Youngkin wins, flipping Virginia red

Source: Politico | November 2, 2021 | Zach Montellaro and Brittany Gibson

The Virginia gubernatorial contest is historically seen as a bellwether halfway between the last election and the next midterm.

CHANTILLY, Va. — Republican Glenn Youngkin has won the race for governor in Virginia, riding a wave of late momentum to deliver a rebuke of Democratic control in Richmond and Washington.

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The Virginia Public Access Project also projected that Republicans flipped at least 6 state House seats, regaining control of the lower chamber after Democrats took it over in 2019. Democrats still have their narrow 21-19 majority in the state Senate, whose seats were not up this year.

The race also attracted record turnout across the state. Over 3.2 million Virginians cast a ballot this year, which would make it the highest turnout ever for a Virginia gubernatorial election and put it just shy of turnout in the 2018 midterms.

In the run-up to Tuesday’s election in Virginia, which Biden won by 10 points a year ago, Youngkin has been steadily gaining ground on McAuliffe in public and private polling. That’s despite the state’s overall blue tint — but in line with decades of political history, in which the party that wins the White House in the preceding election almost always loses the next year’s gubernatorial race.

Though it is an election to state office, the race is seen as a key bellwether halfway between Biden’s 2020 victory, and the crucial midterm elections next November. Polls in Virginia and nationally have shown a signific

ant drop in public support for the president, whose party holds only slim majorities in Congress and is defending governorships in swing states in 2022.

Youngkin, a wealthy first-time candidate and former private equity executive, also became the first Republican to win statewide since 2009, when Bob McDonnell cruised to a commanding 17-point win.

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And while Trump endorsed Youngkin, he never physically appeared in the state on behalf of Youngkin, as the candidate tried to walk a delicate line of hanging on to and energizing the former president’s most ardent supporters — while not spooking the large swath of suburbanites who fled the party in great numbers during Trump’s tenure in the White House.

The closest Trump came to appearing in the state was a brief tele-rally into which he dialed on Monday evening, which Youngkin did not attend — part of a “heads I win, tails you lose” strategy for the former president — after teasing a potential in-person visit last week.

Nevertheless, Trump declared victory in the state, both for himself and for Youngkin. “I would like to thank my BASE for coming out in force and voting for Glenn Youngkin,” the former president said in a statement hours before media outlets declared a winner. “Without you, he would not have been close to winning.”

Youngkin, meanwhile, has steered clear of Trump on the trail. At one of his final rallies on Monday at an airport on the border of the city of Richmond and the county of Chesterfield, an ancestrally Republican area that Biden carried in 2020, former President George W. Bush and his famous line on the “soft bigotry of low expectations” got a shoutout during an extended riff on education — but Trump went unmentioned.

That push on education, along with a focus on the economy and crime, has been the centerpiece of Youngkin’s campaign. He has cast himself as a bulwark against “critical race theory” — a legal theory that has become a catch-all for conservatives for how race is taught in school — pledged to raise academic standards and promised to support a push for more charter schools in the state.

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