Some excellent analysis from Perry Bacon, Jr. at the Washington Post, An abnormal Republican Party was treated normally by voters in New Jersey and Virginia:
Tuesday’s election results in New Jersey and Virginia — a big swing away from the party that controls the White House — were fairly normal. And that’s the scary thing.
The president’s party generally struggles in off-year elections for two reasons. First, there is often a turnout gap that favors the party that doesn’t control the White House. Off-year elections have much lower turnout than presidential ones, but typically more people from the party that doesn’t control the presidency are motivated to vote in opposition to whatever the incumbent president is doing. Second, some voters swing away from the president’s party, both because they don’t like his performance and because they want a balance of power in government.
But I hoped that the threat of Trumpism might reverse these patterns, for a simple reason: The post-2020-election Republican Party has gone crazy. Many of the party’s leading figures refuse to acknowledge President Biden’s victory. A wave of GOP-controlled states has passed laws to make it harder to vote and to learn about the United States’ racial history. Numerous GOP leaders have fought policies such as mask-wearing to limit the spread of covid-19.
Less than two months ago in California, that hope was fulfilled. Democrats rightly cast Republican gubernatorial candidate Larry Elder as a dangerous, Trump-like figure — and it worked. Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom defeated an attempted recall by about the same margin (about 24 points) that he had won reelection in 2018, when Donald Trump was president.
But Virginia and New Jersey contradict what happened in California and suggest that many voters aren’t too bothered by a Trump-like Republican Party as long as Trump isn’t in the White House.
Both states followed the historic pattern of the president’s party in off-year elections. In heavily Democratic Fairfax County, Va., Biden won about 420,000 votes in 2020, while Trump won about 168,000. In the gubernatorial election this year, Democrat Terry McAuliffe won about 282,000 votes and Republican Glenn Youngkin about 152,000, meaning Youngkin won 90 percent of Trump’s total and McAuliffe won just 67 percent of Biden’s.
Note: Democrats do this to themselves every midterm election; they simply do not turn out to vote in the same numbers that they do in presidential years. If Democrats turned out to vote in every election as they do in presidential elections, we would be looking at a much different political landscape. If there was a simple solution to this problem, strategists would have discovered it by now. (Classic toon).
Some voters may have switched from Biden to Youngkin, but it’s unlikely the huge McAuliffe shortfall in Fairfax was just about switching. Instead, it’s clear that lots of the people who voted for Biden did not participate in this election, while a smaller percentage of Trump voters sat out. Exit polls suggest that of those who participated, 47 percent voted for Biden and 45 percent voted for Trump. This was not the same electorate that Biden won 54-44.
Similarly, in New Jersey, 2.6 million people voted for Biden, but Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy is likely to finish several hundred thousand votes behind that.
There is evidence of switching, too. Exit polls in Virginia suggested that 5 percent of 2020 Biden votes backed Youngkin, while just 2 percent of 2020 Trump voters supported McAuliffe. That only accounts for a few points, but McAuliffe will end up losing by 1-to-3 percentage points, so those small shifts matter.
In some ways, it’s entirely logical that traditional patterns held. Youngkin and New Jersey GOP gubernatorial candidate Jack Ciattarelli don’t have a long history of saying racist things. Neither man tried to overturn an election. Victories by Youngkin and Ciattarelli would not be the threat to American democracy posed by Trump in 2020 (and potentially in 2024).
And the fact that Youngkin and Ciattarelli aren’t Trump made it easier for a few Biden voters to back them. After all, some who voted for Republicans such as George W. Bush and Mitt Romney still consider themselves conservative but couldn’t stomach Trump. And I have no doubt that there are voters in both states who are either frustrated by the gridlock in Washington and think Biden has been ineffective or are simply wary of parts of the Democratic agenda.
