From New York Times, I'm Michael Bolvaro. This is Adely.

Today, why Democrats fared so poorly in so many different parts of the country

in Tuesday's closely watched elections? I asked my colleague, National Political Correspondent,

Alex Burns. It's Thursday, November 4th.

Hey, Mr. Burns. It has been a really, really long time since you were on the show. In fact,

I did some math. It's been eight months. Has it really? Yep. I've counted every single day with

one of those dramatic X's on the calendar? And it's extremely fitting that after all that time

and all that bereftness on our part, you were turned on the day of the very first big election

since you left. I did not plan it out that way. No, but it did kind of work out. No. I just kind

of ran out of time off. But here I am just in time for these elections. So speaking of this

election, it felt like all of us were focused pretty much exclusively on the governor's race in

Virginia and the story there about an unexpectedly close contest. So how did that all unfold for you?

I think that's totally right. Going into the night really felt like Virginia was the main show

that's a state that's a trended towards Democrats over the last decade. But where you had a

Republican candidate, Glenn Youngkin, a newcomer to politics, a business guy, are running an

unexpectedly strong race against Terry McCallough, the former Democratic governor who's trying to

make a political comeback. And it really seemed like the question of hanging over the whole night was

can Glenn Youngkin pull off this distinctively strong performance in a tough state?

Right. And as the night went on, and as it became clearer and clearer that, yeah,

Glenn Youngkin probably was going to pull that off. We start to look beyond Virginia.

And we start to see evidence that maybe this isn't a singular event. Maybe there's something

happening here that relates to the larger fabric of American politics and the position of the

...