Republican Glenn Youngkin’s shocking defeat of Democrat Terry McAuliffe Tuesday in the Virginia gubernatorial contest will almost certainly serve as a blueprint for Republicans in the post-Trump era.
Youngkin’s victory was consistent with late October polls that showed him burning through McAuliffe’s summer lead and claiming a modest advantage on the strength of his message about education and the economy.
GLENN YOUNGKIN WINS VIRGINIA GOVERNOR’S RACE, RIDING ENTHUSIASM WAVE ON EDUCATION ISSUES
Rising prices and drama at school board meetings created the ideal backdrop for Youngkin’s devotion to the kitchen-table issues that McAuliffe was widely perceived as having ignored, as he focused more on racial divisions and opposition to a president no longer in office.
Youngkin managed to eat into McAuliffe’s leads in Northern Virginia counties that Democrats have won in nearly all recent elections — including in 2020, when President Joe Biden carried them by sizable margins.
Poll after poll showed Youngkin’s school-focused message catching fire with Virginia parents.
An Echelon Insights poll published on Friday showed Youngkin with a 3-point lead over McAuliffe across the state.
But among Virginia voters with children in grade school, Youngkin’s lead shot up to 15 points.
A Fox News poll published last week showed voters said they trust Youngkin to handle education more than McAuliffe by an 8-point margin.
A Washington Post/Schar School poll released Friday showed voters cited education as the top factor in deciding their vote.
The same poll conducted in September had shown voters placing education behind the pandemic and the economy when asked about their top concerns — suggesting the issue of schools, in the final month of the race, eclipsed other issues on which McAuliffe performed better with voters.
That shift from September also suggested Youngkin’s relentless focus on education elevated it from a discussion point to the decisive factor that brought centrist voters into his column.
In September, the Washington Post/Schar School poll gave him an 8-point advantage with independent likely voters. By late October, when education had risen to become the top issue in the race, Youngkin’s advantage with independent likely voters had grown to 18 points.
Exit surveys suggested Youngkin did come away with a significant share of the independent vote on Tuesday and that he dominated among voters that cited education as the top factor in deciding their vote.
McAuliffe spent months attempting to define his opponent as a Trump acolyte whose candidacy harnessed the same destructive forces behind the Jan. 6 riots at the Capitol.
Several of his ads featured the same soundbite of Youngkin from a radio interview in May, during which Youngkin said the former president “represents so much of why I’m running” — one of the rare instances the Republican candidate embraced Trump directly.
As he tried to nationalize the race, McAuliffe relied on a rotating coterie of high-profile Democrats who traveled to the Old Dominion and amplified that message in the race’s waning days.
For example, President Joe Biden said Trump’s name 24 times during a campaign appearance on McAuliffe’s behalf last week.
Biden said Youngkin’s name just twice, and only when quoting a Washington Post editorial about him.
But Youngkin proved adept at wiggling out of the Trump frame in which McAuliffe tried to place him.
The Republican candidate rarely mentioned Trump on the trail, and he studiously avoided appearing with the former president throughout the race.
Clad daily in a fleece vest and amiable smile, Youngkin refused to play the role of right-wing ideologue. He largely steered clear of culture war flashpoints until the last stretch of the race — and even when he dove into the emotionally fraught issue of schools, he spoke about them in the language of a centrist.
And the political landscape for Democrats shifted dramatically in the months since McAuliffe decided to adopt the national party’s platform as his campaign’s lodestar.
Biden’s approval rating sat at 43% nationally on Election Day, while his disapproval rating had climbed to 51%, according to the RealClearPolitics average of polling.
The day McAuliffe clinched the Democratic nomination for governor, Biden’s average approval rating was 53.6%, putting him well above water with a disapproval rating of 41.4%, according to the same polling average.
In other words, McAuliffe began a campaign focused on the national politics of a party whose leader was broadly popular.
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But he didn’t adjust his strategy when the contours of the race shifted against his favor due to Biden’s plummeting popularity and Democrats’ struggles to get any of their legislative priorities over the finish line.
Democrats will likely reevaluate their approach to a race that slipped away from them in the last month despite their laser focus on an issue that had previously delivered them victories: opposition to Trump and Republicans they’d successfully characterized as radicals in the past.
