Flipping Virginia
-
From the WSJ:
The first Republican presidential debate is two weeks away, and the party’s prospects look bleak. The front-runner is under indictment in three jurisdictions so far. Donald Trump’s platform for 2024 is retribution, for offenses real and imagined. In second place is a successful governor of a booming state, but Florida’s Ron DeSantis is failing to electrify voters. A survey this week showed him polling at 9% in New Hampshire in a tie with Chris Christie.
If no alternative to Mr. Trump breaks through, nervous Republican donors and voters will start looking for a lifeboat, and Glenn Youngkin just may prove seaworthy. The Virginia governor’s approval rating is 57% in a state Joe Biden carried by 10 points. A poll this month from Virginia Commonwealth University suggested Mr. Youngkin would beat Mr. Biden in the Old Dominion, which the GOP hasn’t carried in a presidential election since 2004.
For now Mr. Youngkin, 56, is focused on another contest: for control of the Virginia General Assembly this November. The GOP seeks to preserve its slender majority in the lower chamber, the House of Delegates. Democrats control the Senate 22-18 and have held up much of the governor’s agenda since he came to Richmond last year.
“I’m excited about the midterms,” Gov. Youngkin tells me on Tuesday, after touring a manufacturing facility north of Richmond. “It gives us a chance to take our case back to voters and say, ‘This is how we’ve done. We’d like for you to extend our license to lead by electing a House that’s led by Republicans and flipping the Senate.’ ”
Taking the Assembly won’t be a layup, to use a favorite metaphor of Mr. Youngkin, who played college basketball at Rice University before a career in business. Governors tend to lose seats in midterm elections. Virginia Republicans haven’t controlled both Assembly houses and the governorship in a decade. Control will likely depend on a few races in some of America’s most contested political territory—suburban Richmond and Hampton Roads, in the southeastern corner of the state.
Mr. Youngkin seems to have no shortage of enthusiasm or energy. He is witheringly sunny. “It’s the way God made me—I tend to see the glass half full,” he says with a laugh. The governor is rooting the fall race in a popular agenda: the economy, education and public safety. “You can’t run on 52 things. You’ve got to be very clear about your top priorities.”
By some miracle, the GOP seems to have produced local candidates who aren’t terrifying to normal Americans. Pair that with a sophisticated early-voting operation aimed at narrowing the Democratic turnout advantage. Whatever the outcome in November, give the governor credit for risking his political capital instead of merely riding his popularity into other ambitions after his one-term limit expires and his successor is elected in 2025.
If he does manage to defy political gravity and consolidate Republican control in Richmond, it will be a major political story with national implications. Such an achievement might bust open the race for the White House, even if Mr. Trump’s support now appears set in concrete.
“Children will meet the expectations that are set for them,” Mr. Youngkin says at a fire station on Thursday morning in quaint Stafford County. In Virginia, “over previous years, expectations were systematically lowered. What does that mean? When I say standards were lowered—literally, the number of questions on our standards-of-learning tests that had to be right, in order to be proficient, was reduced. That’s the truth.”
He has been traversing the state conducting “Parents Matter” listening sessions, with another one earlier in the week near Richmond. The core pitch: Raising both “the ceiling and the floor” on student achievement, closing learning gaps widened by pandemic school closures, and giving parents more choices, such as a “lab school” initiative working with colleges and universities.
Most Republicans in blue states would stop there, and try to duck any polarizing cultural issues. Mr. Youngkin is reading from a different script. He mentions a bill he signed that requires parents to be notified if schoolwork includes sexually explicit material and gives them the power to request alternatives.
Mr. Youngkin touts a new law that puts tougher age-verification rules on pornography sites. The potential penalties are so stiff that a major pornography company “withdrew totally” from Virginia, he says. The crowd applauds.
Yet Mr. Youngkin isn’t running kamikaze missions that alienate suburban Republicans. His administration revised the state history standards “to teach all of our history—the good and the bad,” to “make sure that we’re well-grounded in civics, well-grounded in the foundational documents to this country,” and to ensure that students are prepared for “being a citizen of the United States of America,” he says at the suburban Richmond town hall. There is no railing against wokeness.
At times the town halls are less a political event than a group catharsis about the complexities of modern child rearing. Moms and dads stand up and trade tips for talking to kids about the dangers of technology. Mr. Youngkin says he wants the Assembly to pass a bill restricting social-media companies from collecting data on minors, at least without parental consent. “That is wrong.”
It’s a message social conservatives and suburban liberals can get behind, and its effectiveness is showing up in hard numbers. Mr. Youngkin endorsed GOP candidates in 10 contested House and Senate primaries this summer—and all 10 prevailed. Every Senate candidate in a battleground district, the governor’s political shop trumpets, “is either a woman, minority, or either retired law enforcement or military.”
-
Intersting article. I do not know much about Gov. Youngkin. But it does reinforce what I have also thought, Non primary national elections are won/lost by the middle. And right now, those voters are not really liking either major candidate from each party
