Glenn Youngkin’s triumph in the Virginia governor’s race, turning the state red after its 12 years deep blue, is a triple defeat for the Democrats — a 3D catastrophe.
It was, to deal first with the small fry, a defeat for Terry McAuliffe and his cheap, revolting, and characteristic demagoguery. He sought to cast Youngkin as a white supremacist by, for example, saying his opposition to critical race theory was a racist “dog whistle.” He went along, until it was too embarrassing even for him, with the Lincoln Project’s sickening false-flag stunt sending Democratic workers with tiki torches to stand like some sort of fascist bodyguards next to Youngkin’s campaign bus.
Virginia voters were having none of it. They could see Youngkin dressed in his sheep’s clothing — he was famous for his fleece, for goodness’s sake — but they knew very well it did not conceal a wolf. He didn’t frighten them, and they saw what a ridiculous stretch it was for McAuliffe to suggest such a thing.
The Virginia defeat was, secondly, a crushing repudiation of President Joe Biden by voters already up to here in frustration at his incompetence just across the Potomac River in Washington, D.C. Not just his incompetence, but also his dishonesty, for he has governed as a socialist sock puppet after he ran as a centrist who’d stand up to Sen. Bernie Sanders and the Squad rather than submit willingly to them.
Biden put the remnants of his credibility (already in tatters after just nine months in office) on the line for McAuliffe and was even willing to add his voice to the contemptible chorus suggesting Youngkin was an extremist. Voters who had helped put Biden in office with a limited mandate rather than a blank check for radicalism turned against him, allowing Youngkin not just to roll up higher margins than former President Donald Trump in rural Virginia but also to cut deeply into the Democrats’ margin in the squishy suburbs.
Virginia was not merely or primarily a defeat either for McAuliffe or for Biden. It was, more importantly than those stinging personal rebukes, a massive public recognition and voter repudiation of what the Democratic Party as a whole has become. The Virginia campaign gained national media attention and, in doing so, helped the scales fall from voters’ eyes so they could clearly see the rampant Left in all its arrogant, bullying malignancy.
The catalytic issue was the indoctrination of children in schools, with hyperracialized and hypersexualized lessons and policies that had been revealed to parents when they tuned into their children’s Zoom classes. The abuses of educrats were exposed as never before, and parents were enraged and revolted.
What was the reaction? Youngkin took parents’ side and McAuliffe told them to get lost. As a final tin-eared campaign effort, the Democrat held a rally with Randi Weingarten, the teachers union boss and hated face of insouciant education officialdom who had dictated the unnecessary shutdown of schools. McAuliffe’s tag team with her was as near to a middle finger as any politician has given to the people whose votes he wished to win.
The Virginia parents’ rebellion revealed an adamantine truth about the Democratic Party — that it is not on the side of ordinary people and will indeed not even listen to them. It is uninterested to the point of disdain in their interests, concerns, and opinions. It has no democratic desire to respond to voters’ wishes but instead wants the plebs to shut up and do as they are told.
Youngkin ran a disciplined campaign with a state-level agenda, pushing tax cuts for Virginians and promising schools would be accountable to parents. The Democrat, by contrast, forgot that politics is local. Like his party, he nationalized the race, running against Trump and phantasmal white supremacy, and pushed ideological extremism.
Listening to voter concerns, respecting their opinions, and offering concrete policies is what real democracy is about. It’s about people making decisions for themselves on how and by whom they should be governed. Nationalizing all the issues, as McAuliffe and the Democrats did, is about driving forward an alien and unpopular ideological agenda.
With McAuliffe’s defeat, the last unlamented straggler of the Clinton coterie has, one hopes, been blasted off the political landscape. We can be grateful for that. And we can be grateful to McAuliffe himself for unwittingly laying his party’s soul so bare before voters’ baleful gaze.
It is an ugly sight. But it’s best to know what one is up against. So, let’s keep it in view as we proceed toward 2022 and 2024.
