No sudden Virginia shift
It seems a long time ago, but 2021 is the year Virginia became the first former Confederate state to abolish the death penalty.
That, along with a decade of Democrats shutting out Republicans in statewide elections, prompted many media pundits to proclaim Virginia as solidly, perhaps permanently, blue.
The November elections disproved that assessment.
It is tempting to read the outcome of a single election cycle as transformative or at least having some lasting meaning for the status of the major political parties. Just as much was made of Virginia’s transition from red to blue, many observers now look to the 2021 Virginia election as signaling a new political reality in the commonwealth. Yet, had Democratic former Gov. Terry McAuliffe not uttered those fateful 12 words in the Northern Virginia Chamber of Commerce/ Schar School debate, analysts might instead be interpreting the outcome in the context of a long Democratic trend with no end in sight.
The Republican sweep of the offices of governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general and the GOP winning a majority in the House of Delegates show that Virginia is politically in the mainstream of American politics, a state dominated by moderates who punish perceived excesses toward the left or the right.
From 2012 through the 2020 election, the electoral muscle of Virginia’s slightly left-ofcenter suburbs, mostly surrounding Washington and Richmond and in Hampton Roads, favored Democrats over the GOP and its increasingly strident brand of conservatism. That was never truer than the four years when Donald Trump was in the spotlight, either as a Republican candidate or as president, a period that culminated in his 10-percentage-point defeat at Democrat Joe Biden’s hands in 2020.
Republicans were in a tailspin in Virginia at the start of 2021 from a fresh electoral defeat worsened by the Jan. 6 pro-Trump siege at the U.S. Capitol. Since the 2013 election, the GOP had held no statewide elective office in the commonwealth. Democrats have owned both U.S. Senate seats since 2009 and won a majority of Virginia’s U.S. House seats in 2018. The 2019 legislative elections gave the Democrats state Senate and House majorities for the first time since 1999.
The last time Democrats enjoyed such wall-towall power in Virginia was the late 1960s, before the state’s first elected Republican governor, Linwood Holton, broke their stranglehold.
This time, the Democrats’ dominance was fleeting because Republicans turned out last month in unprecedented numbers and because suburbanites who had leaned Democratic were unimpressed with what they saw from the party and wanted change.
It’s a stretch to say that Virginia is now right of the political center because of one election. Every election is different, with campaigns litigated over ever-changing social, economic and governmental situations.
In 2020, as with the three preceding years, Trump’s low esteem in Virginia’s educated, affluent suburbs that are closely tied economically to the federal government galvanized voters in support of Democrats.
A year later, however, with Trump out of office if not out of sight, with Biden’s job-approval ratings dropping over his domestic policy agenda stalemated in a Democratic Congress and a foreign policy debacle in Afghanistan, and with Virginia Democrats swiftly and aggressively enacting progressive legislation, voters became uneasy.
Republicans read the tea leaves correctly, nominated a fresh face to lead a diverse ticket and made their case for change that addressed Virginians’ real-life concerns. McAuliffe unwittingly aided their cause, sticking with an inflexible strategy of claiming GOP nominee Glenn Youngkin was a Trump proxy at the expense of touting Democratic achievements and his own popular policy proposals.
Largely on the potent and timely GOP arguments over who controls local public-school policy, the promise of tax cuts amid rampant inflation and support for law enforcement after a year of sometimes violent unrest, the GOP influenced enough suburban voters to suppress the Democrats’ inherent advantages in suburban and exurban localities.
Sometimes an election outcome, especially a close one, results primarily from the idiosyncrasies of the candidates’ campaigns, their strategies, short-term shifting in the public focus on issues that drive voting and events over which the candidates and parties have no control.
There is no evidence in public opinion or exit polling that in 2021 Virginia suddenly shifted right. Virginia started the year as a competitive two-party state and ended 2021 the same, although with a different party mostly in control of the levers of power.