The Democratic Party was not sending its best in Virginia. In a wipeout, Virginia voters ushered out the old guard for some fresh Republican faces.
Gone will be former Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe, who ran a terrible campaign focused on the previous president and on telling parents they shouldn’t be involved in their children’s education. He was running to replace Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam, who made excuses for infanticide and still hasn’t said whether he was the one in his yearbook photo wearing blackface or wearing the Ku Klux Klan hood.
Gov.-elect Glenn Youngkin was a political newcomer who ran a campaign carefully focused on local Virginia issues. But he wasn’t the only Republican success story, and McAuliffe and Northam aren’t the only Democrats that Virginians have resoundingly rejected.
Gone too will be Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax. Fairfax had been accused of sexual assault in early 2019 and went on to compare his situation with that of Emmett Till, who was lynched in Mississippi in 1995. Replacing him is Winsome Sears, the first black woman to be elected statewide in Virginia, who defeated Democratic challenger Hala Ayala.
And then there is the attorney general’s race. Mark Herring, who admitted to wearing blackface around the same time Northam’s and Fairfax’s scandals broke, is well on his way to losing as well. Republican challenger Jason Miyares, who would become the state’s first Latino attorney general, leads by more than 45,000 votes with over 95% of the vote reported.
The collection of failures running Virginia managed to lose a state that had moved considerably toward the Democratic Party and was already considered a reliably blue state. In their place, Virginians elected a political newcomer and a black woman Marine veteran born in Jamaica. Now, they are poised to add the son of a Cuban refugee to the list.
It isn’t just an indictment of President Joe Biden or national Democrats. This was a rejection of the people that the Virginia Democratic Party had put in charge in a state that hadn’t elected a Republican statewide since 2009. Northam, McAuliffe, Fairfax, and Herring have been handed a clear referendum on themselves and their record of governance.
