Election night’s message is that Joe Biden needs a big win on Capitol Hill – and he needs it now

Democrats need a better story to sell to voters across the nation, writes Andrew Buncombe

Joe Biden was elected after campaigning as someone who could deliver (Getty Images)

If there is one overarching message from America’s latest election night it is this: Joe Biden needs a big win on Capitol Hill and he needs it fast.

Democrat Terry McAuliffe and his team will have plenty of time to ponder what they did wrong in Virginia, how they allowed Republican Glenn Youngkin to exploit an issue and lie about it, playing the coded race card in the same way as Richard Nixon used to to across the southern states, and getting away with it.

They will have time to consider whether McAuliffe, a never-thrilling 64-year-old white man, who previously served as governor, was the best candidate, and whether a woman, particularly a Black woman, would have generated greater enthusiasm among voters.

Democrats might have done badly regardless of who the candidate was; elections in “off” years do not always point to the future.

What appears beyond doubt, however, is that if Democrats had a better story to tell to voters, a story of bills passed on Capitol Bill, and signed into law by Joe Biden, they would have fared better.

Instead, as Virginia Republicans prepared to party in Richmond, and Donald Trump, typically, sought to claim credit, Democrats were left picking through the wreckage of how McAuliffe had allowed Youngkin to seize on the issue of critical race theory, and claim, falsely in most cases, that it was being taught in elementary schools and that parents had no say in the matter.

(In some schools, pupils are taught Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), which school boards have introduced to try and meet the needs of a more diverse population.)

If McAuliffe had a better story to tell, one of trillions of dollars being invested in infrastructure and child care, into clean water and combatting climate change, then he may not have been forced to deliver a non-concession concession speech, thanking his supporters for all they had done.

But Democrats did not have a better story to tell. And that will be fatal far beyond Virginia in next year’s midterms, if they do not fix that quickly.

And the reason they do not have a better story to tell? Because, despite Democrats controlling the White House, and both the Senate and the House of Representatives, they have been unable to pass either of the major pieces of infrastructure legislation that lie at the heart of Biden’s domestic agenda.

Blame for that can he handed round to plenty of people. But at the most crucial point, two Democratic senators, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, have failed to support it.

Manchin is a rare thing, an elected Democratic official from ruby-red West Virginia, one of a handful of states where coal mining is still important. Manchin will do nothing that harms that industry, and flatly rejected Biden’s plan to replace coal and gas-fired power plants with renewable energy.

On Monday, Manchin held a press conference in Washington DC, seemingly never tired of the spotlight.

“I’m open to supporting a final bill that helps move our country forward, but I am equally open to voting against a bill that hurts our country,” he said.

Biden had counted on winning over Manchin, even claiming he also did not want to end the Senate filibuster rule that requires a 60 votes for many bills to be passed, and which progressives such as Bernie Sanders want to scrap.

On Tuesday morning, on the other side of the Atlantic, we witnessed the sorry spectacle of the president almost pleading with a member of his party, to get on board.

Former Gov Terry McAuliffe (Getty Images)

“I believe that Joe will be there,” Biden said during a news conference at the United Nations climate summit in Glasgow.

“He will vote for this if we have in this proposal what he has anticipated, and that is looking at the fine print and the detail of what comes out of the House in terms of the actual legislative initiatives.”

As it was, Biden had also predicted McAuliffe would win.

The 2022 midterms are just one year away. On Tuesday night, analyst Dave Wasserman, of the well-respected Cook Political Report, tweeted of the result in Virginia: “Needless to say, tonight’s results are consistent w/ a political environment in which Republicans would comfortably take back both the House and Senate in 2022.”

For Democrats there can hardly be a more clear message; if they think getting legislation passed is difficult when they control the House and the Senate, imagine what it will be like if they hold neither.

Democrats need to hand Biden a legislative victory that the whole party can sell to the country. Otherwise, anything can happen.