But even though Youngkin isn’t as bad as Trump, he has nonetheless flirted with some of the worst of Trumpism, at one point refusing to acknowledge Biden won the election and throughout the election casting critical race theory as a threat. It would have been great if Virginia decisively rebuked a candidate who traffics in even small amounts of Trumpism.
Perhaps that will come in 2022. It could be the case that in next year’s elections Republicans nominate more candidates like Elder (who had a record of out-there comments) and fewer like Youngkin. Maybe voters think of federal elections differently than state ones. Trump, who largely stayed out of New Jersey and Virginia, could interject himself more next year, making the specter of Trumpism more real.
But at least right now, the results from New Jersey and Virginia suggest a reversion to normal — that the 2022 election will feature a GOP base that is more motivated than the Democratic one, along with a small bloc of voters swinging to the GOP. In normal circumstances, I’d see that as a bad thing, since my policy views are closer to the Democrats. A person with traditional Republican policy views would no doubt disagree. But in our current abnormal circumstance, with U.S. democracy on the precipice because of the extremism of the current GOP, everyone needs to understand that normal could well be catastrophic.
Republican voters actually elected candidates who participated in the January 6 insurrection – a criminal act which is disqualifying for any elected office at any level of government. Republicans are embracing fascism. They represent the greatest national security threat to the survival of American democracy.
The Washington Post reports, At least seven Jan. 6 rallygoers won public office on Election Day (“rallygoers”? Way to downplay the seriousness WaPo):
At least seven people who attended the pro-Trump rally on Jan. 6 in Washington that preceded the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol were elected to public office Tuesday.
BuzzFeedNews first reported last week that at least 13 Republicans who traveled to Washington on Jan. 6 to protest the results of the 2020 election were running for office this year.
None were charged with crimes (yet), and all denied being part of the pro-Trump mob that stormed the Capitol to try to stop the certification of President Biden’s electoral college win.
On Tuesday, three of those 13 Republicans — Dave LaRock, John McGuire and Marie March — were elected to the Virginia House of Delegates, as first reported by HuffPost. LaRock and McGuire won reelection, while March won an open seat.
March told the AP she did not regret participating in the rally.
LaRock, who has represented Virginia’s 33rd District since 2014, lashed out at critics who called on him to resign after it was revealed that he participated in the Jan. 6 rally, according to the Loudoun Times. Before that, he had spread conspiracy theories about the election. In a statement released after the rally, LaRock said participants were “law-abiding, patriotic, mom and pop, young adults pushing baby carriages.”
Bullshit! Does this look like “law abiding’ to you? And do not dare to call them patriots. They are seditious insurrectionist domestic terrorists who tried to overthrow the government and attacked Capitol Police officers.
McGuire did not acknowledge publicly that he participated in the rally until July, when he told The Washington Post. McGuire told reporters then that he didn’t enter the building.
Two other Republicans who were at the Capitol that day — Philip Hamilton and Maureen Brody — lost their races Tuesday for the Virginia House of Delegates.
According to HuffPost, other Jan. 6 rallygoers who won elected office Tuesday include Christine Ead for the Watchung, N.J., city council; Natalie Jangula for the city council in Nampa, Idaho; Matthew Lynch for the local school committee in Braintree, Mass.; and Susan Soloway for reelection to the board of directors in Hunterdon County, N.J.
According to the Idaho Press, Jangula said participating in the Jan. 6 rally was a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to show support for our country.” Lynch, a former teacher who resigned after a photo surfaced of him at the rally, told Patch, a local news organization, that the FBI had visited him twice after that day. It is unclear whether he entered the Capitol. Soloway, meanwhile, faced a Change.org petition calling for her to step down from her county’s governing body after it was revealed that she was at the rally. In a statement, Soloway said she had participated in the rally but left before the Capitol was breached.
[In] February, HuffPost identified at least 57 Republicans in local or state office who traveled to the pro-Trump rally on Jan. 6. A handful have resigned or faced consequences. More than 500 people have been arrested in conjunction with the riot at the Capitol, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced in June.
