Virginia: Harbinger of the midterms?

The current political hypothesis is that education is a winning issue for Republicans and that, if Terry McAuliffe loses or only squeaks by in the 2021 Virginia gubernatorial election, it will solidify the second hypothesis that Virginia 2021 is a harbinger of doom for Democrats in 2022.

Virginia does tend to be an indicator of how midterm elections will go. In 2009, Republican Bob McDonnell won along with a slate of statewide Republicans. The GOP also added six seats to the Virginia House of Delegates. As the Obamacare debate raged in Washington, Democrats tried to claim Virginia had no bearing on 2010. It turned out to foreshadow that year’s destruction of the Democrats pretty precisely.

Virginia’s recent electoral history has been decidedly more favorable to the Democratic Party. In 2013, even with Barack Obama in the White House, Terry McAuliffe beat Republican Ken Cuccinelli, but barely and only because of a Libertarian spoiler who garnered 6.5 percent of the vote. McAuliffe received 47.8 percent to Cuccinelli’s 45.2 percent. In 2017, with Trump in office, Ralph Northam beat Ed Gillespie in Virginia 53.9 percent to 45 percent.

This year, Terry McAuliffe is running a second time. As Virginia has trended blue, McAuliffe has run as if he is entitled to win. Only at end has it dawned on him that he made a strategic mistake. On Oct. 19, McAuliffe angrily cut short a 20 minute interview with a Virginia news station and lectured the reporter on the questions the reporter should have asked. This came the day after McAuliffe released an ad claiming his Republican opponent, Glenn Youngkin, had taken him out of context on education. The moment the ad hit, alarm bells went off among Democrats.

The last week of September, McAuliffe and Youngkin debated. In the debate, McAuliffe claimed parents should not be able to tell local school boards what to teach their children. The next day, in an interview, McAuliffe doubled down. Tripling and quadrupling down, McAuliffe then claimed critical race theory (CRT) is not being taught in Virginia schools and said that complaining about CRT is a “racist dogwhistle,” in McAuliffe’s words. Note this: Glenn Youngkin did not attack McAuliffe for saying these things. He simply played Terry McAuliffe’s own words against him.

It took McAuliffe three weeks to realize he had created an electoral problem for himself. In those three weeks, reports have come out about Loudoun County, Va.’s school system covering up sexual assaults of students by students. One of those assaults, uncovered by reporting from the conservative site Daily Wire, raises questions about a transgender student assaulting more than one girl. The Loudoun school system made the alleged victim’s father the bad guy while failing to report on the transgender assailant.

These issues poured into a pre-existing torrent of discontent. During lockdowns, Northern Virginia parents who hired private tutors for their children were excoriated by local school boards for unfairly “privileging” their children. Schools stayed closed far longer than necessary and then, when opened, imposed overly burdensome COVID protocols. It all enraged parents already fuming about CRT.

Parents went to school board meetings. Christian parents complained about transgender policies. Liberal parents complained about CRT. All the parents complained about remote learning. Democrat politicians attacked the Christian and conservative parents. Democrats convinced themselves that only bigoted, racist Republicans complained about CRT. In reality, more and more liberal parents have showed up at school board meetings across the state to complain about it too.

For the moment, Democrats believe liberal and independent voter concerns about public schools, CRT, and even transgender policies are just anecdotes. Sure, registered Democrats complained about CRT, but Democrats believe it is mostly a Republican concern.

In 2020, Democrats presumed only Republicans cared about urban riots and the “defund the police” movement. Like Soviet communist countries silencing dissent, progressives shut out all the voices who would tell them “defund” was a vote killer. By November 2020, it became Democratic orthodoxy that police departments needed defunding. Then the voters said otherwise, repudiating the Democrats’ new orthodoxy.

Now, with just a few weeks left before the election in Virginia, Democrats realize a parental backlash really is building. It is turning into a voter backlash. Having convinced themselves that only Christians and conservatives cared about school matters, Democrats have further enraged parents. They now confront polling that shows a Republican surge building.

Given Virginia’s blue majority, the state should go easily to Terry McAuliffe. But a course correction now would likely split his own party. The big lesson here is the fact that public education was the explosive issue that has reshaped the race. That explosion will not be limited to Virginia.