Democrats took a beating this week in Virginia, losing multiple statewide elections to Republicans black, white, and, Hispanic.
Yet deranged liberal pundits insist the key takeaway from the Nov. 2 elections is not that modern liberal orthodoxy has a problem but that Virginians are white supremacists.
Because when all you have is a hammer, everything is a nail.
“Racism still works in Virginia,” quipped failed Democratic presidential candidate and former MSNBC contributor Howard Dean, who once spoke about how he wanted to win the votes of people with Confederate flags on their pickup trucks.
The Atlantic’s Jemele Hill added, “It’s not the messaging, folks. This country simply loves white supremacy.”
“Whiteness remains undefeated,” said the Daily Beast’s Wajahat Ali. “Let’s wait and see who those white suburban voters went for tonight in Virginia. Any guesses?”
Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe, a longtime bagman for the Clinton political dynasty, was bested by Republican newcomer Glenn Youngkin. Democratic Virginia Del. Hala Ayala likewise lost her race for lieutenant governor to Republican Winsome Sears, a black, Jamaican-born immigrant and U.S. Marine Corps veteran. Incumbent Democratic Attorney General Mark Herring was defeated by Republican Jason Miyares, who is now the first Latino in Virginia’s history to win the office.
Meanwhile, Republicans have won back control of the Virginia House of Delegates after flipping at least five seats from blue to red (with at least two more expected after all the votes are counted).
Youngkin is white. Sears is black. Miyares is Hispanic. Clearly, white supremacy did this, according to liberal pundits.
“Yes, Youngkin did in fact run on straight-up racism,” said MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan.
Former Vox reporter David Roberts followed up: “Youngkin not only ran on racism — he ran on a very specific kind of racism targeted at white women. And white women came through for him.”
“Every media outlet saying ‘education’ was the issue in the Virginia race and not literally racism is doing their audience a disservice,” said Alliance for Justice press secretary and former ThinkProgress staffer Zack Ford.
On its face, the white supremacy argument is plain laziness. It allows the speaker to avoid any amount of uncomfortable and difficult self-reflection to determine whether his or her own beliefs are inadequate or in error.
And in the case of the Virginia elections specifically, the racism bit is not just lazy, but also nonsensical. It makes no sense considering the slate of Republican candidates who ran successful campaigns in the Old Dominion state. The same voters who went for Youngkin, who is white, also went for Sears, who is black, and Miyares, who is Latino. Is this white supremacy? As it turns out, a particularly deranged and not-so-insignificant subset of liberal pundits believes it is. They don’t believe Miyares and Sears represent a hitch in their racism theory because they believe illiberal nonwhites simply don’t count.
Anything to avoid a bit of introspection.
The idea that white supremacy is responsible for the Democratic Party’s woes in Virginia also ignores what is happening elsewhere in the country. New Jersey Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy, for example, barely held off Republican upstart Jack Ciattarelli. It was never supposed to be this close in New Jersey. Yet, it was. Did white supremacy do this, too? In Buffalo, New York, socialist mayoral candidate India Walton, who secured the endorsement of Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, lost by double digits to a write-in candidate — current Democratic Mayor Byron Brown. Brown is black, and he’s even a Democrat. Let me guess: white supremacy again?
If you want to believe racism robbed the Left of multiple victories this week, you are entitled to the six inches inside your own skull. Go ahead. Embrace it. Run with it in every future election. Slap it on a banner and fly it from a plane over every stadium in the country.
Just don’t be surprised when a party that focuses more on voters’ interests — the economy, the coronavirus pandemic, and education — ends up beating you for every elected office in 2022, 2024, and beyond, right down to dogcatcher.