All of them should have been expelled from office by now and disqualified from ever seeking elected office again. They should be barred from appearing on the ballot.
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Many Democrats don’t turn out for mid-term elections because the DCCC & DSCC always insist on running non-progressive candidates. Then, if their preferred candidates lose their primaries, the DCCC & DSCC have a habit of turning their backs on the race. Or, they don’t bother running any candidates in every election.
Howard Dean had it right. Run candidates in every race because if you don’t run your party won’t win. After his turn at the DNC’s helm the Democrats regained the House. He was replaced by Rahm Emanuel who went back to the old way of only running select races. Guess what eventually happened?
As I’ve mentioned before, national leadership organizations like the DNC, DCCC and the DSCC really need to quit interfering in primaries & support the primary winners in the general. Even if the winner is a progressive!
You’re going to love today’s New York Times editorial, “Democrats Deny Political Reality at Their Own Peril”, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/04/opinion/democrats-election-results.html
What’s badly needed is a return to the moderate policies that fueled the blue-wave victories in 2018 and won Joe Biden the presidency in 2020.
Charles Blow at the New York Times adds, “White Racial Anxiety Strikes Again”, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/03/opinion/youngkin-virginia-race.html
(excerpt)
[W]hat can’t be denied is the degree to which Youngkin successfully activated and unleashed white racial anxiety, positioning it in its most potent form: as the protection of the vulnerable, innocent and helpless. In this case, the white victims in supposed distress were children.
Youngkin homed in on critical race theory, even though critical race theory, as Youngkin imagines it, isn’t being taught in his state’s schools. But that didn’t matter.
There are people who want to believe the fabrication because it justifies their fears about displacement, powerlessness and vulnerability.
In fact, the frenzy around critical race theory is just the latest in a long line of manufactured outrages meant to tap into this same fear, and the strategy has proved depressingly effective.
There was the fear of “race-mixing” among children — including the notion that Black boys might begin dating white girls following the desegregation ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. (By the way, this was a variation on the ancient and dusty fear peddled during Reconstruction that not only were Black men incapable of governing, but their rapacious nature also put white women at risk of rape and devilment.)
There was the fear of a collapse of the Southern way of life and society following the successes of the civil rights movement. That gave rise to the Republicans’ “Southern strategy.”
Richard Nixon used the fear of a lost generation to launch his disastrous war on drugs, which was not really a war on drugs at all but yet another way to ignite white racial anxiety.
[R]onald Reagan employed the myth of the welfare queen to anger white voters.
As The New Republic put it, “the welfare queen stood in for the idea that Black people were too lazy to work, instead relying on public benefits to get by, paid for by the rest of us upstanding citizens.”
[In] fact, working-class white people have benefited most from assistance from the government.
George H.W. Bush ginned up fears of white women being raped by Black former prisoners with his 1988 Willie Horton ad, hammering home a tough-on-crime message.
[S]arah Palin tried her best to other Barack Obama and make white people afraid of him, accusing the Illinois senator of “palling around with terrorists.” At the same time, birthers were questioning if Obama was born in the United States and wondering whether he was Christian or Muslim.
Then came Donald Trump, the chief birther, who ratcheted up this fear appeal to obscene levels, positioning Mexicans as rapists and Muslims as people who hate America. He disparaged Black countries, demonized Black athletes and found some “very fine people” among the Nazis in Charlottesville.
So it’s no wonder Youngkin’s critical race theory lie worked. The parasite of white racial anxiety needed a new host, a fresher one.
You could argue that the Democrats made missteps in Virginia. Absolutely. But, to win, Democrats also needed to tamp down white people’s fears, which is like playing Whac-a-Mole.
Some of the very same people who voted against Donald Trump because they were exhausted and embarrassed by him turned eagerly to Youngkin because he represented some of the same ideals, but behind a front of congeniality.
Youngkin delivered fear with a smile.