Erick Erickson has a good piece on the imminent gubernatorial contest in Virginia, featuring former Governor Terry McAuliffe (D-VA) vs businessman, and inexperienced politician, Glenn Youngkin (R-VA), which I had pegged as an easy 10 point win for the Democrat a few months back.
The last polls show the race to be neck and neck. Here’s Erickson:
In the real world, gas prices are making it more difficult for people to live their daily lives. Food prices compound the problem. Shortages add to the problem. But progressives and the press bellyache that consumerist Americans have it great, Americans are the problem, and Americans need to shut up and get vaccinated.
Meanwhile, these Americans’ friends and family are losing jobs because of vaccine hesitancy and the press vilifies them while Democrats punish them. While all of that is happening, Democrats want to throw even more trillions of dollars at the problem and cause even more inflation.
Today in Virginia, McAuliffe is most likely going to lose and, should he win, it will be closer than it should be.
By midnight, as this reality settles in, the media and Democrats will realize their January 6th and Donald Trump hysteria and screams of racism and various phobias will not have impacted Americans. They will then do what the press and progressives do best — blame the American people. Sometime around midnight, the tears on MSNBC and on social media will muffle the sounds of lament that America is racist again.
Now, politics is always local, so McAuliffe’s bona fides are of limited importance; his personality, his positions, and all the rest of his negatives are important as well.
But it’s also possible to evaluate this race based on a hierarchy of voter concerns.
Look: As I’ve said before, no matter how much we want to hold democracy sacred, it’s not a religious tenet. People come with individual, but often shared, hierarchies of concerns to all elections, and these can change from election to election – but changes are rarely major.
First up on most lists, as the Romanovs of Imperial Russia discovered, is putting food on the table. At some point, it doesn’t matter how loudly you scream about the holiness of your position, the people will overturn you if you’re not making it possible to put food on the table, and at a price, justified or not, that they think is reasonable.
Then there’s safety – which makes the rising crime rate in combination with the leftists’ Defund the police slogan a real loser.
For those with children or conscious of the importance of supporting and developing children’s transition into citizens, education is high up the list.
After that come the religious issues, such as abortion & separation of church and state, and then ideological issues – unfettered free markets vs socialism.
This serves as a plan of attack. For a governing party, they should discover the general order of priorities peculiar to the electorate for this cycle and then make sure they are keeping citizens happy on each, in order of priority – or they have a satisfactory excuse and a record of at least trying.
Have the Democrats managed the hierarchy? Erickson doesn’t think so – he figures they’ve screwed up economics, although then he desperately defends the ideology that has already led to one insurrection. How about Andrew Sullivan? In response to a letter he received explaining why a married couple of Democratic-leaning of voters were voting Republican (you’ll have to go read that for yourself, and you’ll need a subscription for that, but it had to do with Education, which is way up the hierarchy of concerns), Sullivan remarked:
If I were in Virginia, I’d vote for Youngkin too. The Democrats need to be shaken out of their commitment to critical theory’s extremists on race, sex and gender — especially when it comes to indoctrinating children. They won’t listen until they’re forced to.
Not having children myself, nor the time to research whether there’s indoctrination going on, or whether Critical Race Theory remains a dusty old law theory, it’s tough for me to say. Have the Republicans lied their way to victory?
Whatever the answer, the McAuliffe should have won this race easily. The lemonade squirting from the clouds, though, is that this functions as an early warning for the Democrats to clean their message up. Start with the Defund the police message – the partisans behind that slogan may hate the Democrats for doing it, but the Democrats have to repudiate it or the GOP will use it as a club on them, and as important as the treachery implied by the insurrection of Jan 6th remains, the fact of the matter is that violent, dangerous crime is a lot closer to most voters than Washington, D.C., and so the Defund club will be a lot larger as well.
Then they need to investigate what’s happening in schools. Is indoctrination happening? Or is it all lies? Whatever it is, they need to affirm that a law theory isn’t appropriate for anyone below college. The problem is that certain school boards have been indulging some dumb passions, such as renaming schools to remove the names of American heroes from them. That it’s a mistake to apply today’s moral laws to yesterday’s people is easily demonstrated. One approach is by comparing the actions of Generals Washington and Lee, and asking why one is no more than a slave owning traitor on the wrong side of a war to retain slavery, while the other was a slave-owning war hero who ushered in a new form of government, if I may stretch a point slightly – and why the latter, in an era of slavery, is worthy of admiration, while fighting to retain slavery is a moral abomination.
Democrats have to clean up their message and the associated implementation, or McAuliffe’s close shave or loss will be replicated in 2022’s elections. No ifs, ands, or buts.
