. Trump was not that involved in Mr. Youngkin’s campaign.

But that did not stop him and his supporters from claiming, mere hours after the race was called, that Mr. Youngkin could not have won the election without the former president and his legions of supporters.

A little after 9 a.m. on Wednesday, Mr. Trump called into the John Fredericks Radio Show and, in typically grandiose fashion, claimed most of the credit.

“Without MAGA, he would have lost by 15 points or more,” Mr. Trump said, referring to the shorthand he and his supporters use for the Trump movement. “Instead of giving us credit, they say, ‘Oh he’s more popular than Trump.’ It’s unbelievable.”

Mr. Fredericks, who served as Mr. Trump’s Virginia campaign chairman during his presidential campaigns, said multiple times during the interview that he agreed. “If there was no Trump in this election, there’s no Glenn Youngkin,” he said.

Mr. Trump endorsed Mr. Youngkin in a news release in May — but only after the Republican had secured his party’s nomination. The two men did not know each other and are not close. Republicans were concerned that the former president’s interference in the race could cost Mr. Youngkin in a state that voted for Mr. Biden by 10 percentage points.

Mr. Youngkin kept his distance from Mr. Trump even as he leaned into issues that are popular with Trump supporters, including exaggerated claims of lax security around elections.

After the interview, Mr. Trump’s office issued a single-sentence news release. It was Mr. Fredericks’s comment about the former president’s supposedly pivotal role in the race.

Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, campaigned heavily on education — and in opposition to what he called “critical race theory” — in his successful campaign for Virginia governor against the Democrat Terry McAuliffe. But Mr. Youngkin also made an issue of the state’s handling of schooling during the pandemic, which may have played a part in his win.

“Virginia’s excessive and extended school closures ravaged student advancement and well-being,” he wrote in an opinion piece for Fox News just before the election.

Last year, districts in Virginia, led by Governor Ralph Northam, a Democrat, were some of the last to reopen classrooms full-time.

While some parents supported the cautious approach — driven by teachers’ unions, school boards and some administrators — others became frustrated and angry, especially in suburban counties like Fairfax and Arlington.

And national and state teachers’ union leaders drew public ire for slowing reopening timelines even after educators were given early access to the vaccine.

Hostility toward teachers’ unions has been a problem for Democrats like Mr. McAuliffe, since the party is closely tied to organized labor. In the final days of the campaign, Mr. McAuliffe appeared with Randi Weingarten, the powerful president of the American Federation of Teachers, which drew rebukes from Republicans.

Schools are open this year, but that has not neutralized the issue. Education in Virginia, and in other states, has continued to be disrupted by occasional quarantines and classroom closures to contain the coronavirus.

Some parents have become fed up with their children learning in masks. A smaller group has also loudly resisted vaccine mandates for student athletes, which some districts, like Fairfax County, require.

Parents angry over how schools have operated during the pandemic span the political spectrum, from lifelong liberal Democrats to activist Trump supporters. But on the right, the issue has been a potent way to energize voters who are also angry about other cultural issues in schools, namely, efforts to teach a more critical history of race in America.

The strategy is not new. For many decades, conservatives have used white grievance politics around education to energize their base.

Mr. Youngkin seized on Mr. McAuliffe’s remark that he didn’t “believe parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” Mr. Youngkin used the comment, made during a debate, as an entryway to hammer his rival for supporting efforts that would help address racial inequities in schools — including changes to the curriculum, discipline policies and diversifying the teaching staff.

“This is no longer a campaign,” Mr. Youngkin said. “It is a movement being led by Virginia’s parents.”

Even without presidential contenders fanning out across the state, Pennsylvania presented one of the biggest prizes in this year’s elections, one influencing everything from the governor’s coronavirus powers to redistricting — a seat on the state’s Supreme Court.

On Tuesday, P. Kevin Brobson, a Republican and a Commonwealth Court judge, defeated Maria McLaughlin, a Democrat and a Superior Court judge, in a fiercely contested race for a seat vacated by a Republican. The candidates raised more than $5 million, much from special interests.

