Right as Democrats swept Tuesday’s off-year elections, reclaiming a trifecta in Virginia and keeping New Jersey indigo blue, the party’s shutdown of the federal government set the record as the longest in the nation’s history. The overlap of the two events is no coincidence: nearly a quarter of Virginia’s electorate works for the federal government, two-thirds of whom voted for Gov.-elect Abigail Spanberger. By the time the shutdown hit the 35-day mark on election night, some 2.5 million federal workers , a disproportionate share of whom live in Virginia, were going without their paychecks.

The nominal reason congressional Democrats have refused — 14 times in a row now — to authorize the Republican continuing resolution that would reopen the federal government at Biden-era spending

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