Republicans have won a statewide election in Virginia for the first time in 12 years, with Glenn Youngkin leading a GOP sweep, a year after Joe Biden had won the Commonwealth by double-digits.
Youngkin, a hedge fund multimillionaire, defeated former governor Terry McAuliffe by 85,000 votes from among the more than 3.2 million cast, in the process carrying Winsome Sears and Jason Miyares across the finish line with him, in results that trickled in Tuesday night and into Wednesday morning.
The Republican sweep had been in the works in recent weeks in a cycle that had begun, as past years’ cycles had in Virginia, with Democrats as the heavy favorites.
McAuliffe had won a June primary with more than 60 percent of the vote, seemingly unifying a party that had been at risk of being divided between moderates who backed McAuliffe and progressives who had split between a pair of African-American women, Jennifer Carroll Foy and Jennifer McClellan.
McAuliffe, though, would never recapture the magic of the primary season, forced to tread uphill as Democrats in D.C. couldn’t get out of their own way.
Moderates and progressives in the nation’s capital are still dithering over the basics of an infrastructure bill that should have been low-hanging fruit politically, showcasing a classic Democratic weakness dating back a generation now – a fundamental inability to do anything of substance, other than pass a watered-down healthcare reform bill, modeled after something that came out of conservative think tanks in the 1990s, when they have the majority in Congress and the White House.
That, and Biden’s disastrous unilateral withdrawal from Afghanistan, and another COVID surge – fueled, yes, largely by Republican partisans avoiding vaccination shots allowing the virus to continue to spread and strengthen – were headwind for McAuliffe.
McAuliffe then stepped on his own, you know, nether regions, most notably when he dismissed the role that parents should play in determining public school curriculums, ceding the education issue that has historically been the province of Democrats to Youngkin, who took the ball, ran with it, then risked getting an unsportsmanlike penalty flag for excessive celebration, taunting, possible targeting, though, you couldn’t blame him.
Turnout was up substantially – with 600,000 more votes cast in the 2021 cycle compared to four years ago, when Democrat Ralph Northam defeated Republican Ed Gillespie with 54 percent of the vote, and 1.4 million raw votes on his ledger.
With a relative handful of votes still to be counted in the 2021 election, McAuliffe actually outperformed Northam in terms of raw votes, by about 150,000 votes, but while he still ran strong in vote-rich Northern Virginia, his margins there were down slightly.
Fairfax County, for instance, went to McAuliffe by a 116,000-vote margin, down from the 138,000-vote margin for Northam in 2017. Loudoun County also narrowed, from a 23,000-vote margin in favor of Northam to a 17,000-vote McAuliffe win.
Chesterfield County, in the Richmond suburbs, went to Youngkin by 14,000 votes, a year after Biden had won the county by 13,000 votes.
A few thousand votes here, another few thousand votes there, and then, the areas south and west, traditionally Republican, by large margins, went for Youngkin by even larger margins.
Augusta County, for instance, which had given Gillespie an 11,000-vote win over Northam in 2017, went to Youngkin by 19,000 votes. Neighboring Rockingham County had gone to Gillespie by a similar 11,000-vote margin four years ago; in the 2021 cycle, Youngkin took Rockingham by 16,000 votes.
The narrative heading into Election Day was that Republicans were energized, Democrats weren’t, that Youngkin could win by a substantial margin.
In the end, Youngkin won by 2.7 percent, not a landslide, by any accounting.
As noted, McAuliffe got more votes than Northam did four years ago, so, it wasn’t lack of enthusiasm from Democrats.
We underestimated the enthusiasm of Republicans, who boosted Youngkin by more than half a million votes over what Gillespie got back in 2017.
Seems that Republicans were as energized by wanting a light at the end of the tunnel from two years of COVID restrictions from a preachy, do as I say, not as I do Northam as Democrats were in 2020 for wanting an end to four years of the 24/7 inanity of Donald Trump.
Making the real winner, and still undefeated, now, through two cycles, COVID, which unseated Trump, and now has unseated Virginia Democrats – and put Biden and congressional Democrats, who will no doubt continue to be unable to get anything of consequence done, on notice for the 2022 midterms.
Story by Chris Graham
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