5 reasons Democrats should be worried about 2022 after their devastating losses in Virginia

• Democrats suffered a trio of devastating losses Tuesday in Virginia's elections.
• Republicans also prevailed in other under-the-radar elections in blue and swing states.

Virginia Democrats took a shellacking Tuesday as Republicans flipped control of the top three statewide offices and are on track to take away Democrats' majority in the House of Delegates.

With President Joe Biden in the White House and the party controlling both chambers of Congress, Democrats faced an uphill battle. Voters tend to feel dissatisfied with their current leadership or their own personal fortunes and have historically turned on the party in power.

But the results in Virginia and in New Jersey, where Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy and the Republican Jack Ciattarelli were neck and neck as of Wednesday evening, are indicative of even more structural warning signs for Democrats.

1. Democrats don't have the suburbs on lock

Republican Gov.-elect Glenn Youngkin, Lt. Gov.-elect Winsome Sears, and Attorney General-elect Jason Miyares' paths to victory in Virginia relied on winning back white and suburban voters who recently turned away from the GOP.

In his race against the Democrat Terry McAuliffe, Youngkin flipped at least eight counties and cities that Biden carried in the 2020 presidential election, including the affluent Richmond-area suburbs in Chesterfield County and the fast-growing Caroline County.

Republicans also handily won parts of the Virginia Beach and Norfolk areas, including Virginia Beach, James City, and Chesapeake City, the second-largest city in the state, that have all trended blue in recent elections.

Youngkin also put a dent in Democrats' margins in more reliably blue suburban areas like Loudoun County, which gained national attention as the center of high-profile battles over education policy and how racism is taught in schools. McAuliffe carried the northern Virginia county by just under 10 points, 55% to 45%, over Youngkin. This marked a major shift from Biden's 25-point win over Donald Trump in the county in 2020.

2. Democrats continue to lose among rural and blue-collar voters

Rural areas getting redder while suburbs got bluer was a major storyline of Trump-era elections. And the continued erosion of Democratic support in rural areas while non-Trump Republican candidates forge new paths in suburbs presents a worrying math problem for Democrats entering 2022.

Beyond gaining ground in the suburbs, a question that lingered into Election Day was whether Youngkin would succeed in winning over enough reliably Republican voters in rural parts of the state to outpace McAuliffe's dominance in blue counties and cities.

Compared with the 2017 governor's race between the Democrat Ralph Northam and the Republican Ed Gillespie, the southwestern corner of the state saw both higher turnout and larger margins for Youngkin and other Republicans, with McAuliffe too getting lower margins than Northam. And while Democrats aren't likely to mount a big rural revival anytime soon, those margins have an impact in competitive elections.

In New Jersey too, Ciattarelli appears to have flipped three South Jersey counties that Biden carried in 2020 and is substantially outperforming Trump's 2020 margins in Republican-leaning areas of the state.

3. Democrats can't bank on making every race a referendum on Trump

Both McAuliffe and Murphy went all in on painting their opponents as better-polished versions of Trump, hoping that voters' disdain for Trump would translate down the ballot.

But Youngkin and Ciattarelli overperformed expectations by deploying the well-worn playbook of a Republican businessman turned politician running as a check on Democratic dominance in blue states.

Youngkin put enough distance between himself and Trump both stylistically and in his policy positions so as not to alienate diehard Trump supporters, Biden voters, or independents - all of whom he needed to win statewide.

And more important, he, unlike McAuliffe, successfully controlled the narrative of the race by making education and schools, particularly how much control parents have over their kids' schools curriculum and policies, a key mobilizing issue for voters.

By the end of the campaign, surveyed voters said education was the most important issue to them while COVID-19 and abortion, issues where McAuliffe dominated, fell to the wayside.

Ciattarelli, meanwhile, branded himself as a "Main Street businessman," adopting a moderate stance on hot-button issues like abortion and immigration while also hammering Murphy's handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and highlighting New Jersey-specific issues like lowering property taxes.

4. Republicans now have a clear road map to do well in blue and swing states

While Biden's big win over Trump in the presidential race got most of the attention in 2020, downballot Republicans proved themselves able to shed Trump's baggage, picking up about a dozen seats in the US House and flipping more than 80 seats in state legislatures.

And elsewhere in the Northeast on Tuesday night, Republicans furthered that trend and secured more under-the-radar but notable downballot wins.

Republicans flipped back control of four seats in the Virginia House of Delegates and could flip as many as four more, which would give them back control of the chamber after two years of Democratic dominance.

GOP candidates also won a competitive election for district attorney in New York's Nassau County and two big judicial elections, including a key state Supreme Court race, in Pennsylvania on Tuesday.

Those races were, of course, influenced by all kinds of state and local factors as well as the quality of the candidates. But they show how Democrats can't rely on a divisive figure at the top of the ticket to obscure structural headwinds they face.

5. Negative polarization means Biden's poor approval is more of a drag on downballot Democrats

Over the past decade or so, the phenomenon of negative polarization, in which voters are more motivated by disdain toward the opposing party than affinity toward their own, has increasingly shaped American voter behavior and the outcome of elections.

This is manifested in Americans holding increasingly negative views of the other party and its voters and record-low levels of voters splitting their tickets between one party at the presidential level and downballot races.

Negative polarization gave Democrats a huge downballot boost in the Trump years, as dissatisfaction with Trump particularly among white and college-educated voters delivered Democrats big wins in the 2018 midterms.

But now the shoe is on the other foot and Democrats find themselves stumbling over Biden's dismal approvals and the large percentage of Americans who see the country as going in the wrong direction.

To the extent that national politics did impact the results of the Virginia and New Jersey races, Biden's historically paltry approval ratings were more of a drag on Democrats than Trump's unpopularity was on Republicans.

In Virginia, Youngkin won 51% of the vote, improving on Trump's 2020 vote share in the commonwealth by over 6 percentage points, while McAuliffe received 49% of the vote, underperforming Biden's 2020 vote share also by 6 points.

And while more votes remain to be counted in the New Jersey governor's race, the same pattern is playing out in the Garden State, with Murphy so far underperforming Biden's 2020 vote share and Ciattarelli outperforming Trump.