Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe closed his embattled campaign for Virginia governor by pushing a liberal education agenda, wrapping his arms around powerful teachers unions while proposing to diversify the ranks of public school educators he complained are too white.
Virginia voters headed to the polls Tuesday morning, capping off a key off-year campaign that trended toward Republican Glenn Youngkin in the final weeks in a state that voted for President Joe Biden over former President Donald Trump by more than 10 percentage points just one year ago. Suburban parents flocked to Youngkin as he promised them more control over their children’s education while vowing to reduce the influence of organized labor and public school bureaucrats.
Despite the political mileage Youngkin accrued with this conservative message, McAuliffe stubbornly stuck with a pitch designed to cater to the Democratic base, of which the teachers unions are an integral part.
Indeed, on Monday, the final full day of campaigning, McAuliffe welcomed American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten to the trail to stump for him — to the delight of Republicans hoping an upset in Virginia jump-starts their 2022 bid to recapture Congress.
“I fundamentally didn’t get it,” said Doug Heye, a Republican strategist who has been critical of Trump and his party at times. “The countless interviews Weingarten has done in the past year-plus, pushing for teachers to be put to the front of the line for [coronavirus] vaccines, only to continue to push back on schools reopening, seeded the ground making the Youngkin [northern Virginia] surge possible.”
Frustration with public schools can be traced to the coronavirus. Suburban parents in particular were unhappy with the quality of the virtual education their children received during the pandemic. They were equally irritated by the snail’s pace at which public schools reopened this calendar year after the coronavirus vaccine became widely available and teachers were given priority to receive the shot. Parents saw the teachers unions, school boards, and school administrators as the culprits.
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In the Virginia suburbs of Richmond and Washington, which gravitated toward the Democratic Party during Trump’s presidency, Youngkin’s message of putting parents in charge resonated, making the governor’s race a razor-thin affair. So it was somewhat surprising to see McAuliffe close his campaign by emphasizing his support for the teachers unions and, by extension, their often dominating influence over all aspects of public education.
Democrats are not convinced that this is the primary reason McAuliffe could become their first nominee to lose a Virginia governor’s race since 2009. “When we look back on this, the mistake on the Democratic side — all of us, not just the campaign — was to not define Youngkin the day after he won the nomination,” Democratic pollster Joe Trippi said. “Had Democrats done that, this race never would have gotten within range.”
But other Democrats privately concede that McAuliffe “messed up.”
These Democratic operatives say the former governor’s strategy of attempting to convince Virginians that the mild-mannered Youngkin is the same kind of Republican as the provocative Trump was misguided. McAuliffe’s Democratic critics also say the former governor erred by not addressing the very real concerns suburban parents harbor about the quality of the education their children are receiving in Virginia’s public schools.
“They made a big miscalculation on education,” said a Democratic operative who has worked on campaigns in Virginia in the past and requested anonymity to speak candidly. “I know that Terry McAuliffe hates Donald Trump. I don’t know why Terry McAuliffe wants to be governor.”
The Virginia governor’s race grew more competitive in August, when Biden’s job approval numbers tumbled on the heels of the botched withdrawal of the U.S. military forces from Afghanistan. Democratic infighting on Capitol Hill over social spending and infrastructure legislation has not done McAuliffe any favors, either. But a crucial turning point in the contest can be traced to late September and a slip-up the former governor uttered during a debate with Youngkin.
In a back-and-forth with the Republican nominee about how much power parents should have over public school curricula, McAuliffe clumsily declared that he opposed allowing parents to implement book bans in school libraries. But what the Democrat said, and the sound bite that swung the campaign hard toward Youngkin, seemed more like general opposition to parents having a say in the children’s education.
“I’m not going to let parents come into schools and actually take books out and make their own decision,” McAuliffe said. “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” From that moment on, that second line became the centerpiece of Youngkin’s campaign message, with the career private equity investor and first-time candidate vowing to do the opposite: put parents front and center in decisions about public education.
Education, as an issue, is usually a strength for Democrats and a vulnerability for Republicans. But McAuliffe’s verbal miscue and Youngkin’s response flipped that dynamic on its head, so much so that suburban parents who are generally unmotivated by cultural issues began complaining about critical race theory, an approach to teaching social studies that revolves around race and ethnicity that is not even taught in all of Virginia’s schools.
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The former governor, who was termed out of office in 2018 because the commonwealth does not allow chief executives to serve consecutive terms, seemed to recognize his mistake and ran a television ad claiming his words were taken out of context. But by the conclusion of the campaign, McAuliffe had returned to boilerplate liberal policy, highlighting his alliance with the teachers unions and saying the problem with public schools was that nonwhite teachers are underrepresented.
“Virtual learning and COVID really opened many parents’ eyes to what their children were being taught and has bolstered parental engagement for school curriculum,” said Alleigh Marre, who runs Free to Learn Action, a conservative political nonprofit group.
