CROSS JUNCTION, Va. — Four years ago, Virginia Democrats nominated a slow-talking, country-accented pediatrician named Ralph Northam who had been an anonymous lieutenant governor for Terry McAuliffe.
Unlike McAuliffe, he sounded and talked like a rural Virginian, so he seemed harmless. Northam ran a campaign that did not have any sharp edges, and therefore, the campaign was about the hottest thing going at the time — Donald Trump.
Ed Gillespie was the Republican nominee. He was the same kind of Republican who normally would have been competitive here, except that he was a political professional. He’d served in former President George Bush’s administration, had been the chairman of the Republican National Committee, and was an adviser to Sen. Mitt Romney’s presidential election.
It is always kind of hard for your party’s base to be excited by somebody who’s a political pro.
The race thus became a referendum on the national climate, which was Trump. Democrats won by a landslide.
This time, Republicans have pretty much done what the Democrats did in 2017. In nominating Glenn Youngkin, an inoffensive suburban businessman who talks in measured, quiet tones, they found the GOP version of Northam. Meanwhile, McAuliffe is struggling because voters are not just viewing him through the lens of their negative sentiments about the Biden administration, but they also view him as a lifetime political professional.
There has been an immense change of attitude toward President Joe Biden, the man to whom Virginia voters gave a landslide victory just a year ago.
In particular, among voters who consider themselves independent, faith in Biden’s ability to govern as he promised — from the middle and without chaos — has collapsed.
If voters here back Youngkin, it won’t be because they woke up and decided that they love Republicans again. It will be because the Democrats have pissed them off. Most of their answers will begin in 2020, when their children were quarantined at home at the onset of the pandemic and they realized the amount of control and power school boards have over what their children learn.
Parents realized they weren’t alone in their thinking that schools had become too indoctrinated in leftist cultural programs. Schools were obsessing over “equity” and promulgating critical race theory. They were exposing students to sexually explicit reading material and ramming policies down parents’ throats that allowed gender-fluid students, including at least one alleged male rapist, to use bathrooms and locker rooms based on their claimed gender identity. There were also diktats requiring teachers to refer to students by their preferred pronouns.
Even the stoutest of independent voters who have long forgotten how to vote Republican are now rethinking their sentiments with each overreach that culture and the Democratic Party, which are explicitly intertwined, try to force on their lives and their communities.
Voters here in Virginia sent Democrats an overwhelmingly supportive message with their landslide vote for Biden and all of the Democrats down the ballot in last year’s presidential and congressional elections. Like clockwork, the Democrats misread it.
If you lived here in Virginia or were an observer of people, you might have picked up on a trend that started here in the spring — of Virginians becoming unhappy with the Biden administration. The sentiment has trickled down to McAuliffe.
It didn’t happen instantly, but it was definitely happening, with McAuliffe seemingly unaware that his favorability among voters was directly tied to Biden.
More importantly, McAuliffe didn’t get that what Biden was doing, or not doing, wasn’t what voters had expected of him. Biden’s behavior is making it impossible for the former governor to scoop up enough Republicans and independents to sail to victory as Democrats have done here for the past 20 years.
In reaction to his sinking fortunes, McAuliffe is trying desperately to define Youngkin as Trump’s handmaiden, or as someone who is going to come in the middle of the night and take your abortion rights away in your sleep.
Last week, McAuliffe tweeted: “Glenn Youngkin wants to bring the Donald Trump-Betsy DeVos education agenda to Virginia: MASSIVE cuts to public schools and redirecting taxpayer dollars to private schools. We have got to stop them.” McAuliffe’s push along these lines has gotten even the left-leaning PolitiFact to dispute his veracity. McAuliffe is so desperate to tie Youngkin to Trump that he has even resorted to planting “Youngkin = Trump” signs at his campaign events.
To win, McAuliffe has to change the dynamic. He’s got two ways to do it. One requires introducing something that is truly disqualifying for Youngkin. That hasn’t worked, and so the other is to associate Youngkin with Trump, which also isn’t working. Most voters’ concerns in this election have literally nothing to do with Trump, and they’d like you to stop asking about him, thank you very much.
Democrats may be in a far worse position than they understand — not only in Virginia, but everywhere. Biden has become the new Trump, and attitudes toward him are the new measurement of dissatisfaction with Washington.
In the last two governor races in Virginia, if you look at the early vote by party — obviously you don’t know how anybody voted — you know how many Republicans and how many Democrats have voted during early voting. The Democrats’ advantage this year is far behind where it was in the last two gubernatorial election cycles.
So what is Virginia telling us? It might be that a red wave is at least a possibility.
