Steve Helber/AP Photo
Virginia Gov.-elect Glenn Youngkin speaks to the media as Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, second from left, Suzanne Youngkin, right, and Pam Northam look on after a transition meeting, outside the governor’s mansion at the Capitol in Richmond earlier today.
Some self-proclaimed moderates in both politics and the media have radically misdiagnosed the causes of the Great Democratic Nosedive of 2021. According to Mark Warner, one of Virginia’s two Democratic senators, and CNN’s Gloria Borger, House Democrats should have steamed ahead by passing the infrastructure bill—thereby leaving most of Biden’s agenda up in the air—and, in Borger’s view, should also have greatly pared back Biden’s Build Back Better bill because it was way too left.
That’s not what the exit polls show to be what the Democrats did wrong, however. The Edison exit poll of Virginia, for instance, shows that voters age 45 and older supported Joe Biden in 2020 and Terry McAuliffe in 2021 at roughly the same rate: McAuliffe’s share of the vote among these voters was only about two percentage points lower than Biden’s. It was among voters under 45 that McAuliffe cataclysmically underperformed Biden, by roughly nine points at least.
Add these data points to my colleague Gabrielle Gurley’s reporting on Virginia outcomes—in which Black Democratic members of the legislature lost their seats to white Republicans—and what you see is a falling off in the turnout of Virginians who vote Democratic when they vote, but have to be especially motivated to turn out. Younger voters, that is, and sometime minority voters, as well.
Now, do you think those sometime voters decided to stay home because the Democrats were too radical? Or did they stay home because the party that had promised them tangible improvements in their lives failed to deliver, and because McAuliffe’s campaign declined to focus on the kind of tangible improvements he’d make as governor?
My take is that it was the failure to enact, and the months of dithering on, a bill that would have established universal pre-K, affordable child care, drug price reductions, paid sick leave, and climate change mitigation that led otherwise Democratic voters to stay home. As well as the Democrats’ failure to protect voter rights by declining to abolish the filibuster. The real authors of the Democratic debacle, then, were Democrats (or, if you prefer, DINOs—Democrats in name only, also with a pre-and-maybe-sub-mammalian grasp of reality) Manchin, Sinema, Gottheimer, Peters, and their ilk, not to mention McAuliffe himself, who proved himself incapable of waging a progressive populist campaign against the private equity billionaire who defeated him this week.
Which is why Youngkin owes Manchin a note of thanks.
