The three most important elections from Tuesday — the gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey and the mayoral race in New York City — foreshadowed the issues that will be at the forefront in the 2016 elections.

In New York City, the Democratic mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio won a resounding victory over Republican candidate Joseph Lhota. This is the first time in two decades that New York City elected a Democratic mayor — surprising in a city touted as a liberal haven.

The issues surrounding this election will be front and center in 2016.

Upon taking office, de Blasio’s first initiative will be to raise taxes on the wealthiest New Yorkers to fund an expansion of prekindergarten and after-school programs. He also supports former mayor Michael Bloomberg’s liberal climate change agenda, smoking ban and other Bloomberg health policies.

The issues on de Blasio’s agenda are many of the same issues that divide conservatives and liberals nationwide. Remember last year when Sarah Palin took a break from her Conservative Political Action Conference speech to mock mayor Bloomberg by drinking from a Big Gulp?

Raising taxes on the wealthy was a theme of President Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns and an ember in the smoldering remnants of the fire that was the Occupy Wall Street movement.

The gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey also highlight divisive national issues.

In Virginia, Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe narrowly beat Republican candidate Ken Cuccinelli.

McAuliffe is a former Clinton staffer and former Democratic National Committee chairman. Bill and Hillary Clinton, President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden hit the campaign trail in support of the Democratic candidate.

McAuliffe’s campaign has raised far more money than Cuccinelli’s, which bought them more airtime. The campaign used this time to paint Cuccinelli as a radical conservative with an anti-women voting record.

Cuccinelli is a social conservative, beloved by the Tea Party. He supported the House Republican’s crusade to defund Obamacare and was the first state attorney general to litigate against the law. He does not support same-sex marriage or abortion, and he is a climate change denier.

Cuccinelli’s hard-right views made him a Tea Party favorite but lost him support from moderate Republicans. “It is impossible to be the candidate of the Tea Party and still be the candidate of the center,” Terry McAuliffe’s pollster told CNN.

In New Jersey, the incumbent Governor Chris Christie won handedly over little-known Democratic challenger Barbara Buono.

Christie, who is portrayed as a moderate by many in his own party, won with 60 percent of the vote. Most importantly, Christie won 66 percent of the independent vote in New Jersey, according to CNN.

This sets the stage nicely for a presidential run and suggests that Christie could capture undecided voters.

Many pundits are treating the elections in New Jersey and Virginia as a referenda on the divided state of the Republican Party and rightly so. Christie won a primarily Democratic state and Cuccinelli lost a state that voted Republican in eight of the last 10 presidential elections. This highlights the fact that the public does not believe in the hardline conservative policies of the Tea Party.

Christie’s policies place him much closer to the political center, which alienates him from many right-wing Republicans. But for Republicans to win the presidential election in 2016, they will have to embrace candidates like Christie.

The deciding issues in these three elections and the circumstances surrounding each of them point to a resurgence of power by liberal Democrats and a push back toward the center by Republicans. Watch as these two themes play an omnipresent role in 2016.

Michael Hacker is a senior political science major. His column appears weekly. He can be reached at mahacker@syr.edu and followed on Twitter at @mikeincuse.

Published on November 7, 2013 at 1:53 am