Unofficial tallies reported by the Pennsylvania Department of State showed Judge Brobson with about 52 percent of the vote.

The election protected one of the two seats Republicans control on the seven-member court in Pennsylvania, which is one of a handful of states that elect rather than appoint their Supreme Court justices.

While judicial races often fly under the radar, they are hugely consequential.

In Pennsylvania over the past few years, the Supreme Court has redrawn the state’s congressional districts, throwing away a Republican gerrymander and contributing to Democrats’ net gain of four House seats there in 2018. It has also upheld an emergency declaration that enabled Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, to issue stay-at-home orders and other restrictions in response to the pandemic; allowed Pittsburgh to enact a paid sick leave law; and slapped down a Republican lawsuit seeking to invalidate mail-in ballots in the 2020 election.

Given the persistence of efforts by former President Donald J. Trump and his allies to delegitimize the voting process, more election-related cases are likely to come before the court. So might one or more cases challenging Pennsylvania Republicans’ efforts to subpoena voters’ personal information in their bid for a partisan review of the 2020 election results. The court is also expected to decide whether Pennsylvania’s Medicaid program must cover abortion without restrictions.

Republicans also won judicial races in lower courts. Megan Sullivan beat Timika Lane, a Democrat, for a seat on the state’s Superior Court. Stacy Wallace, a Republican, finished first among four candidates for two seats on the Commonwealth Court. Another Republican, Drew Crompton, who was seeking a permanent seat on the court, was leading the two Democrats in that race.

Daniel Slotnik contributed reporting.

Over the last two decades, American politics has steadily polarized along urban and rural lines, with Democrats running up the score in well-educated metropolitan areas and Republicans making gains in the countryside.

For one night in Virginia, that trend did not continue.

In a departure from recent demographic trends, there weren’t really any notable demographic trends in Virginia at all.

Glenn Youngkin, the Republican candidate for governor, won by making broad gains over Democrats in every part of the state and, apparently, across every demographic group. He gained in the cities, the suburbs and rural areas. He gained in the east and west. He made inroads in precincts with both white and nonwhite voters.

It’s an unusually simple picture for such a noteworthy result. When a candidate outperforms expectations, it’s often accompanied by a big breakthrough among a particular demographic group; when a candidate disappoints, they still usually have a few bright spots. There were no bright spots for the Democratic candidate, Terry McAuliffe, but no breakthroughs for Mr. Youngkin, either.

The broad shift to the right could indicate widespread revulsion against Democrats, or it could simply be a sign that longstanding trends have finally run their course. Or perhaps it’s because Mr. Youngkin adopted a message that appealed to the kinds of voters who have gradually been fleeing the Republican Party.

Whatever the reason, it makes it harder to tell the usual story about why Democrats lost on Tuesday.

In a milestone Election Day for mayoral races around the country, a 97-year-old World War II veteran in New Jersey won his second term in his borough’s top municipal office.

Vito Perillo bested three opponents in the nonpartisan race for mayor of Tinton Falls, a small borough a few miles off the Jersey Shore, with 40 percent of the votes.

Though there is no official record-keeping, Mr. Perillo is believed to be the oldest mayor in the country. When he leaves office, he will be 101.

“Today I stopped to think about why people might vote for me. Maybe it’s because I’m a WWII veteran, or an ‘old guy’ (hopefully not),” Mr. Perillo wrote on Facebook. “My hope, however, is that it’s because you see that I care about our town and the people who live in it above anything else.”

Mr. Perillo made his first run for political office in 2017, and in a surprise, he ousted the borough’s former police chief and two-term incumbent mayor. He was motivated in part by high property taxes and a whistle-blower lawsuit involving the Police Department that cost his town $1.1 million.

Despite his achievement on Tuesday, Mr. Perillo, who is a golfer and remains active, does not want to be known for his age.

