The Republicans create the surprise: In Virginia, their candidate Glenn Youngkin becomes the new governor. According to projections, Youngkin won the exciting race by a wafer-thin margin over the Democrat Terry McAuliffe. He got 50.9 percent of the vote, McAuliffe 48.4 percent. In the race for the deputy position, the Republican Winsome Sears was ahead of the Democrat Hala Ayala, the office of the Attorney General should also go from the Democrats to the Republicans.
The result must give food for thought to Joe Biden and his Democrats. The Virginia election is also a first plebiscite about the administration of the US President. In the state that Biden won by 10 percentage points over Trump, a Republican is now the new governor.
Biden must take five warnings with him from this election day:
The Trump card doesn’t sting
The basic rule is so simple that no warning should be required: Democrats are not automatically elected just because they are not Donald Trump. Nevertheless, the Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe had tried with all his might in Virginia to make the gubernatorial election a referendum on the ex-president. The Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin was a clone of Trump: That was McAuliffe’s message. A similar strategy had worked in California, where the Republican candidate failed the polls in mid-September. In Virginia, however, it led the Democrats to defeat.
The anti-Trump scam was apparently good for shaking up democratic voters: they went to the polls far more numerous than four years ago. But the Democrats mobilized the Republican base with their aggressive election campaign. Youngkin, a political career changer and former fund manager, was careful to keep his distance from Donald Trump. He would have loved to travel to Virginia himself to whip up his followers. But Youngkin managed to fob him off with a digital tele-rally. He paid homage to Trump just enough to please his fans. Youngkin, on the other hand, presented himself as a moderate, sensible and business-friendly Republican. He avoided extreme positions in order not to deter swing voters. Youngkin mastered the slalom in an exemplary manner. Reaching the middle electorate is attractive in Virginia – the state traditionally elects a governor who is not currently a member of the President’s party in Washington. A fifth of Youngkins voters did not vote for Trump in 2020, clear evidence that the ex-president is not necessarily a help for candidates of his party – but neither is a manslaughter argument for the Democrats.
The economy is the number one topic
The main reason the Democrats lost in Virginia was because of economic concerns among the electorate. According to voter surveys, the economy was by far the most important issue for them – and Joe Biden was not the right person to get these worries out of the world. Biden is blamed for driving prices up across the board, especially energy prices. It is an example of how national political issues can penetrate to the more local level. In Virginia, Glenn Youngkin, as a former fund manager worth millions, understood better than McAuliffe, also a successful entrepreneur, but now a professional politician as a former governor. For Biden and the Democrats, this means that they need a swift economic recovery if they want to escape a bitter defeat with the loss of numerous seats in the national mid-term elections in 2022. You have already begun to argue that Biden’s social and climate package counteracts inflation. However, the Democrats are still arguing internally about the package – which makes them appear neither determined nor assertive and certainly not business-friendly.
The Democrats lose the battle for the suburbs
The cities vote democratically, the country republican. But in between, in the suburbs, the political camps are less clearly defined. Glenn Youngkin brought this to mind by making schools an election campaign topic – and thereby opening up larger groups of voters in the agglomerations. Youngkin cleverly tapped into the (eternal) frustration of parents with schools, which is currently blooming strange in many US schools. A dispute is raging in many school authorities about which literature should be sexualized and which theory about racial discrimination is too rebellious to be able to expect children not to talk about the appropriateness of the Covid protection measures. The Democrats have not yet found a recipe for absorbing this discontent. Their ineptly conducted security debate also hurt them in the metropolitan areas. The left wing of the party wanted to cancel the police’s money in order to reform them, and that in the middle of a pandemic that caused the number of violent crimes to rise sharply.
The Latinos are courted
The Latino electorate is a treasure trove for the Republicans, although or because they have traditionally been considered more inclined to the Democrats. In Virginia she was particularly popular with Glenn Youngkin, including as part of his suburban promotion. Donald Trump already managed to get men with Latin American roots excited about himself. For the Democrats, Youngkin’s success is now a sign that they are about to miss a trend. You can no longer simply assume that Latinos will support the democratic candidates because of their migration history. Rather, the parties are fighting for the still growing Latino minority in the country, and the Republicans are apparently catching up.
Republicans are more motivated than Democrats
It didn’t turn out quite as bad as feared for the Democrats. They had to assume that many of their voters would stay away from the polls. Because it is a mid-term election year, because President Biden does not cause any storms of enthusiasm, because citizens have been alarmed and shaken up so often in the past five years. But now voter turnout in Virginia is significantly higher than in the previous gubernatorial elections. This is likely due to the fact that postal voting has recently been made easier in the state and the opening times of the urns have been extended: Postal voting was used almost ten times more than four years ago. Usually the Democrats should benefit from this. But this time around, the Republicans seem to have mobilized even more, which contributed to Glenn Youngkin’s victory.
The result is a harbinger of the mid-term elections next year. The Democrats will then try to defend their majority in both chambers of Congress. From now on, however, they have a reputation for being on the decline. The Republicans, on the other hand, are motivated and their grassroots mobilized, as the election in Virginia showed. It is no longer enough for Joe Biden and his Democrats to keep their election promises at some point. They also need a spectacular economic turnaround to keep the Republicans in check.