Opinion

The victory of smooth-talkin' Glenn Youngkin over Terry McAuliffe on Tuesday has Democrats wringing their hands and looking under the couch cushions for excuses. After all, the entire Republican Party and anyone running under its banner should have been deeply wounded by now. They remain, after all, the party of Donald Trump, the single most unpopular political figure in our time. They were the party in charge when the pandemic hit and took 400,000 lives. They are the party that has pushed misinformation about COVID for nearly two years, including loud and repeated lies about vaccines and mask-wearing, causing countless additional deaths. They are the party that has persistently countenanced an attempted coup after the last election and spread the corrosive lie that Trump didn't actually lose.

Republicans should be so knocked back on their heels that they still can't manage to get up, and yet this blow-dried "businessman" running on a platform of transparent lies was able to win the governorship of Virginia. Why? Was it the Democrats in Congress and their failure to pass two incredibly popular bills before Election Day? Was it because McAuliffe carried the baggage of reminding Virginia voters of the Clintons and ran a boring, clueless, inept campaign? Or was his loss simply the predictable product of off-year politics and the bad luck of being the party in power in the White House?

There's a deeper battle happening in Washington than the ones we usually hear about. It's lurking right under the surface of the Build Back Better (BBB) bill. It's woven into the established order in this country. It's something we're afraid to say out loud.

America has become a gerontocracy.

In a bizarre twist of fate, it seems abortion and gun rights are intertwined at the Supreme Court. This past week, SCOTUS has heard oral arguments in two cases concerning SB8 (the Texas bounty hunter law) and a gun rights case from New York state. They also declined to hear two cases with significance for mandating abortion for insurance coverage and transgender healthcare. Shockingly, it's not all bad news out of the court but some of the good news on abortion could be owed to a brief from the Firearms Policy Coalition (yes, seriously).

The two abortion cases heard this past week concern the Texas bounty hunter abortion law (SB8) that places enforcement of a six-week abortion ban in the hands of private individuals suing people who aid in abortions. The court previously allowed this law to take effect (even though it's a blatantly unconstitutional attempt to avoid judicial review) in a shadow docket ruling on September 1.

Tuesday's election, which was shockingly bad for Democrats even in an off-year, was a pandemic election. Sure, at first glance, it may not seem that way. CNN exit polling shows that "coronavirus" ranked third after "economy/jobs" and "education" as issues voters cared most about in the Virginia gubernatorial election. But that's likely because of partisanship — Republicans don't like admitting the virus is real, Democrats don't like admitting things aren't going great right now — than anything else. As others have persuasively argued, "economy" and "schools" are proxy issues for the pandemic.

That's why it's so frustrating that President Joe Biden dragged his heels for months on vaccine mandates. Way back in March, careful observers of the right wing media — including myself — were sounding the alarm about the Fox News/GOP plan to sabotage Biden's pandemic response by convincing their followers not to vaccinate. But rather than respond aggressively with vaccine mandates, the Biden administration told themselves that "persuasion" was the best way forward. It was obvious they were afraid of poking the culture war bear and didn't want to give Republicans an issue to tantrum over.

12 gallons of milk was my last straw. CNN's widely mocked report may have broken me. It seemed like only minutes after the clip on a Texas family struggling with that impact of inflation went viral, it was blasted out by the House Republicans on Twitter:

The report suggests a 40% rise in milk prices over (presumably) the past year. Not only is that not true, but prices are down, in nominal terms from a high in 2007. To be fair, it's pretty clear some prices are going up. But so are wages. Overall household debts have fallen, as well. So I don't mock the family or their milk consumption. I mock CNN for holding up these outliers of cartoonish proportions as a typical, representative middle-class family. And I resent how infrequently they report on actually food-insecure families. CNN could have interviewed people going in and out of a Kroger about how they feel about the stimulus checks as they get their groceries. They could have stopped to talk to a clerk or bagger at the store. Instead, they pre-manufactured a shopping trip using a family whose situation wasn't at all representative.

The president was right in thinking there's not much he or his party could have done to prevent losing Virginia in this week's off-off-year election in which Terry McAuliffe got more votes than any Democrat in the state's history. "I'm not sure that I would be able to have changed the number of very conservative folks who turned out in the red districts who were Trump voters," he said. "But maybe. Maybe."

But I think Joe Biden was wrong, too. He said that once his party works out how to pass his legislative agenda, "factors grinding on Americans — the lingering pandemic, rising costs at the gas pump, uncertainty about the economy — as problems … would go away if he could just get his agenda passed," according to the Associated Press. Biden said:

Republicans are snickering like third graders over a new catchphrase, "Let's Go Brandon!" Due to a miscommunication too banal to relate, but involving NASCAR, the phrase has become a cutesy euphemism for "Fuck Joe Biden!" Ted Cruz posed with it, Mitch McConnell's spokesman retweeted it and gunsmiths are etching it on their wares.

It was all harmless cringe until the pilot of a Southwest Airlines flight from Houston to Albuquerque signed off with "Remember: Let's Go Brandon," eliciting audible gasps from some passengers.

It has been 20 years since former President George W. Bush passed the No Child Left Behind law that ultimately discovered the extent to which children were being left behind by failing schools all over the country. The bill's aim was to use testing to discover which states were failing and suggest changes, but what the federal government discovered is that there was no one-size-fits-all solution.

Conservative states have continued to slash funding to schools at both the K-12 level and through higher education, significantly increasing the cost of those seeking a college degree. At a time when the United States must compete on a global scale, the U.S. is losing its lead in education, spending less and less each year.

Those screams you hear resembling a wailing banshee are coming from Democrats. They're convinced the world has come to an end after Terry McAuliffe lost the governor's race in Virginia.

The snickers you hear are from the fascists who believe the Virginia election signals they are on their way to recapturing the former democracy of the United States in the name of their demented overlord, Donald Trump.

If there is a second American Civil War, which side would you choose? It may be wise to make that decision now, in the spirit of planning for the worst while hoping for the best.

A recent public opinion poll by the University of Virginia Center for Politics finds that a majority of Trump voters want to secede from the Union. Alarmingly, nearly as many Biden voters, 41 percent, also feel it may be "time to split the country." This is part of a larger pattern; other polls and research have come to similar conclusions.

Racine County Sheriff Christopher Schmaling's recommendation of criminal charges against five Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) officials — stemming from sensationalized allegations about “possible" voting fraud in a Racine County nursing home and “possible" widespread, statewide fraud in the 2020 elections — are little more than a baseless, hyper-partisan attack on legal and approved election procedures made by a highly partisan elected official. The charges only serve to undermine public trust in our election system if they are not repudiated.

Further, the Republican politicians who have rushed to judgment and embraced these questionable allegations and called for resignations of WEC staff and commissioners are highly irresponsible. Their inflammatory statements only serve to further sow seeds of distrust in democracy and add fuel to the fire of the conspiracy theories that continue to permeate the state and the nation about the results of the 2020 election.

Yes, Democrats got whipped soundly, losing a critical governor's race in a state that Joe Biden carried by 10 percentage points just a year ago. That's particularly ominous for Democrats in states such as Georgia, which is thought to be roughly a decade behind Virginia in its transition from red state to blue state. The victory of Gov.-elect Glenn Youngkin suggests that demographics might not be destiny, that the inevitable might not be inevitable after all.

So what do I find encouraging?

Tuesday's Virginia race is the fertile soil from which a thousand hot takes will bloom, but in the end, it really did come down to voter enthusiasm. People who voted for Donald Trump in 2020 were fired up and ready to vote for Glenn Youngkin. It's not because they are infatuated with the milquetoast mini-Trump in a sweater vest. It's because they were drunk on racist hysterics and eager to stick it to the Democrats. A lot of people who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 — 33% — however, stayed home. Meanwhile, Republicans only saw a 15% drop-off in turnout.

In the end, Youngkin got 85% of the vote share Trump got the year before, and Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe only 66% of Biden's 2020 share. Swing voters exist, but they are a small percentage of voters. This election came down — as they often do — to turnout. Republicans turned out and Democrats, about a third of them, did not.