Hope, haplessness at polls

Voters in Little Rock had a positive choice Tuesday. Virginia voters … not so much. And New Jersey voters had more of a choice than we knew.

Little Rock made that positive choice, by 3 to 1. Its voters put a long-overdue bounce in the step of their public schools, which have been beleaguered too long.

Virginia’s voting outcome in a governor’s race remained uncertain at this writing. But it should have been clear and settled rather than heading the way it appeared to be heading, meaning narrowly Republican.

Virginia is blue, or has been reliably. Its senators are Democrats. It votes reliably blue for president.

Yet Joe Biden and congressional Democrats have been busy lately making Virginians (and many of the rest of us) weary of being fed incompetence after we rallied for our country to purge the existential threat of madness.

Weariness holds down partisan votes. The scent of weariness motivates the other side.

Meantime, nobody had been paying attention to New Jersey, but, all of a sudden, incumbent Democratic governor Phil Murphy was trailing narrowly late in vote-counting.

All you could say for sure was that Democrats had blown it.

But, first, the hopeful local news: The lone ballot issue in Little Rock was a proposal not to raise the city school district’s debt millage levy, but extend it at its current level by 19 years to provide $300 million in refinancing cash to attend to maintenance and facilities needs in the long-embattled, widely dilapidated but possibly reviving Little Rock schools.

The proposal was to pay the same tax and yet get more money to rebuild a sinking Cloverdale school and erect an overdue public high school in west Little Rock, among many other projects.

Voters turned down this very financing proposal—though designated proceeds uses varied—in 2017 and 2020. They did so mainly out of pique that the state had taken over the district and done nothing much for it.

This time, the state had given the district back. A new locally elected school board spanning all sections of the city had voted 8-0 to refer the millage proposal. Neighborhood organizations endorsed it.

About the only opposition I saw was an editorial in this paper.

But if Little Rock couldn’t win approval for this plan at this point— same taxes for a west Little Rock high school— one would have to wonder anew whither public schools in the city.

Polls closed at 7:30 p.m. A quick dump of early votes a minute later showed 1,099 votes for the proposal and 392 against. Cautious celebration began for public-school advocates at the Hill Station beer garden in Hillcrest.

Nearly three hours later, the unofficial final tally: 5,736 voters favored the school millage extension and 1,866 opposed it. A bounce in the step, indeed.

So, back to Virginia, to news hopeful for Republicans and perhaps for Donald Trump: Voters there favored Biden by 54-44 over Trump 12 months ago. But exit polls Tuesday showed Biden with a 56 percent disapproval rating and that 53 of respondents believed the Democrats to be “too liberal.”

The problem for Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe was three-pronged: The first was that he was not a particularly compelling candidate who mainly tried to tie Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin to Trump, from whom Youngkin kept a smartly safe distance. The second was that Democrats were dispirited by their own party nationally and in-state. The third was that Youngkin, needing to seize energy, motivation and momentum, found a magic issue by spreading the vast overstatement—and that’s to understate—that he needed to become governor to save the state’s white schoolchildren from being taught by evil Democratic teachers that the nation was bad because of its racist history.

It’s called playing the race card. It’s also called a dogwhistle. One pundit called Youngkin’s strong vote a sign of “white backlash” in America.

It invokes the dreaded “critical race theory,” which is a college post-graduate field of legal study having nothing to do with public-school history teaching. But it works well to stoke fears and resentments of misinformed white conservatives, who can be determinative even in a blue state if inept Democrats are blundering the energy out of their voters.

And that’s precisely what they were doing with their impasse over spending large amounts of money for wish lists.

If they’d passed the infrastructure bill a couple of months ago, rather than hold it hostage to Bernie Sanders’ hopes and dreams, they’d have had bipartisan success to boast of. McAuliffe would have had something of Democratic value to run on, rather than a Democratic burden to carry.

Then, as a bad candidate on his own, McAuliffe managed to compound the effectiveness of the Republicans’ race card by saying in a debate—in a broader context that never gets made—that he didn’t want parents telling schools what to teach.

And, at this hour, New Jersey threatened to be the worst news of all for Democrats.

So, I’ll leave you with this: A man asked openly on social media on Tuesday what Republicans stood for while Democrats fought among themselves about big ideas and big programs.

I decided to answer him: Republicans stand for finding things they can exploit against Democrats.

Democrats stand for making that easy for them.