Lesson from Virginia is the Democrats are losing the culture war

The Republicans’ new breakout star Winsome Sears. Picture: Getty

The Republicans have a new breakout star - Winsome Sears, a gun-toting former marine who has shot down the Democrats’ attempt to blame their failure in a string of elections last week on a racist “whitelash”.

“I’m telling you that what you are looking at is the American dream,” Sears beamed, flanked by her husband and daughters, after being elected the first black woman lieutenant-governor of Virginia, the second most powerful post in the state government. Her father came to the US from Jamaica with $1.75 in 1963 to forge a better life for his family. Six years later, she followed him: “I got on a plane and landed in a new world.” Proudly black, Christian and patriotic, her victory carried a warning for Democrats that they are losing the cultural war.

There was a “red wave” across the US in favour of the Republicans last week, including my own county in the swing state of Pennsylvania. Saving democracy from Donald Trump did not cut much ice on the doorstep for Democrats. Having alienated white, working-class voters the party has become dangerously reliant on huge turnouts among ethnic minority groups, whose loyalty is increasingly being tested.

Democrats have been squabbling among themselves. The left is furious with the party establishment.

Tre Easton, a spokesman for the Battle Born collective, a radical Washington think tank, said: “Progressives are always blamed when Democrats do poorly but we’re not buying that any more. The moderates are in charge. They should look in the mirror. You guys are at fault!”

Equally, moderates think liberals are to blame. Both sides have pointed to the impact of Covid-19 (now to be cured, they hope, by a pill), worries about the economy (job numbers just picked up by 531,000) and the stalling of Joe Biden’s $3 trillion spending bills (finally nearing resolution). Three reasons to cheer! If only progress had come earlier, they sigh, when it was their bickering that reinforced Biden’s poor ratings.

US President Joe Biden. Picture: AFP

The left - minus holdouts in the “Squad”, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Corte

z - reluctantly agreed on Friday night to pass a historic $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill that had bipartisan support. We will see if moderates now honour their promise to vote for the dollars 1.85 trillion social spending and climate bill. Either way it will be months, if not years, before voters know whether the programmes represent value for money.

Meanwhile, Republicans have been stealing the Democrats’ thunder on key issues. It is easy enough to point to Virginia’s robust tradition of voting in a governor from the opposing party only a year after the presidential elections, but Tuesday was a night of sweeping gains for the Grand Old Party. Nor was it just Sears who created history. Virginians also elected Jason Miyares, 46, as the state’s first Latino attorney-general.

Virginians elected Jason Miyares as the state’s first Latino attorney-general. Picture: Getty

This is hard to square with some Democrats’ accusations that victory for Glenn Youngkin - a wealthy financier described as “Mitt Romney in a fleece” - was propelled by dog-whistle racism. Youngkin won 59 per cent of the white vote but also “united the right” more than the marchers at the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville ever did. Or Trump, for that matter, who won only 53 per cent of the white Virginians and offended swathes of suburbia.

Sophia Nelson, a black friend of Sears, told me, “How can the result be racist? The idea that we are a bunch of white supremacists when we just elected the most diverse administration ever in Virginia is ridiculous.”

“Values voters” have been pigeon-holed as conservative, but concern about jobs, education, inflation, family and crime are not the property of any one party or ethnic group. The battle in Virginia was more complex than who is for or against “wokeism”.

For instance Sears, despite being a Trump loyalist who opposes abortion and greater gun control, favoured the removal of a statue of the confederate general, Robert E Lee, in Richmond. “We must move Virginia forward in a brand new inclusive direction,” she told the Washington Post.

In Virginia the wedge issue was “critical race theory” (CRT) which Democrats insisted pointlessly was not taught in schools.

True, not every lesson was taught through the prism of race, but this was a state in which two schools changed their names from those of founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson and George Mason, because they had owned slaves.

CRT cut through as shorthand for the rejection of parent power, as well as perceived indoctrination on race. In addition, schools were closed for the pandemic and there was a cover-up of the rape in a bathroom of a 15-year-old girl by a male pupil in a skirt. This left the field wide open for the Republicans. As Sears said on election night, “We are going to have safer neighbourhoods, safer communities and our children are going to get a good education. Education lifted my father out of poverty, education lifted me out of poverty.”

Youngkin ended up trouncing his opponent, Terry McAuliffe, by 15 points among parents of school-age children, even though education is traditionally a winner for Democrats.

While McAuliffe is not “woke”, he is a leading member of the party establishment, who sided with teaching unions over parents.

It was not the first time the “friend of Bill” and fundraiser for the Clintons had run a tone-deaf campaign. I interviewed him in 2008 when he dismissed Barack Obama as a young upstart with a “brilliant future” who might win a couple of primaries, but was not a serious challenger to Hillary Clinton.

It was not only independent, suburban voters who delivered a rebuke to Democrats last week. Their own side did too. Byron Brown, the black mayor of Buffalo, upstate New York, ousted in a Democratic primary by a white liberal, retained his office on a “write-in” ballot. In New York city, the new black Democratic mayor, Eric Adams, a former police officer, won on a law-and-order ticket after seeing off white liberals in a primary campaign. His victory speech was as much a hymn to family and faith as the one delivered by Sears.

In an NBC News poll, 48 per cent of Democrats said they think the country is headed in the wrong direction. A report last week on American values from the Public Religion Research Institute and Brookings Institution in Washington revealed that a majority of Americans - including 70 per cent of Republicans and 52 per cent of independent voters - think “American culture and way of life have changed for the worse since the 1950s”.

If that trend continues, the verdict of the electorate could be devastating for the Democrats in next year’s midterm elections. They now know they won’t be able to fight that campaign, as they did in Virginia, purely on opposing Trump. Yet, if they get another “shellacking”, it will pave the way for Trump’s comeback as his party’s nominee for president in 2024. And that is a Catch-22 nightmare scenario for moderate Republicans as much as for Democrats.

The Sunday Times