Joe Biden won Virginia in 2020 by 500,000 votes. I doubt even Youngkin could find that much fraud, no matter how full of shit he is. (And he is full of shit.)
Who said parents shoild be the sole entity? Here’s what McCauliffe said:
"I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”
In a later interview he was gven an opportinity to clarify. He responded, “Listen, we have a board of ed working with the local school boards to determine the curriculum for our schools. You don’t want parents coming in in every different school jurisdiction saying, ‘This is what should be taught here’ and, ‘This is what should be taught here.’”
This in the context of parents being enraged about the curriculum. You can fine-parse that any way you want, but it’s pretty clear that McCauliffe was on the side of the school board and Youngkin on the side of the parents.
And that’s when the race started to flip. Before McCauliffe’s first comment he was up by 10 points, if I recall. He began to slide immediately thereafter.
Biden won the state by 10 points. Youngkin shouldn’t have had a chance. I don’t think Democrats realize just how unpopular their social agenda is outside of large Democratic cities, and maybe not even those. Eric Adams won in New York City by repudiating ‘Defund the Police’ and promising to crack down on crime.
FiveThirtyEight seems to think that some of the absentee ballots have been cast and as I dig deeper on the Virginia Department of Elections website, I see the same thing (they bury it under precinct level data), but I don’t see what percentage of them have been counted.
Their latest take, which I’m not going to argue for or against until I see better absentee percentages…
Although some localities have only reported some of their vote, and some have not reported their Democratic-leaning absentee ballots, this looks like Youngkin’s race to lose at this point.
I provided some evidence earlier in the thread that Val Demings does. And you provided it for Eric Adams. Maybe tonight will inspire a few more.
If the Supreme Court rules against AA, and Harris approvingly says, the next day, standing beside Joe, that one reason she went to Howard was no AA, the Greens will gain a couple hundred more members in Berkeley, while the GOP will have lost, for years, its biggest dog whistle.
Would Joe and Kamala really dare? Probably not, but if I was still a Republican, I’d be scared of it.
From the link in the OP, it looks like Youngkin is up by 58,000 votes with 94% in and the Dem counties all in.
NBC, with 95% in showing Youngkin with an 84,000 vote lead with 189,000 votes outstanding.
So my question is this - Assuming Youngkin holds his lead and becomes the next Governor of Virginia, how much damage can he really do? Don’t the D’s have a majority in both houses of the General Assembly? It isn’t a large enough majority to override a veto but it is large enough to make life difficult, isn’t it?
If McAuliffe ends up losing, I don’t see how this is such a shocker anyway. Virginia doesn’t allow consecutive terms for a governor and it looks like they haven’t elected anyone to non-consecutive terms in decades. I’m more than a little surprised anyone thought a person with the amount of Clinton stink on them as McAuliffe happens to have could pull this off.
I realize the pundits and the news media will make this all about how Biden is so unpopular but I don’t see that having much to do with it. McAuliffe kicked himself in the nuts with his tone-deaf comment about schools.
Bottom line - 2022 is still a long way off.
FWIW I don’t think McAuliffe’s gaffe is why he’s losing; I do think it hurt him. But if that was all that happened Dems wouldn’t be losing across the board. There are a few factors. One is that Virginia (as I said earlier) is still in the process of changing demographics, and that means it is still a winnable state for Republicans. Because it’s a winnable State, it means the Democrats needed to run a good campaign. They didn’t.
Terry was a “meh” Governor, he’s a creature of the Clintons, he’s not inspiring, he isn’t personable. He had no elected political experience prior to becoming Governor the first time. He was a Democrat party insider that won in 2014 against Ken Cuccinelli for a few reasons. One was the State GOP was in a bit of disarray at the time, with lots of divisions. There was a third party (libertarian) candidate that got something like 7% of the vote. Probably the two biggest things that worked for Terry in 2014 is he was able (successfully) to paint Cuccinelli as an extreme social conservative (which is actually funny because Youngkin is almost certainly far more of one, but Terry campaigned very badly against Youngkin), and he most importantly linked Cuccinelli with the Republican lead government shutdown, which absolutely killed Ken in NoVA–government shutdowns are unsurprisingly not that popular with voters in Northern Virginia.
Despite all that McAuliffe pulled out a very narrow win over Cuccinelli, and showed some serious political weakness at the time.
Inexplicably his second bite at the apple, he actually ran a much worse campaign, which is surprising because you’d normally expect a second time candidate to run a better operation. In his first run, McAuliffe ran incredibly vicious negative campaign ads that while they probably reinforced the negative perceptions of Terry as a partisan dog (and a carpet bagger to boot), they did damage. In this campaign all of McAuliffe’s campaigning was based entirely on saying Youngkin was Donald Trump.
I’ve long said that I think it’s very bad politically to run campaigns where your method of attack is to try and link a candidate to a different politician who is not on the ballot. I’ve seen Republicans try, and lose, many elections where they attempt to link local candidates to Nancy Pelosi (a figure despised in online right-wing political circles but with much less visibility than most people think out in the real world.)
