I’ll give a long time Virginian’s perspective on it, move along if you don’t want the over-wordy version.
I’ve mentioned it elsewhere, but to give some background, I had been a Republican since I was 18. While my military career took me away from Virginia for years at a time, it’s always been “home.” I’ve been a precinct captain, I’ve been an elected (by the party) member of the county executive committee previously, and I served one term on a Virginia school board (I won’t be specific as to location) in the mid-1990s. I was involved in local fundraising, canvassing etc. I was a party Republican, more so than most. With the Tea Party wave, I started distancing myself from many “active” party activities, but still generally donated and supported the party–the defeat of one of our local Congressmen, Eric Cantor by a crazy Tea Party candidate in the primaries, was when I started to move further away from the party. I was a Romney voter in 2012, and voted for some Republicans in local elections after that, but since 2015 or so I have largely left the party entirely. My politics will never be in line with those of the Dems, but the GOP represents a threat to everything America is supposed to stand for and everything I believed in for my entire life–I do not believe I will ever cast a vote for a Republican for any office for the rest of my life.
As to OP, I think you are right to be worried. If I had to place a bet, I believe Youngkin will win by a few points and the Republicans will end up controlling both houses of the General Assembly. In Virginia, I think you can get down from the ledge. Why? Because this state has changed and is changing, massively. All of our growth is in counties where the ideas of Republicanism are just too off putting. The areas where the Republicans are strongest are decaying, literally decaying away. We started off with a very rural, conservative based demographic going back many decades (oddly that used to mean Democratic when I was growing up, the Virginia Democratic party had a lock on rural Virginia until the 90s when the final gasps of Southern Democrats were being heard); so where we are now is Democrats are ascendant and will be ascendant, but because of the large built in advantage to more conservative ideology, it’s still close enough that a bad cycle for Democrats with a weak Democrat candidate and a strong Republican candidate are enough that the GOP is going to win, I think they’ll basically clean up tonight.
But in 2 years, the conditions will be even worse for the GOP. Two years after that, even worse. Two years after that, even worse. The fears that the GOP is going to “gerrymander a permanent majority” are not real, we’ve done away with partisan gerrymandering and our maps for the next 10 years will be drawn by the State Supreme Court. By the time the GOP gets a chance at gerrymandering Virginia again–which would require them actually reversing State law, then holding on to the Assembly with the non-Gerrymandered maps until the next Census. I just don’t see it, again, every two years the State is going to get worse and worse for them. We aren’t Florida, Pennsylvania, or Michigan where demographics suggest probably long-term brutal fights, we’re a state that is turning blue rapidly. Northern Virginia is the engine, and it’s growing fast, and nothing any Republican in the State does can change that.
Now that being said, if we want to talk nationally–I think you need to get back up onto the ledge. Why? Because Youngkin - McAuliffe, and I say this as a politically experienced supporter of the Dems, but an “outsider”, this match up represents everything wrong with the Democratic party and why, despite generally having the support of less than 50% of the voters, the Republicans have been so easily able to take your lunch so often. It’s right for Dems to raise issues like gerrymandering and how unfair the Senate is, but there’s a lot of elections you’d actually have won in spite of that if you guys knew how to run campaigns.
Republicans run issues-based campaigns that fire up their voters. Democrats largely run milquetoast campaigns that are designed to…not offend any part of the Democratic coalition. Republican candidates often are just simply more decisive, they pick issues that might offend part of the GOP base–that’s why they lost voters like me, but they gamble that most Republicans will stay loyal–and they do. Democrats are horrible at firing people up. Most Democratic big wins since Clinton have seemed to largely come down to getting lucky because the country is unhappy with Republican rule and is willing to embrace boring technocratic Democrat candidates. But anytime the country isn’t in that “political mood” you guys get your asses kicked, because you just don’t seem to know how to run political campaigns.
Now I actually know the people running a lot of these campaigns for the Dems are not idiots and do actually know how to run campaigns. I think the issue is the culture of the party has moved into this “offend no one” technocratic direction, that most Democrats are afraid to run bold campaigns because it is seen as being “divisive” in the party. I think Democrats need to find a way out of that puzzle box.
By the way, remember how I said Republicans run issues-based campaigns? The typical Dem response is “BUT THEIR ISSUES ARE BULLSHIT.” Take Virginia for example–nothing remotely like CRT appears on any official curriculum in any school district in the commonwealth. No textbooks or official reading list in any district has any hint of CRT to it either. That does not matter. There are 3.2 million teachers in America, the typical way teaching works is the State sets curriculum guidelines, the School Board oversees local administration and some high-level contractual decisions, and sometimes a little bit of curriculum (at least when I was on a board, we didn’t influence curriculum that much), and teachers follow it. However just following the curriculum is not all teachers do. Teachers are in these classrooms every school day every year, with all their students. The system is not set up to micromanage what the teachers do every minute of their day, and that’s IMO a good thing. But what it does mean, is out of those 3.2m teachers, Fox News and The Gateway Pundit and Breitbart, are absolutely going to find lefty teachers, either having discussions or maybe doing readings “outside the curriculum” that will be on racial issues that annoy or piss off white parents with their tenor or tone.
I’ve actually followed it fairly closely, out of the 3.2m American teachers, I think the far right has gotten less than 30 genuinely good tales of this. So this is pretty fucking rare. But when Fox News runs over 100 hours of content on those couple dozen outliers, it has a huge impact. When Breitbart runs articles about it every day, it has a huge impact. When conservative influencers Tweet about it every day it has a huge impact. Now, the reality is teachers have always taught “off curriculum” and most of the time this is actually independence we want our good teachers to have, and even many of the examples the far right has found, frankly aren’t actually THAT bad if you dig into them.
But people won’t dig into them, if you’re explaining yourself, you’ve already lost.
I don’t run political campaigns, I’m not an expert. I could be full of shit. But to me the way you fight disinformation like that is not by countering it. Because you can’t win by explaining. How do Republicans usually handle it when they are being attacked on issues that aren’t good for Republicans? They ignore the issue and counter attack on something else. Maybe that isn’t a panacea, but what I can say absolutely, never, never works is just saying "that’s not a real issue, it’s just Republican propaganda. You guys remember that propaganda works right? That’s why it was invented and why it’s still used. When someone is hitting you with effective propaganda the only defense is to punch them in the mouth, and that means hitting them with something worse, find something to fire up your base, find something to drive a wedge between the other side’s voters etc.
The typical Democratic game plan here does not work.
My prediction is that when Youngkin wins, the CRT playbook will be exported around the entire country in 2022, and if Democrats don’t learn this lesson, they are going to lose close races they otherwise could have won. I think the educated white population is “weak” for the GOP more so than it has ever been, and looks to probably get weaker over time, but it’s not “out of reach” for the GOP…not yet, so stuff like this, that makes suburban parents feel like their kids are being indoctrinated with weird, anti-white racist stuff, it’s going to cost you votes. You need to learn how to fight against this stuff, the country needs a non-Republican party that actually knows how to campaign.