“I just want to be known for being the mayor of Tinton Falls,” Mr. Perillo told The Asbury Park Press last month.

Politically, Democrats view the Virginia election result as a sign that the sky is falling.

In terms of how life shifts under a new Republican governor, however, Virginians may find the outcome much more mundane.

The agenda that Gov.-elect Glenn Youngkin laid out in his acceptance speech early Wednesday morning echoed the light-on-specifics platform he ran on, promising Virginians “a commonwealth of high expectations,’’ but mostly sketching out minor-key changes that might not affect everyday life that much.

Notably, Mr. Youngkin, who sought to appeal to suburban moderates, never shaped his candidacy around repealing the bulk of the sweeping liberal agenda that Democrats have passed since taking full control in Richmond last year. Democrats ended the death penalty, raised the minimum wage to $15, broadly expanded voting rights and introduced gun safety measures such as universal background checks.

With the House of Delegates likely to end up with a Republican majority, it can be counted on to introduce bills next year to reverse those progressive laws. But they will meet resistance in the State Senate, where Democrats retain control.

Mr. Youngkin’s major campaign message, to give parents more input to schools, is both broadly popular and highly vague. Parents already elect school boards that choose the curriculum of their local schools.

Likewise, the incoming governor’s promise to ban critical race theory may have little practical effect, educators say, because it is not taught in K-12 schools, nor does it shape curriculums.

More specific education items on Mr. Youngkin’s punch list, such as raising teacher salaries and creating 20 new charter schools, must pass the General Assembly. Kirk Cox, a former Republican speaker of the House of Delegates, who is a retired teacher, predicted both initiatives would have a good shot in a “holistic” education package in the legislature, along with Mr. Youngkin’s proposal to have a police officer in every school.

Mr. Youngkin’s most concrete agenda is aimed at stimulating the economy, including ending a sales tax on groceries, doubling the standard deduction on state income taxes and paying a one-time rebate of $300 to individuals. Each item will have to pass via the state budget that requires lawmakers’ approval.

Richard Saslaw, the Democratic majority leader of the Senate, said zeroing out the grocery tax and other revenue sources would lower the money the state has to spend, including on Youngkin proposals for higher pay for teachers and police officers.

“We have to see what all the numbers look like,’’ Mr. Saslaw said. “We’re not the federal government, we don’t have a printing press.”

Not all of the people eagerly awaiting the outcomes of Tuesday’s elections live in New Jersey.

The race for governor there is the highest-profile outstanding election, with the Democratic incumbent, Philip D. Murphy, narrowly leading the Republican candidate, Jack Ciattarelli, on Wednesday afternoon.

Two of the main reasons for the delay are the large number of mail and provisional ballots that need to be counted and confusion caused by new voting laws and equipment.

Other races around the country are still undecided for a range of reasons. Here’s where some of them stand.

Atlanta mayor’s race

None of the five main candidates in Atlanta’s mayoral election received the more than 50 percent of the vote needed to win. Felicia Moore, the City Council president who received by far the most votes, will face either Kasim Reed, a former two-term mayor whose administration was dogged by corruption, or Andre Dickens, a city councilman, in a runoff election on Nov. 30.

As of Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Dickens narrowly led Mr. Reed.

Seattle mayor and city attorney’s races

Results in two important elections in Washington are still outstanding because Seattle uses an all-mail voting system that allows voters to postmark ballots on Election Day, and many votes still need to be counted.

But the outcomes of those races seem clearer than Atlanta’s. As of Wednesday afternoon, two staunchly pro-police candidates, Bruce Harrell for mayor and Ann Davison for city attorney, were well ahead of Lorena González, who called last year for a 50 percent cut in the police budget, and Nicole Thomas-Kennedy, who wants to overhaul the criminal justice system.

Later votes historically favor liberal candidates, sometimes enough to swing results by double digits, but most likely not to the degree needed to close the gaps in these races. Ms. Davison would be the first Republican elected to citywide office in Seattle in three decades.