I’m not going to pretend to know for sure what the best answer against the fraudulent “CRT” line of attack is…but calling your opponent Donald Trump and saying parents should have no say…is not the answer. If it was me, I’d probably flip it as “Youngkin wants to turn our public schools into far right wing indoctrination centers, where teachers are required to teach extremist Republican ideas.” I also think McAuliffe needed to run like, some kind of actual campaign on his side…which he did not do. In 2014 his slogan was something about job creation and he actually ran a lot of ads about positive things he would bring to the State. He really didn’t do any of that this time.
I also think the way McAuliffe pushed aside several young up and coming Democrats in the primaries sat wrong with some people, especially black Democrats (who are notoriously fickle in this State) who have seen in their minds a chain of McAuliffe–>Northam–>McAuliffe again, and they feel like they’ve somewhat compromised each time to anoint the candidate the “suburbs” want and they’re expected to just get behind it.
I think McAuliffe also took NoVA for granted and did a very bad job there. He underestimated how high rural turnout would be, and he really needed very high turnout in NoVA, high turnout in black districts around Newport News and Richmond, and he needed to be strong in the purple suburbs. He failed on most of those marks.
All that being said I also think we just have some normal Virginia shit where we’ve historically voted against the party in power, and the Dems have been running things here for 8 years. I think on spec all but like 2 mid terms since the year 1900 have seen the President’s party lose seats / races etc, and I think part of that is a natural part of the electorate who is just always “angry” about who is running the country.
I think VA demographically has moved enough towards the Democrats that despite mid term headwinds, this was winnable for them, but I think their campaigning was piss poor, campaigns still matter.
The big takeaway for the real midterms in 2022 is you need to actually run counter points to the issues Republicans raise. The Dems have to get out of this mindset of “not wanting to engage” on issues they “don’t like.” Sorry, that isn’t how politics work. If you don’t agree with the CRT narrative you need to find something as explosive to talk about for your side or you need to turn it around on the GOP.
The House of Delegates, which runs every 2 years, is well in reach of a GOP flip. The Senate stays on until 2023.
Gotta agree with Martin_, this is something of a sample that “run a nonthreatening establishment vanilla guy” is not necessarily the answer. And “but, TRUMP!!!” is not a platform.
I think the President always has some effect on the midterms, and this is basically a midterm election cycle. I think if Trump was still President, Youngkin would have had a MUCH harder time. But I also think McAuliffe was a bad choice for nominee and ran a bad campaign. Youngkin pulled some very Politics 101 stuff–he didn’t talk about his many far right and extremist positions (which are actually very unpopular in Virginia, I predict Youngkin will be a very unpopular Governor once people realize who they’ve voted for), and Terry never really called him to task on it…he spent way too much energy trying to campaign against Trump–which may work in a midterm when Trump is in the White House, but he isn’t.
I disagree if the Dems had passed some big spending deal in Congress McAuliffe wins, though. I think the Democrats are putting way too much importance, or expecting way more political hay, from those bills. The simple reality is culture war shit matters, the Democrats don’t like that because they absolutely suck ass at culture war debates. That either changes, or you can get used to a lot more Republicans winning elections for the next 15 years than demographics would suggest they ought win.
No disagreement McAuliffe was a middling Governor, carpetbagger and a Clinton toady. If Cuccinelli weren’t such a jerk I doubt Terry would have won the first time.
I think you meant to say he was a Democratic party insider. 
When this type of silliness happens it basically means I won’t bother paying attention to the rest of the post.
Oh come on, really, all that good material but that is unforgiveable?
Not unforgivable but basically tells me what follows isn’t worth my time. YMMV.
Much as your post here tells me what follows from you is highly unlikely to be worth my time—thanks for saving me from wasting it.
With the trends, it looks like the Dems survive in New Jersey. Nobody seems to be calling VA yet. I wonder if they know something we don’t. It looks near impossible for McAuliffe to win.
Meanwhile, back to the matter about the Virginia Senate staying Democrat…ic. I hope that helps OP know that at least there’s a year or two of most Really Horrible Things not happening, to look forward to.
If only I could assure them that the Democrats will take the right lessons to heart… but I am a lousy liar.
Youngkin has won, just likely by a few points so they won’t call it til basically everything is in. I feel like they’ve gotten WAY more hesitant about calling races in the last few election cycles.
Ciattarelli is speaking now. I think if you look up “New Jersey” in the dictionary, there is a picture of that guy.
Fox calling VA for Youngkin.
ETA: So is Washington Post
The networks got overcautious about this last year, when there were big changes in the number of voters (and partisanship of voters) who were voting using various early voting methods. It was a dead certainty that Joe Biden had won by Wednesday evening, but they waited two and a half more days to call it because they were paranoid about making a mistake.