As Tom noted below in this post, one of the main differences between the Democrats and the Republicans these days is that Democrats are sane and the GOP is not. Can there be any doubt that if the vote went the other way that all we would be hearing today would be shrill shrieks that the vote was rigged? Of course not.
Instead, the Democrats are rending their garments and retreating back to all their favored tropes (kitchen table issues! The hippies ruin everything!) Personally, I think it’s weird that all we’ve been hearing for months is how the out party is always more enthusiastic in mid-terms and that Democrats aren’t going be as excited without Trump on the ballot so I have to wonder why everyone is so surprised.
Dan Pfeiffer’s newsletter today seems pretty level-headed so I thought I’d share some pieces of it:
A Shock to the Suburban Coalition
Typically, the party in power loses off-year elections because their base is complacent or worn down by slow progress, and the other side is fired up. That’s not what happened last night; turnout was high on both sides. Youngkin won because he convinced enough Joe Biden and Ralph Northam voters to switch sides. Virginia is a state dominated by suburbs with a large college-educated population. These are the voters who moved strongly in the Democratic direction when Trump came on the scene. Youngkin won enough of those voters and he did it without sacrificing votes from Trump’s base. In Virginia at least, without Trump on the ballot, Republicans are winning back Romney-Clinton voters faster than Democrats are winning back Obama-Trump voters or finding new voters. If that trend holds, there is no math that gives Democrats the House, Senate, or White House. Figuring out how to win these voters back without depressing our base is job number one for the party. This goal doesn’t rely on turnout or persuasion. It relies on both.
A Daunting Democratic Communications Deficit
The way the race played out in Virginia is yet more evidence Republicans have a massive communications advantage. This advantage helped Youngkin in two ways. First, Youngkin made the teaching of Critical Race Theory a major talking point, which is impressive because it is a complete nonissue. A fake, Trumped-up controversy promoted by the Right-Wing media. There is not a single student being taught CRT anywhere in the world, let alone Virginia. Yet, Youngkin was able to make a fake issue very real to Virginia voters. In a Washington Post/Schar poll from before the election, education was Virginia voters’ number one concern. Youngkin led by nine among the voters who named education as their top priority. McAuliffe led them by more than 30 earlier in the race. CRT went straight from Fox News to the top of voters’ minds in Virginia. As Greg Sargent recently wrote:
Youngkin and his allies have transmitted some of their most visceral and hallucinogenic versions of the anti-CRT demagoguery straight to the base via right-wing media … Matt Gertz of Media Matters estimates that Fox News ran up to 100 segments on CRT in Virginia last spring, even though it isn’t taught in Virginia schools.
The Right-Wing is able to create an alternative reality and then offer solutions to fake problems that people believe are Democrats’ fault. CRT probably played less of a role than a lot of pundits suggest, but the fact that Youngkin was able to make it an issue should be a giant warning sign about what is to come in 2022.
Second, because the GOP has created a powerful, self-serving media infrastructure, Youngkin used the Right-Wing media to communicate his MAGA credentials to the base without offending the Independents and Trump-skeptical Republicans who gave Biden a ten-point victory last year.
Eric Kleefeld @EricKleefeld
@waltshaub @jbouie Youngkin went looking for votes with Seb Gorka — a man who openly cheered on the January 6 attack as it was happening. Seb Gorka, neo-Nazi-adjacent Trump lackey, gets Virginia gubernatorial candidate to come on his showVirginia Republican gubernatorial candidate criticized for appearing on far-right Sebastian Gorka’s radio show.dailydot.comYoungkin can be a fleece-wearing suburban dad/political outsider on local TV and a fully indoctrinated soldier in Trump’s army when he appears on Right Wing media. Democrats are still primarily relying on the traditional press to get our message out and we lack the firepower to make Youngkin pay a price for this duplicity. I have written before (and will write again) about how Democrats can solve this problem; but until we do, there will be more nights like last night.
Pass BBB/BIF Right Now
Twitter was ablaze with hot takes last night from people attributing the loss in Virginia to the mess in Congress. Some blamed Manchin and Sinema for slowing the process down. Others saw the loss as evidence Biden leaned too far Left. Some centrists wanted to hit pause on the process. I have yet to see a piece of evidence supporting any of these takes. I am skeptical the legislative impasse played a significant role in the race. It certainly didn’t depress Democratic turnout.
However, I think this unexpected loss should be a swift kick in everyone’s rear to get both bills passed ASAP. If the too-long debate hurt our chances in this election, it was likely because the missed deadlines, disagreements, and disappointments were fodder for a never-ending cycle of bad news for Democrats. Brokering compromises on Capitol Hill is a necessary part of the job for a president but it is a diminishing one. The public elects a president, but they tend to punish a prime minister.
The longer we delay, the longer the spotlight will linger on Democratic disarray and prevent us from making an argument for why Republicans cannot be allowed to sniff power again. Further debate and delay serve no purpose.
Youngkin’s “Trump Light” Act Will Be Difficult to Replicate
Before most of the networks even called the race, mainstream Republicans already deified Youngkin as their new savior. New York Times columnist Ross Douthat called on Youngkin to consider running for president. Prior to the vote counting, Axios called Youngkin the “prototype” for Republican candidates.
Sam Baker @sam_baker
Win or lose, Youngkin is the new prototype for GOP candidates Trump Light: Glenn Youngkin’s 5-step template for the GOP in swing statesThe Virginia race will have big echoes in the ’22 midterms and the ’24 presidential race.axios.comThere are many lessons to learn from Youngkin’s campaign, but I would pump the brakes on some of the immediate hagiography. His “Trump Light” act is going to be very hard for most Republicans to replicate. Youngkin is a legitimate political outsider who ran against a former governor and the ultimate political insider in a state where Democrats have controlled the governorship for 16 of the last 20 years. The vast majority of Republican candidates are politicians and MAGA media types who spent the last five years offering fealty to Trump. Pulling off Yongkin’s balancing act will be near impossible for the leading candidates in Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere.
