Steve Helber/AP Photo
Former President Barack Obama waves during a rally with Democratic gubernatorial candidate former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, right, October 23, 2021, in Richmond, Virginia.
All Terry McAuliffe had to do was sit on a stool, clap, and nod. Barack Obama strode to the podium, slim still, hair gray, smiling for days in his go-to uniform: black pants, white button-down shirt, open collar. Out stumping for McAuliffe with one week to go before Virginia’s Election Day, the 44th president aimed to persuade Virginia Commonwealth University students and those Richmond residents who managed to get tickets to get their friends and family to vote.
After a “You’ll feel good about exercising the franchise” plea, Obama went for the jugular: “You can’t run ads telling me you’re a regular old hoops-playing, dishwashing, fleece-wearing guy but quietly cultivate support from those who seek to tear down our democracy,” he said, referring to Glenn Youngkin, the Republican gubernatorial nominee. “Either he actually believes in the same conspiracy theories that resulted in a mob, or he doesn’t.”
The Virginia gubernatorial race is the first national checkup on the health of American democracy. McAuliffe, the former businessman turned governor, and Obama both hammered home the threat posed by Youngkin, the retired co-CEO of the Carlyle Group private equity firm. National media outlets have endlessly recycled the “enthusiasm gap” headline that McAuliffe needs to close. But the problem is more fundamental and peculiarly American than that: Many eligible voters have to be shaken out of their civic stupor. They frequently fail to consider the consequences of the electoral decisions they make (or the ones they avoid) until someone like Donald Trump or Glenn Youngkin is making the decisions that affect their daily lives.
That it took a former president’s trip to Richmond to drill home the importance of the 2021 statewide election was not lost on VCU senior Shawna Neal. “Before, I didn’t think it was super, super serious to vote,” said Neal, a 22-year-old biology major. “But hearing what they had to say and all the important messages and topics that they talked about, I’m definitely going to make sure that I get my vote in.”
The Virginia gubernatorial race is the first national checkup on the health of American democracy.
An October 20 Monmouth University poll of 1,005 registered Virginia voters found that 87 percent of Blacks polled planned to vote for McAuliffe. Among 18- to 34-year-olds, 53 percent would vote for McAuliffe and 36 percent for Youngkin.
McAuliffe, who served as governor from 2014 to 2018, has made a conscious choice to nationalize the race, exhorting voters to grasp the threats to voting rights, abortion choice, and democratic government. He’s also touted his job creation record (securing Amazon’s second national headquarters is at the top of his list) and his restoration of voting rights to returning citizens. (Virginia governors are forbidden by law to serve consecutive terms; McAuliffe is bidding to serve nonconsecutive terms.)
But the Richmond rally also served another purpose that’s not as widely appreciated: It showcased how Democratic trifecta state government has managed to usher in some of the social reforms that have eluded Congress, including establishing pandemic worker protections, raising the minimum wage, carving out rudimentary paid family leave, and abolishing the death penalty.
“Look at what the House of Delegates has done over the last two years and all the things that changed for the better,” says David Toscano, a former Democratic leader in the Virginia House of Delegates. “People are saying, yeah, these people are worth re-electing.”
“Now Terry’s kind of in a unique position because he wasn’t there for the last four years,” Toscano continues. “People don’t remember his record in quite the same way as they do what has happened in the last few years.”
McAuliffe claims that 600,000 ballots have already been cast, which would put Virginia on track for casting the most votes ever in a statewide off-year election. October 14-15 data compiled by the Virginia Public Access Project, a nonpartisan election data and information resource, shows Democrats running roughly ten percentage points behind 2020 in-person voting totals, while Republicans are running roughly ten percentage points ahead of their 2020 numbers. Democratic mail-in ballot totals are running almost even with 2020 percentages at 76 percent; Republicans are also almost even with last year’s figures, but with only a 20 percent share of ballots cast.
If young voters and Black and Latino voters turn out—the three groups that Democratic strategists have been sweating—then Terry McAuliffe becomes governor again. “What we saw nationally in the [2020] presidential is that there was a significant increase in younger voters, and that was true throughout Virginia as well,” says Karen Hult, a Virginia Tech political science professor. “They tend to, by and large, be Democratic, and were they to turn out in the numbers that they did in the presidential election, McAuliffe would be far less worried.”
Steve Helber/AP Photo
Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin gestures during a rally in Glen Allen, Virginia, October 23, 2021. Youngkin will face Democrat Terry McAuliffe in the November election.
“I GOT MORE ENERGY than the day I was born!”—a line in McAuliffe’s stump speech that is bolstered by his behavior. The former governor has the hyperactive demeanor of a human Labrador retriever, bopping in place to whatever rally tune moves him as everyone nearby pretends that his dancing isn’t happening. He’s happy to take selfies with chatty strangers and wide-eyed small children who’d rather be on a playground. “It seems like his whole life goal is just to be governor every other four years,” says J. Miles Coleman, an assistant editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics.
With a personal fortune estimated at $440 million, Youngkin, a 54-year-old political neophyte, exudes a strain of Mitt Romney-esque country club conservatism that obscures the Trump acolyte underneath. (A number of his former Carlyle Group colleagues have expressed dissatisfaction with his inability to completely decouple himself from Trump.) He has raised more than $35 million (his own fortune accounts for half of that total) in the course of his campaign. Youngkin counts multiple billionaires among his backers, but then, with a net worth of $30 million, so does McAuliffe.
