Virginia governor’s races get outsized coverage. They take place a year after presidential elections, often making them the only big competitive contest in the country. And a lot of political reporters are based around Washington.
This time, though, the result really may be a portent. There are reasons for thinking that Republican Glenn Youngkin’s victory is bad news for Democrats nationally.
First, it suggests that a standard Democratic line of attack is a dud. Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic candidate and a former governor, centered his campaign on the awfulness of former President Donald Trump. He called his opponent “Trumpkin.” The fact that Trump lost the state by 10 percentage points last year made McAuliffe’s strategy attractive. No state’s Republican party saw bigger losses in the state legislature under Trump than Virginia’s did.
Youngkin had to get just enough distance from Trump to reassure voters who disliked the ex-president while not alienating his fans — or Trump himself. But he found that ground. A decisive number of Virginians who picked President Joe Biden over Trump went with Youngkin. Thus Youngkin was able to keep most of Trump’s voters while winning back some of the people who fled the Republican party because of him.
Democrats in other states may have better luck with McAuliffe’s strategy if they are running against Republicans who are less deft at, or intent on, separating themselves from Trump. But a lot of other states — including several with Senate races next year — are also less hostile to Trump than Virginia is.
The themes Youngkin used, on the other hand, could well travel. Youngkin said he wanted to keep the state’s public schools from teaching “critical race theory,” shorthand for a left-wing view of U.S. racial history, and to give parents more of a say. McAuliffe and the Democrats called it a fake issue and an appeal to racism. It didn’t work. Voters whose top issue is education usually break for the Democrats. This time, they went for Youngkin.
Democratic candidates in next year’s races will be careful not to deliver a sound bite as damaging as McAuliffe’s comment that “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” But the party as a whole is more deferential toward the educational system than Republicans are, and takes the same view of the controversy over critical race theory as McAuliffe does. Republicans elsewhere are surely taking notes.
Finally, the results may suggest a degree of unhappiness with one-party Democratic rule that may also be present elsewhere. Youngkin’s victory is notable in part because Virginia has become so Democratic. But that development is recent. Democrats have had the governorship and majorities of both houses of the legislature only for the last two years, and that dominance occurred against the backdrop of unified Democratic control of the federal government only for the last year.
Virginia’s Democrats have made the most of their new power, changing the law on everything from abortion to marijuana to guns to the death penalty. Even voters who approved of some of the changes might want a break from progressivism. It’s a sentiment that typically seizes the whole country quickly when the Democrats have Congress and the presidency.
On CNN on Election Night, the Democratic strategist David Axelrod asked, “How blue is Virginia, really?” It’s a question Democrats might be asking of a lot of other states this time next year.
