What does Democrats losing in Virginia mean for Biden? Our panel responds
Ben Davis: ‘Democrats: pass your agenda now. You won’t have another chance’ Democrats have just lost an enormous amount of ground since dominating Virginia during the Trump era. The first and most important takeaway of the governor’s race is that this is normal. Without a major crisis like 9/11, the party in power will always lose ground in elections like this. It’s as close to an ironclad law as there is.
Beware of any takes that blame the specter of critical race theory or masks mandates. Can you remember what specific niche issues animated Democrats in 2017-18 or Republicans in 2009-10 beyond a broad dislike of the president? Didn’t think so.
This result is not really about turnout, either. Turnout was, by all accounts, quite robust, including among Democrats who voted in their victory in 2017. There is a real cohort of voters who switch parties during off-year and midterm elections. The Republicans won many Obama voters in 2009-2010, and Democrats won many Trump voters in 2017-18. Republicans doubtless won many Biden voters today. Indeed, exit polls show Glenn Youngkin won a solid 18% of voters who have an unfavorable opinion of Trump.
What does this all mean? Well, Democrats will most likely lose the midterms without an unprecedented event, because that is what happens to most governing parties almost every time. Since the second world war, the president’s party has gained seats in the midterms only during the Clinton impeachment and after 9/11. They can’t tinker with policy to jujitsu out of what’s coming. The moderates decimating the Democratic agenda are goners either way. The best way forward is to pass good, lasting policy that improves people’s lives and will build long-term support for the party and its objectives.
Democrats didn’t understand this in 2009, neutering Obamacare in an ill-fated attempt to hold their seats. Republicans under Trump understood it, passing their massive tax cuts and dutifully marching into the electoral thresher. Democrats need not lose sleep over critical racial theory: just pass the agenda. There won’t be another chance.
Ben Davis works in political data in Washington DC
Steve Phillips: ‘Democrats need a better answer to racial fears being stoked’
On Tuesday, we saw the limits of the default Democratic strategy of trying to ignore and change the subject from systemic racism and white nationalism. Joy Reid said it best early on election night: “The Democratic party has not developed the reflex of defending black voters. They don’t know how to openly defend them because they’re so afraid of offending that suburban white voter who might be uncomfortable on race issues.”
Republican Glenn Youngkin found a powerful coded way to stoke white racial fears and anxiety with his attacks on critical race theory. Democratic Terry McAuliffe refused to forcefully refute the racist message and thereby let white voters off the hook. All this in the state where slavery started and the Confederacy based its capital.
As a result, Youngkin’s call to arms to white people resonated, leading to large turnout of white voters and, critically, improved vote share in the suburbs.
Republicans are going to certainly turbocharge this strategy in 2022, and Democrats better have an answer. They need to sound the alarm to voters of color in ways that stoke a sense of urgency, and they need to force white voters to face the reality of racism and take a stand – not try to change the subject. McAuliffe tried that, and failed. Miserably.
Steve Phillips is the founder of Democracy in Color and author of Brown is the New White: How the Demographic Revolution Has Created a New American Majority
Geoffrey Kabaservice: ‘Democrats should have addressed concerns’
For months I’ve been predicting a win by Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin, largely because of the reactions I’ve seen among my moderateleaning, college-educated friends in the northern Virginia suburbs, where I lived for more than a decade.
These are socially tolerant, fiscally conservative people who in the past had often voted for moderate Republicans but were horrified by Trump’s racism and authoritarianism. Swing voters in this category were such a crucial bloc that their defection from the Republicans gave Joe Biden a 10 percentage-point win in Virginia and flipped both houses of the state legislature to Democrats in 2020.
But these same people have been filling my inbox with agonized stories about school administrators and teachers pushing a contentious racialized ideology on their children – which in many cases they were able to witness in person as classes moved online during the pandemic.
This ideology wasn’t critical race theory per se, in the sense that students weren’t reading original CRT texts. But after the George Floyd protests of last year, the curriculum undeniably became infused not only with a greater emphasis on America’s troubled racial history – which most of my suburban friends agreed was overdue – but also with CRT-influenced anti-racism pedagogy.
Democrats should have addressed parental concerns over these educational issues openly and honestly. Instead they pretended that nothing resembling CRT was being taught in the schools while also claiming that anyone objecting to the new progressive pedagogy was a white supremacist.
The Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe – who, as a former moderate, should have appreciated the dangers of indulging such progressive hubris – instead hammered home the message that “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”
Parties that scorn the voters who give them their majorities soon return to the minority. Education rose to become the number one issue in the Virginia gubernatorial election because of this sort of Democratic gaslighting, which reinforced voter doubts over issues like inflation and Democratic infighting on Capitol Hill.
