Republican Glenn Youngkin, a private equity magnate turned friendly sweater-vest campaign dad, defeated former Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe on Tuesday, leading by nearly three points when networks called the race. It’s Republicans’ first gubernatorial win in Virginia since 2009. This now makes it 11 out of the last 12 governor’s races in the state that the party not controlling the White House has won. (The lone exception was McAuliffe in 2013, who pulled off a squeaker against ideologue Ken Cuccinelli. So at least he has that.)
While there will be plenty of miscalculations for Democrats to pick over in the coming days and weeks, it’s that last statistic, about the out-party traditionally winning the Virginia gubernatorial race, that provides the architecture of McAuliffe’s loss.
This pattern is not a coincidence. One year after an election, the base voters of the party that just lost a presidential race are going to be pissed off, and wake up each morning dreaming of the next time they can vote against the president’s party. (There’s a critical addendum to this in Virginia’s case, too: Republicans had lost every statewide race for nearly a decade in a state they used to dominate. Each loss irritated them more! They were ready to go this time.) The president’s party’s base, meanwhile, can’t match that level of enthusiasm. The president, about whom everyone was so excited to elect the previous year, takes ownership of national problems and sags, or plummets, from their post-election high. This is also the basic structure of why the president’s party typically loses ground in midterm elections the following year. (Just wait!)
In this case, Democrats’ problems accumulated over the summer with a messy withdrawal from Afghanistan; the Delta variant, which brought a new, post-vaccine wave of the pandemic; and inflation and supply chain kinks that turned voters’ opinions of the economy sharply negative. As I pointed out earlier this week, an NBC News national poll from this weekend showed that only 22 percent of voters felt the country was on the right track, compared to 71 percent who said it was on the wrong track. Joe Biden’s average approval rating is 42 percent. I’m not sure which closely contested election Democrats expect to win when that’s the case.
Terry McAuliffe, a lifelong Democratic operative, is not a generational political talent. But Washington also didn’t give McAuliffe much material to work with. As I write, we are on month… 3… 4… 17?…of congressional Democrats saying they’ll pass a monumental pair of bills any day now. This week? Eh, might have to push it to next week. How does your December look? This meant McAuliffe had little-to-nothing to point toward as examples of what Democrats can get done if you just give them the chance.
So, McAuliffe basically ran on Trump. His opposition to Youngkin largely hinged on tying him to Trump. This will be treated in the punditry as a catastrophic mistake and extrapolated into broader conclusions about the futility of even bothering to mention Trump from now on. But such conclusions would be news to the Youngkin campaign, which worked strenuously, and oftentimes awkwardly, to keep its distance from Trump (who was eager to embrace Youngkin) and to keep General Election Youngkin sequestered from Primary Election Youngkin, when the latter said an awful lot of nice things about Trump and the need to ensure “election integrity.”
No state, with the exception of Pennsylvania, is more "We're not with the guy in DC, that asshole" than Virginia when it comes to governors, but it sure didn't help that Democrats still haven't passed the Build Back Better plan or the Senate infrastructure bill after talking about it for over a year, and then winning the White House and both chambers of Congress.
Yes, I know the problem is Manchin, Sinema, and the filibuster. Yes, the Democrats are still being jerked around by the pair. Yes, it's hurting the Democrats as a whole, making them look comically ineffective. That wasn't Terry McAuliffe's fault at all.
And in particular, McAuliffe was completely undone by non-college White voters, who made up 36% of the electorate.
And this is with the Biden-passed stimulus and child tax credit putting thousands in the pockets of working-class white parents, and with Northam at the state level legalizing weed, ending the death penalty, and restoring voting rights to 70,000 people.
White voters simply reverted to the Southern state norm, voting overwhelmingly Republican. It wasn't voter suppression in Virginia, Democrats in the state made it easier to vote than in 2020 and expanded early voting. Turnout for an off-year governor's contest was a record. McAuliffe won college-educated white voters by 6. He lost non-college white voters by 52.
The people who showed up were overwhelmingly white, and they voted overwhelmingly for Youngkin.
Dems continue to ignore GOP propaganda at their own peril. Trumpism without Trump wins. If they can't find a solution to at least stay closer than a 50-point loss with non-college white voters, it's going to be ugly from here.
And Biden's popularity in the low 40's isn't helping. At all.
Vote like your country depends on it, because it does.
