When we talk about the “honeymoon phase” of a new administration in Washington, it may be a deep bipartisan swoon or a one-sided affair like we have today. But the real honeymoon is for the rest of the country.

After a long, brutal two-year presidential election cycle, the votes have all been counted, the oaths of office taken, and the balances of power rebalanced. In other words, normal people can unplug from politics for a little while and see what happens next.

But we, of course, are not normal here. The permanent campaign is never more permanent than it is for the junkies in the political press who cover elections. No sooner have the voting booths been stowed away than we are on to the next one.

What’s next are a pair of April 1 special elections in Florida to replace former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R), who resigned ahead of a damning ethics report, and former Rep. Mike Waltz (R), who gave up his seat to become White House national security adviser. Those are both very Republican districts and little will be gleaned about voter attitudes by which one of a field of red-hot MAGA aspirants replaces them. There will be, maybe as soon as early summer, a slightly more interesting race in New York to replace the soon-to-depart Rep. Elise Stefanik (R). She should have no trouble being confirmed as Donald Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, but has to cool her heels in the House until the zero-margin Republicans get reinforcements from Florida.

We’re not going to waste your time on parsing House special elections, though. If it looks like something weird is going to happen, we will let you know. We’d like to direct your attention, instead, to elections that are not special but still very useful in seeing where voters' heads are.

Five states — Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Jersey and Virginia — hold “off cycle” elections in odd-numbered years. The first three time their gubernatorial cycles to fall in the year after federal midterm contests, when the next presidential cycle is already well underway. By the time Kentucky, Louisiana, and Mississippi are picking new governors in 2027, we will be deep into the back nine of the second Trump term.

But not New Jersey and Virginia, which pick governors in the year right after a presidential contest. And while neither of them is a swing state, they are at least politically diverse enough to provide a core sample of the electorate that tells us where voters are heading in the early going of a new administration.

Virginia has, in every modern cycle other than 2013, been a harbinger of the results of the next midterm election. The midterm curse for parties in power hits Richmond before it moves up I-95 to Washington.

All signs right now point to a repeat of the trend in Virginia this November.

Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears is a strong favorite to win her party’s nomination to succeed term-limited incumbent Gov. Glenn Youngkin. She’s an excellent campaigner, a staunch conservative and should be able to dispatch a challenge from a very ambitious state senator.

But it gets a great deal harder from there.

As a poll this week shows, Earle-Sears is starting at a distinct disadvantage to the Democratic front-runner, former Rep. Abigail Spanberger. Spanberger is also a good campaigner who has kept a studied moderation that matched her heavily suburban Northern Virginia and the commonwealth as a whole. Spanberger could still draw a primary foe, but right now she seems to be on a glide path to the nomination. If that’s so, she wouldn’t have to play to her left flank in the way her Republican counterpart may need to in the GOP’s June primary.

But beyond any questions of party unity and Virginia’s decades-long history of going against the party in power in Washington, there’s this: Virginia is home to 152,360 federal employees, second only to California as a percentage of the state’s workforce. There are tens of thousands of jobs supporting those jobs and heaven only knows how many more contractors. An administration that has devoted its opening act largely to shredding the federal bureaucracy probably hasn’t won many new admirers in a place that Trump lost by almost 6 points last year.

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Democrats have lots of reason to feel good about their chances in Virginia, but how about New Jersey?

We have been long accustomed to thinking of Virginia, a Southern state that voted Republican on the presidential level for most of the second half of the 20th century, as the tougher spot for Democrats compared to its off-cycle counterpart, New Jersey. No Republican presidential candidate has won the Garden State since 1988, and Republicans haven’t won a Senate race there since 1966.

But when we look a little more carefully at the 2024 results, we see that the presidential race in New Jersey was closer than any year since 1992, the first year Democrats took control. Democrats still won by a comfortable 6 points, the same as Virginia, but the trend is moving in the opposite direction. As Virginia gets bluer, New Jersey may be acting a little purple.

The leading Republican candidate is Jack Ciattarelli, the businessman and former member of the state Assembly who came within a whisker of unseating incumbent Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy in 2021. Murphy is now term-limited, but probably couldn’t win a third term even if he was allowed.

Murphy’s debacle of a bid to get his wife the nomination for the Senate seat vacated by the resignation of Bob Menendez — now awaiting the start of an 11-year prison sentence for corruption — was a good insight into........

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