Personally, I wish my suburban friends were more concerned about Youngkin’s two-faced attempts to distance himself from Trump’s big lie about a stolen election while indulging it with his call to root out non-existent fraud in Virginia’s voting machines. But the Virginia election outcome is likely to show that if Democrats continue to alienate swing voters by pushing unpopular progressive ideology, imagining that revulsion against Trump gives them license to do whatever they want, they will be wiped out in 2022 and beyond.
Geoffrey Kabaservice is the director of political studies at the Niskanen Center in Washington DC and the author of Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party
Meaghan Winter: ‘Democrats have been reactive’
It’s Republicans over-performing in the house of delegates races that will probably panic Democratic organizers across the country. Since 2019, when Democrats flipped control of the Virginia legislature for the first time in 25 years, the state has been a beacon for progressives nationwide. Democratic state lawmakers have enacted ambitious legislation including clean energy standards, voting protections and minimum wage increases. While red state legislatures have gone to new extremes, Virginia has been a counterweight, proof that it’s possible for Democrats to win on the state level with a progressive platform.
There’s a danger that these losses will be seen as proof that this is no longer the case. And that would be premature. After the 2020 elections, when Democrats lost state races nationwide, I heard from progressive organizers in places like Florida and Michigan that their donors and volunteers had lost faith. That fits a pattern: for decades, Republicans and conservatives have invested on the local level for the long term, and Democrats have been reactive, hurling resources and attention into projects that they abandon after losing an election cycle or two.
But as red state legislatures veer into uncharted territory, including possible election subversion, we cannot afford to decide the future is foregone: in 2022, there will be 36 gubernatorial and hundreds of state legislative races on the ballot, and with the supreme court stacked in their favor, Republicans are pushing their agenda through the states. Democrats must fight back hard if they want to win.
Meaghan Winter is a freelance magazine writer and author of the book All Politics is Local: Why Progressives Must Fight for the States
Cliff Albright: ‘Racism was the deciding factor’
When analyzing the Virginia gubernatorial race, there will be a lot of discussion about how historical trends affected the election results. In Virginia, history has proven unkind to gubernatorial candidates from the same party as the presidential victor in the prior year. On top of that, Terry McAuliffe was attempting to make history by becoming the first person in almost 50 years to be elected to a second term, and the first to do so without switching parties.
But at the end of the day, it was a different kind of history that proved to be the deciding factor. In the state that served as the capital of the Confederacy during the civil war, the history of racism – how we talk about race in our schools and how race is weaponized in political campaigns – was the deciding factor.
Attacks against teaching critical race theory in public schools have swept the country, in spite of the fact that no such teaching takes place in any K-12 schools, whether in Virginia or anywhere else. But that did not stop the Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin from making CRT a major issue in his campaign.
In doing so, he catered to the worst fears and biases among white Virginians. The strategy also allowed Youngkin to build on and remain connected to Trumpism, even as he tried to avoid having Trump campaign in the state. Youngkin communicated that he would oppose racial justice as firmly as Trump, but without as many racist tweets and compliments for hate groups like the Proud Boys.
Youngkin’s strategy worked, particularly with white women. As NBC exit polls suggest, although white women voted narrowly for Biden over Trump 50% to 49% in 2020, they voted for Youngkin over McAuliffe 57% to 43%. This 15-point swing was even more dramatic among white women without a college education; among that demographic their support for the Republican candidate went from a 12-point margin in 2020 (56% to 44%) to an astounding 50-point margin last night (75% to 25%).
But what may be more damaging than the Republican party’s willingness to manipulate racism within its electoral base is the failure of the Democratic party to acknowledge that such racism exists in the electorate. McAuliffe’s response was to attach Youngkin to Trump, but doing so ignored the fact that a large segment of the Virginia electorate actually agrees with Trump on racial issues, even if they won’t go as far as calling white supremacists with tiki torches “very fine people”.
Democrats’ inability or unwillingness to address race will inevitably prevent them from accurately analyzing why McAuliffe lost, which in turn will lead to faulty strategies during the 2022 midterm elections. The shortsighted commentary has already begun, as some pundits are focusing more on the Democratic Congress’s failure to pass an infrastructure bill.
These explanations are reminiscent of the misguided analysis after the 2016 presidential election – analysis that focused on “white economic anxiety” rather than confronting evidence of white racial anxiety. If Democrats remain in denial about what they’re up against, and if they do not find a way to deal with the oncoming wave of CRT campaigning, they are guaranteed to lose their majorities in both chambers of Congress.
Cliff Albright is a cofounder of Black Voters Matter Fund