Dan McLaughlin of National Review deserves a great deal of credit; a week ago, while all political eyes in the nation were fixed unwaveringly on Virginia, McLaughlin wrote a piece suggesting that perhaps a bit more attention ought to be directed toward the New Jersey governor’s race. He posited that, perhaps, it just might be closer than anyone was really expecting.

As I write this on election night, Republican Glenn Youngkin’s victory over Democrat Terry McAuliffe in Virginia’s gubernatorial election has just been called by the remaining holdouts. That win is a pretty big deal, but the bigger story of the night may be the unexpected closeness of the New Jersey race, a deep blue state where the incumbent Democratic governor, Phil Murphy, enjoyed an average of an 11-point lead in the polls and a roughly 2-1 financial advantage. At this moment his Republican challenger, Jack Ciattarelli, is up by about 2 points, with 80-some percent of the vote in.

I still think Murphy will pull it off – maybe I’m just channeling my inner Whittaker Chambers which refuses to let any optimism infiltrate too deeply; and it’s hard to argue that Murphy, who is perhaps the only governor in the nation to mishandle the COVID pandemic worse than Andrew Cuomo, doesn’t deserve to lose – but the simple fact that it is this close is nothing short of a seismic event, politically speaking.

New Jersey is too close to call, and it may be days before the outcome is finalized, but Virginia’s election is in the books. There are three reasons for Youngkin’s win, each of which hold lessons for Colorado Republicans.

The first, most obviously, was a reaction to Democratic overreach. The progressive wing of the Democratic Party, inexplicably, believes that their slim victories in 2020 were a mandate for sweeping social and economic metamorphosis, and have acted on that. And not only in Congress and the White House, but seeping down into every level of government – including public schools. Tuesday night was a reaction to this. When offered revolution, the majority of Virginians responded “count me out.”

The second was a focus by the Republican candidate on issues that matter to most voters. While McAuliffe and his backers incessantly tried to make the election a redux of the 2020 presidential race, Youngkin spoke to Virginians about what really impacted them; concentrating on a shared opposition to ideologization of public education at the expense of educational quality, but also encompassing other themes, such as the economy and crime. Against this, McAuliffe was essentially unarmed, leaving him with little option but to say “Trump” in the same sentence as “Youngkin” as many times as he could.

But Youngkin never took the bait, bringing us to the third pillar, possibly the most crucial single factor of his win, and the greatest lesson for Republicans in Colorado who wish to regain some lost ground. Richard Nixon once remarked that his loss to JFK demonstrated that Republicans cannot win without the conservatives, and Goldwater’s loss revealed that they cannot win with only the conservatives. So it is today with Trump voters.

Youngkin successfully navigated that line – not re-alienating the Forgotten Man that Trump attracted into the fold, but also not cleaving to Trump himself. He kept Trump at a distance, not necessarily discarding his endorsement, but not embracing it either. He offered Republicans around the country a blueprint for how to win back a key natural constituency that fled the party in disgust with Trump – educated suburbanites – by focusing on issues.

The Democrats hoped to win the Virginia election by running on one issue: Donald Trump. No longer. Polls leading up to the election show that the issues Youngkin ran on – education, crime, and the economy – are the ones Americans care about, and it is getting harder for Democrats to evade blame for failures in these areas. The Albatross has changed his party.

Colorado is not substantially different from Virginia. Most Coloradans, we all know, identify politically as independents, an amorphous label that wraps itself around a number of diverse subcategories. Clearly the majority of those independents do not identify with Trump; but neither do they identify with the far left, the wing that seems ascendant in the Democratic Party.

This means that a Republican resurgence is possible in Colorado, as it happened in Virginia – that disaster can yet be averted, hope restored – provided Republicans can absorb the lessons illuminated by Youngkin’s win, move past Donald Trump, and leverage their natural philosophic advantages on the issues that matter. And in doing so provide a responsible, grown-up alternative.