Biden v. Trump
One billion pounds of digital ink (is that thing?) will be spent analyzing the role President Biden and former President Trump played in this race. None of those takes will wait for actual data and most of them will only confirm the pre-existing biases of the person offering the take. It is a fact: Joe Biden’s approval ratings are lower at this point than any other president in history’s approval ratings. Other than Trump’s numbers of course. There is a tendency in these situations to claim the unpopular president is dragging down their party, but that is a very simplistic view of how politics works. There are many factors that affect a president’s approval rating. Most of them are completely outside the president’s control. I am not arguing that better messaging, more success in Congress, or a less chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan would not have helped Biden’s current political standing. But it is just as likely the main forces (the pandemic and inflation) dragging down Biden are also dragging down Democrats across the country. There is a tendency for political punditry to make everything about the president. That is a mistake. We are not one speech or a cool event away from fixing this problem.
McAullife’s campaign tried to tie Yougkin to Trump in the most obvious ways possible. Maybe it was the wrong strategy or maybe it was just poorly executed. But Trump is going to be a factor in 2022 and likely to be on the ballot in 2024. Trump is absent from the conversation for all but the most engaged voters. He didn’t campaign in Virginia. He’s not on mainstream TV or on social media. Most voters are not thinking about Trump at all, let alone obsessing about his return to the political scene. That is going to change in 2022 when Trump hits the campaign trail in places like Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Democrats will need a message that warns about the looming danger of Trumpism without looking like we are obsessed with re-litigating the past.
Youngkin was able to keep Trump out of his race but I am very skeptical that he’s going to be controlled in that way for the mid-terms. And he most certainly will not be in 2024 if he’s on the ballot. The primary races for Republicans are going to be incredibly fraught and it’s highly doubtful they are going to nominate a whole bunch of Younkins with Trump pushing his freakshow. So there’s that.
I’ll just add that McAuliffe’s campaign against Trump was poorly executed and also that Democrats have never made it explicit enough that it isn’t just Trump, it’s the whole damned party and being a member of it and voting for anyone who takes that label after Trump is something any decent human should be ashamed of. Trump IS the GOP and the GOP is Trump.
I don’t know if the window is closed for that but I’d imagine we can expect that there will be a full-fledged retreat from the Democrats of running on anything but kitchen table issues for the mid-terms. It’s what they wanted to do anyway and it will probably be unsuccessful unless there is a huge turnaround in COVID and the economy over the next few months that makes the whole country so ecstatic that suburban moms stop obsessing over CRT.
Luckily for them Trump will be happy to make an ass of himself without their help and he’ll be much more present in the next year. A lot will depend upon whether or not the media makes some changes in the way they cover the Democrats. I’m not sanguine.
Some anecdotes from Virginia yesterday:
Along with a huge team of @postlocal reporters, I spent the day at the polls in Virginia.
I was in western Prince William. Most people I met voted for Youngkin.
I just got home & I’m going through my notebook, so here’s a thread of voters’ quotes about why they picked Youngkin.
As you probably know by now, Youngkin’s message that “parents should have a say” in schools resonated with a ton of voters.
“I kind of like the old style of school,” one stepdad of school students said. “I still believe in the American flag, the Pledge of Allegiance & God.”
A Latina mom who plans on sending her 4-year-old to private school to avoid public school education about race, which she believes motivates bullying: “Parents don’t really have a choice…. They are adding new things to history that children her age don’t really need to know.”
A Black dad who’s homeschooling two of his kids said his older son recently brought home an assignment on Abraham Lincoln that troubled him, though he couldn’t say why. “I’d like to not vote for the guy who said it’s not the parents’ responsibility to take care of their kids.”
One man supported Youngkin’s anti-abortion stance, saying he once conceived a child with a woman who chose an abortion. “I don’t know what my first child would have looked like because of a woman’s right to choose…. I want to be able to go to court & say ‘I want that baby.'”
Another voter said he opposes mask and vaccine requirements. “I’m forced to vote Republican, grudgingly. I don’t even like this guy,” he said, saying he supports abortion rights and finds Youngkin “self-righteous.” But: “I’m tired of the mandates.”
Originally tweeted by Julie Zauzmer Weil (@juliezweil) on November 3, 2021.
Yikes… The one about the man saying he wants to go to court to force a woman to give birth is just chilling. But it’s all chilling. The ones who are not simple authoritarian freaks are earnest in their concerns I’m sure, but they are being manipulated and lied to.
So last night shouldn’t be a big surprise although it’s always disappointing to lose close races. (And it’s always depressing watching the MSM dance on the Democrats’ graves with such glee.) But here we are.
Youngkin managed to keep Trump away from his campaign and the GOP and its propaganda machine leveraged parental concerns around school closings during COVID (and uninformed concerns around “woke” cultural influences) into a full-blown panic over Critical Race Theory among some Biden voters. And yes, the insufferable legislative back and forth probably turned Virginia voters off because they hear so much about Washington politics in their local media.
But that doesn’t explain the close New Jersey race so I think this is really just a reversion to pre-Trump polarization. The wingnuts are more wingnutty than ever and the the GOP moderates and Independent leaners went back to their usual positions, happy to pretend that Trump never happened.
Fortunately or unfortunately, Trump is still around and he’s going to be a much bigger presence in 2022 and will likely be the candidate in 2024. So I’m not convinced this is the harbinger of doom for the Dems that everyone thinks it is.
Here he is last night. A very happy boy, rushing to take credit:
