Not two full hours after the polls closed in Virginia, Dave Wasserman, the polling sage of the Cook Political Report, called the gubernatorial election for Glenn Youngkin, the Republican neophyte. Youngkin turned the traditionally blue state into a national bellwether by embracing what Barack Obama branded the “phony culture wars” riling public school systems.
Youngkin managed to crush former Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat, in unprecedented time for a state that as recently as last November went for Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential race by 10 points. Despite McAuliffe’s best attempts to refocus the race on ex-President Donald Trump, Youngkin drew from parents’ fury not with partisan issues, but with academic curricula ridden with the racial essentialism of “critical race theory” and the school closures amid the pandemic.
It was close, but then, in the weeks leading up to the election, something bigger happened — the horrific rape case in a Loudoun County public school and the school board’s brazen, transparently mendacious cover-up. While liberals tried to characterize the rape case, which culminated in two felony convictions against a “gender-fluid” teenage boy accused of sodomizing a teenage girl, as mere anti-trans activism, the school board’s decision to silence the victim’s father and allow the convicted rapist to attend another county school despite pending criminal proceedings likely influenced the county’s surge of support toward Youngkin.
With Trump off of the ballot and the coronavirus receding as an issue in ultra-vaccinated Virginia, local matters and bread and butter issues came to the forefront. The most important matter rightly became one of life and death. Democrats made clear that this election was one to vote for as though constituents’ daughters’ lives depended on it, and voters responded in kind.
