Often, the message coming out of an election is nuanced and subject to interpretation. But on occasion, voters speak with an unmistakable clarity that serves as a smack upside the head to anyone paying even scant attention.

The latter was certainly the case in Virginia and New Jersey in this odd-numbered-year election that has regularly served as a table-setter for the political year to follow.

Allow me to return to what we just witnessed in these Atlantic seaboard states. The news is not in who won and who lost, but in the magnitude of shifting public sentiment.

Virginia, a state Biden won by 10 points, moved hard to the Republican side in a governor’s race that was not even cliffhanger close. New Jersey, a Biden-plus-16 state, reelected a seemingly popular Democratic governor by tenths of a percentage point in a contest presumed to be a double-digit walkover.

Something is afoot across the body politic. And the footprint is large. President Biden’s approval ratings have not just softened; they’ve cratered.

The Real Clear Politics average has Biden at 42%. Rasmussen pegs him at 40% and USA Today at 38%. That is Jimmy Carter territory and approaches Donald Trump’s lowest depths.

The analysis is not all that complicated and does not revolve around a sole senator from West Virginia.

The loudest voices in the Democratic Party come from the ultra-woke, progressive left. Biden, joined by a House speaker from San Francisco and Senate majority leader from New York City, have largely acceded and acquiesced.

Now bring that to a state like Virginia, where 37% of voters describe themselves as conservative, 40% as moderate and just 23% as liberal. The current Democratic product is simply dead on arrival.

In other times, this could be written off to the cyclical yin and yang of politics. One party drifts too far toward the edges and voters exact a correction.

But this era imposes other considerations. The last comparable election in Virginia and New Jersey where Democrats so underperformed took place in 2009. That set the stage for the Republican gain of 63 House seats and seven Senate seats a year later.

If history even comes close to repeating next November, Republicans have made all too clear their willingness to tinker with the mechanisms of presidential selection in a way that could make Jan. 6th look like a pale rendition of what may unfold in 2024.

So much of this was unnecessary and unforced. Listen to Virginia’s own Democratic U.S. Rep. Abigail Spanberger in the election’s aftermath. “Nobody elected him (Biden) to be FDR. They elected him to be normal and stop the chaos.”

However, somewhere along the way, calm, measured, tested Joe Biden decided to be transformational; that in a country not wanting transformation, but just calm competence.

As inflation ramped up, and a new word “skimpflation” entered the vocabulary meaning paying more but getting less, Biden and his party pushed one spend-o-rama after another.

Though any focus on economic issues is incomplete as this voter rebellion is as much about culture as standard of living.

After a year in which parents assumed ever-more responsibility for their kids’ schooling, it was astonishingly tone deaf for Democrat Terry McAuliffe to question and even insult the parental role.

The smug, hyper-ventilating protests of the MSNBC commentariat notwithstanding, make no mistake that critical race theory was on the ballot in both states. Clearly, little 7-year-old Junior is not reading the works of Derrick Bell or Kimberle Crenshaw. Thankfully so. Those writings and this newly pervasive theory form the race-centric, oppressor-or-victim, no-middle-ground predicate for so much of what takes place in classrooms and beyond.

No serious person contends that schools should not teach our country’s dark, troubled history around race. But that is a far cry from a curriculum and ethos in which race is everything, individual traits are obliterated, and vast progress and healing are denied.

Add much more of the cultural manifesto to this toxic brew. Every day a disgruntled spouse came home from a required day of company training in “equity” as opposed to “equality,” the cultural revolt grew. So, too, was the case with every e-mail received from academia, or now even the corporate world, in which some adult woman, who has never identified as anything but, felt it necessary to virtuously remind you of her preferred pronouns.

Just what reaction did the local powers-that-be anticipate as they debated the removal of Washington’s or Lincoln’s name from schools that could not even open during the worst of the pandemic?

Did no one think to conduct a focus group to test the “defund the police” slogan in a time of escalating crime?

All of this accumulates. Have no doubt that it registers among those voters who swing elections this way or that.

America of this age is a deeply divided country with passionate believers on both poles who can barely grasp, much less appreciate, how those on the other end think. Still, as the political pendulum swings, even with growing volatility and sometimes rage, the axis point remains close to the center. Parties that stray too far from the vicinity of that midpoint are eventually punished.

Democrats should be grateful for the loud, unambiguous warning sign a year in advance while a course correction is still possible. Rural America long ago turned their backs, as did vast chunks of the white working class. Latino support of Democrats weakened in 2020 and in New Jersey this year. If suburban voters, especially suburban women, now leave the Democratic train in any numbers, the wilderness beckons.

The stakes could not be higher. Should Democrats lose next year, much less lose big, what safeguards for any semblance of election integrity will there be come 2024? Further, if Joe Biden, arguably the only person who could oust Trump from the White House, is permanently diminished, who remains to prevent that vengeful comeback?

Democrats face a day of choosing. Do they wake up? Or stay woke?