Virginia voters don’t appear to be more or less enthusiastic about McAuliffe or Youngkin as such. They do appear, however, to have grown weary of the almost constant and ubiquitous exhortations that this! election! is! crucial! (Virginia is one of five states that conduct off-year elections in years when no federal contests are held.)
However, there is residual disillusionment among some Black voters who see the Democratic Party stuck with another old white man at the top of the ticket. McAuliffe, 64, bigfooted a trio of people of color in their forties—former state delegate Jennifer Carroll Foy; Jennifer McClellan, a state senator; and Justin Fairfax, the scandal-tainted lieutenant governor—in the Democratic primary. (A third-party African American candidate Princess Blanding is a potential spoiler, currently polling between 1 and 2 percent.) Yet Black voters are prudent. The consequences of sitting out a statewide election were once comparatively benign; they are now borderline apocalyptic.
Although both candidates have been working to attract Latino support, their efforts have amounted to a bare minimum, says Luis Aguilar, the Virginia director of CASA in Action, a voter mobilization group working in immigrant and communities of color in Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. “Both parties continue to underfund and underengage the Latino community,” he says, adding that they also haven’t forgotten four years of vicious Republican attacks.
Democratic control of the House of Delegates is also up for grabs this year, with about 25 of those races going down to the wire. A net loss of six seats would shift the House to the GOP. The lieutenant governor’s race, featuring two women of color, African American Republican Winsome Sears and Afro-Latina Democrat Hala Ayala, also matters mightily: The current lieutenant governor, Justin Fairfax, has broken 52 ties in the state Senate during his tenure; one of those tiebreakers involved reproductive rights legislation.
Democratic control of the House of Delegates is also up for grabs this year, with about 25 of those races going down to the wire.
Jobs and the economy, education and schools, and the COVID-19 pandemic were ranked as the three top issues for voters in the Monmouth poll. But the fracas over critical race theory, which Youngkin has sought to turn into a mortal threat to the state’s children, has smothered coherent debate about Virginia’s path out of the pandemic economic dislocations. Yet the pandemic continues to be a prime worry for voters who still view their lives through a COVID lens. The Virginia legislature was the first in the country to adopt permanent COVID-19 workplace standards. But Youngkin has railed against the oppression of mask mandates and opposes vaccine mandates.
“It’s less the federal issues and more how the pandemic has affected education, jobs, and health care access,” says Aguilar, whose group has endorsed McAuliffe and has canvassed voters in Norfolk, Virginia Beach, Stafford, and Northern Virginia. “The fundamental thing is that people are still looking at a transition back to their workplaces. Some folks are still reeling over the loss of a loved one or having dealt themselves with the difficulty of COVID-19,” he says.
THE WEEK BEFORE MCAULIFFE hit the stage with Obama, he shared another with Georgia’s Stacey Abrams, the putative heir to John Lewis’s voting rights crusade, in Fairfax, a Washington suburb. The duo drew a small crowd of mostly intense, older white people whose collective posture suggested no lack of enthusiasm nor any need to be cajoled into exercising their constitutional rights. Many Northern Virginia voters are denizens of the Washington media echo chamber, which is filled by accounts of congressional failures on voting rights, infrastructure, reconciliation, and the ongoing threat of Trumpism. “You’re here because you get it,” Abrams told them.
Capitol Hill doings also have salience in Hampton Roads, the region south and east of Richmond that includes Virginia Beach and Norfolk, home to Naval Station Norfolk, the world’s largest naval base. The controversy over a Youngkin campaign event that featured pledging allegiance to a flag hoisted during the Capitol Insurrection raised concerns not only among some of his fellow Republican office seekers but also among some retired military, a significant voting bloc divided between retired military officers who are politically more diverse, and the more conservative veterans who made up the enlisted ranks.
Nevertheless, the Washington cacophony tends to fade the further south one goes in Virginia. Greg Akerman, the Northern Virginia director of the Baltimore-DC Metro Building Trades, notes that as suburbs become economically more diverse and destinations for working families, they open up new opportunities for Democratic candidates. “It is hugely important that Democrats perform in places like Hampton Roads, the Virginia Beach area, and in the suburbs of Richmond,” he says, adding that some statewide races have been called even before Northern Virginia results are in.
Over the past decade, newcomers have also surged into Northern Virginia’s Loudoun, Prince William, and Stafford Counties, cementing the region as the nexus of Democratic power. Meanwhile, the declining population in the Republican strongholds of Southwest Virginia, nestled against the Appalachian Mountains, and Southside Virginia, the region south of the James River to the North Carolina border, has diluted the electoral influence of these poor communities where such Youngkin pledges as cutting grocery taxes resonate (even if localities would lose out on the revenues destined for community services). Gov. Ralph Northam, the Democratic incumbent, steered $700 million in pandemic relief funds to the region, but it’s unclear whether broadband investments delivered by a Democratic legislature will translate into Democratic votes in these hyper-partisan times.
McAuliffe could end up a casualty of the McConnell-Manchin-Sinema hostage taking-as-lawmaking. Since 1977, Virginia voters have elected governors whose party affiliation has been the opposite of the president’s—save only in 2013, when McAuliffe became the only governor to defy that cycle. In that year, he won by two and a half percentage points over Republican attorney general Ken Cuccinelli, a social conservative of the proto-Trump variety.
Akerman, the union leader, is convinced that unions’ and Democrats’ statewide GOTV efforts, knocking on hundreds of thousands of doors, indicate that people across Virginia are “starting to wake up” to the threat that the statewide gains that Democrats have made are at risk. But the campaign isn’t over, and even half a week can be a very long time.
This post has been updated.
