Glenn Youngkin, 54, a political outsider who was chief executive of a private equity giant Carlyle, will become the first Republican in the governor’s mansion in Richmond for 12 years, having defeated veteran Democrat operative and former governor Terry McAuliffe, scion of the Clinton fundraising machine.
A significant Republican victory, flipping hundreds of thousands of votes since the presidential election in 2020, in a state of about nine million, it was also a disaster for Donald Trump’s chances of returning to the White House.
Youngkin – whom the former president had endorsed numerous times via press release, although staying well away from Virginia in person – studiously avoided any mention of him during the campaign, and won a bigger proportion of votes in “deep red” south West Virginia than Trump did in 2020.
Republican party members, donors and preselectors, some of whom loathe Trump or desperately want to shake off the shackles of Mar-A-Lago, now have proof that a conventional Republican figure, with zero name recognition to boot, can win a major state on the strength of a good campaign alone.
Moreover, Youngkin won without abusing his opponents, focusing almost entirely on issues of school choice and curriculum, tax, and law and order, which resonated with an electorate perhaps jaded by calls to defund the police (a move that coincidentally was voted down on the same evening in Minneapolis), and race and sexuality-based activism.
Indeed, expect Republicans to make critical race theory in schools the centrepiece of their 2022 campaigns.
The win will embolden Republican-inclined business executives across the US, who now fancy themselves in Youngkin’s shoes, to contest states or even party primaries of 2024. Youngkin himself might even consider a tilt at the White House in three years.
Perhaps even worse for Trump is how Democrats will stop talking about him in key election contests. McAuliffe made practically his entire campaign about Trump, telling voters Youngkin was Trump’s puppet at every opportunity. It didn’t work.
Biden, who stumped for McAuliffe a week before the poll, said Trump’s name 24 times in a 10-minute speech. Without media attention, Trump’s lodestar, already mauled by the January 6 riots and a refusal to concede electoral defeat, will fade, and with it his claim to de facto leadership of the Grand Old Party.
Within the Democrats, too, the poll will shift power. The far-left of the party, and their hysterical carry on, will be blamed for the loss, weakening their hand in negotiations over Biden’s floundering social and climate change bills.
More polite electioneering might be in the offing as well.
Youngkin, a mild-mannered Harvard graduate, was accused of being a racist, a banner of books and abortion and determined to sack 44,000 teachers, claims that must have seemed as absurd to the ordinary Virginian as they were to Youngkin himself.
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