Good morning from Timothy Noah, who blames the Democrats’ poor showing Tuesday on the October 29 release of Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin. It is the seventh in the series. The number seven is all over the Book of Revelation, which foretells hail and fire and locusts and the seas turning to blood.

Or maybe it was just the supply chain. “The scope of the party’s setbacks,” write Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns in The New York Times, “illustrated that voters were fatigued from the demands of the still-continuing coronavirus pandemic and angry about the soaring prices and scarcity of goods they were confronting every day.”

The various factions within the Democratic Party can’t agree on what to do about all this. In the White House, Biden said that if Congress passes the $1.75 trillion reconciliation bill, “I’m in a position where you’re going to see a lot of those things ameliorated quickly and swiftly.” But Representative Abigail Spanberger, a Virginia Democrat, said, “Nobody elected [Biden] to be F.D.R., they elected him to be normal and stop the chaos.” (That’s why they elected FDR in 1932, actually.)

Your faithful newsletter writer predicts we’re about to see a wave of stories that say the press and the Democrats, both habitually excitable, are overreacting to the bad news. The two big races were in Virginia and New Jersey. The Democrats lost one and won the other. In New Jersey, incumbent Phil Murphy won by a smaller margin than four years ago. We weren’t in a pandemic four years ago! In Virginia, former Governor Terry McAuliffe ran a less than great campaign and lost. The Democratic defeats, reports the Times way down in its story, “were not as overwhelming as the last time the party controlled the presidency and Congress, in 2009, when Republicans won the Virginia governorship by 17 percentage points and the New Jersey governorship as well.”

In the Los Angeles Times, columnist Jackie Calmes notes that in Virginia, Youngkin “still lost to McAuliffe in the suburban counties outside Washington and Richmond,” albeit “by far less than Trump did to Biden.” And Youngkin’s careful balancing act with Trump may not be reproducible in the 2022 midterms. Trump “uncharacteristically followed Republicans’ advice to stay out of Virginia,” Calmes observes, but he “isn’t likely to remain quiet and mostly in self-exile at his Florida Mar-a-Lago resort in 2022, especially as he flirts with a campaign of his own in 2024.” New York Times columnist Gail Collins notes that “Boston elected its first woman and first person of color as mayor,” that “Pittsburgh and Kansas City, Kan., each elected its first Black mayor,” that “Cincinnati chose an Asian American mayor,” and that “Dearborn, Mich.’s next mayor is going to be an Arab American Muslim.”

In other news, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration this morning released its emergency temporary standard on Covid-19, which mandates that large employers require workers either to get vaccinated or to be masked and get tested weekly (text, summary). Businesses must comply by January 4. Companies must provide paid time off for workers to get vaccinated and sick leave in cases where workers suffer side effects. Employers won’t be required to pay for or provide the tests unless union contracts require that. The mask requirement takes effect December 5.

Today at NewRepublic.com, Casey Michel notes yet another reason to pass the $1.75 trillion Build Back Better bill: It contains $80 billion to hire new IRS agents to chase down rich people who cheat on their taxes. The IRS is in desperate need of the money because a decade’s worth of budget cuts has caused a 61 percent decline in audits for millionaires and a 40 percent decline in criminal referrals. Lily Meyer reviews Career and Family, a new book by Harvard’s Claudia Goldin (who I think is the best economic historian in America). Among the nuggets in Goldin’s book is that the corporatization of pharmacies, by replacing self-employed men we called “Doc” with CVS or Walgreens employees, was a boon for women because more sophisticated corporate record-sharing systems made the job more flexible, creating more opportunities for women pharmacists with families. (For the record, I never liked Doc, despite his embodying the small-business ideal. Working long hours made him cranky and slow.) And Esther Wang decries the idea that outlawing abortions past the 15-week mark, as Mississippi has done, is somehow a “moderate” compromise between outlawing them at 20 weeks, as many states have done, and outlawing them at six weeks, as Texas has done. The Supreme Court, which will hear arguments concerning the Mississippi law in December, is in some danger of adopting this view. “We should nip this foolish logic in the bud,” Wang writes. “Like any other ban at any point in someone’s pregnancy, we should recognize it for what it is—an assertion of the state’s power in determining when and how we’re made to have children.”

Timothy Noah, staff writer

Yesterday’s trivia question: According to Genius, precisely one basketball player from the University of Virginia has been name-checked in a hip-hop song. Name the player and, as a bonus, name the song.

Answer: Actually, there are two.(1)Dawn Staley,UVA point guard(1988–1992)and four-time Olympic gold medalist, gets a mention in The Roots’ “100% Dundee” (1999). The relevant lyric is “Wacked up my celly, get known like Dawn Staley.” (2) Ralph Sampson, UVA center (1979–1983) gets a mention in Kurtis Blow’s “Basketball” (1984). The relevant lyric is “Dantley and Wilkins are on the scene /  And Ralph Sampson is really mean.”

Today’s political question: How many Republicans have been elected governor of Virginia since Reconstruction, and how many are still living?