Virginia Mega Thread: The Youngkin Administration

[StateBoiler]

Since McAuliffe's entire strategy is Youngkin = Trump, I wonder how that sits with Democrats if they lose this.

Wow does that say little about McAuliffe's political ability. And this guy has been a top figure in Democratic Party politics for 30 years.

[StateBoiler]

Since McAuliffe's entire strategy is Youngkin = Trump, I wonder how that sits with Democrats if they lose this. I'm still expecting a narrow McAuliffe win but I can't imagine going into 2022 thinking a Trump clone just won a state Biden won by 10 (but of course, he's not a Trump clone, not even close).

And if Youngkin loses, it'll really cement the idea that Virginia is done with the Republican Party medium/long term. If they can't win when the national winds are favoring them and Biden is unpopular and McAuliffe has run this lousy of a campaign they probably can't win any time in the near future.

Agree completely (I also think Youngkin would beat McAuliffe in any remotely competitive state except maybe GA), but I wonder if 'minimalist' single-issue themes/campaigns might be more effective than we think. Hickenlooper's entire campaign could be reduced to "Gardner = Trump", Tuberville's to "I support Donald Trump", Rick Scott's to "Bill Nelson had four decades to fix this", Todd Young's to "I’m a marine, not a lobbyist," Maggie Hassan's to "We need a Senator who will put Granite Staters ahead of special interests", etc. All of these candidates sounded incredibly repetitive and clearly gave scripted answers all the time, but apparently it was all that was needed from the candidate him- or herself (while outside groups took care of the negative ads, obviously) to ride the state's partisan lean to victory. Even Mark Udall, who was widely mocked for his seemingly obsessive focus on abortion, only lost by two points back when CO was only D-leaning and not deep blue like VA/CO today. He’d win easily even with a literal single-issue abortion campaign today, and VA isn’t that much more R than CO.

McAuliffe is many things but he’s no dummy, so I don’t think he’d be pushing this "Youngkin = Trump and no abortions" message so hard if he didn’t consider it an effective strategy. He also drove home the abortion message in 2013 when he painted Cuccinelli as an extremist, and it worked for him then (again, when VA was already a strongly D-leaning state but less D than it is today). There’s a case to be made that a largely negative campaign that drives home no more than one or two themes and doesn’t allow itself to be distracted no matter what is a winning formula in today's world of political campaigning. Now obviously you’re right that Republicans were never going to win this race if they can’t even win it under current conditions, but it’s an interesting pattern nonetheless. (And like I said, I don’t think McAuliffe's strategy would have worked in any remotely competitive state this year.)

Because of McAuliffe's background and personal life, a clean, upbeat, unifying campaign isn't really an option for him.  He knows he has to go with fear to win, and it worked last time (albeit narrowly).  

Holding that Trump rally on Wednesday night may have been a huge strategic error.  It effectively ends the all education, all the time news cycle that started with the debate gaffe with enough time left on the clock for McAuliffe to make it about Trump again.

Is this the "I don't believe parents have a right to tell schools what to teach?" Libertarian Party local and national figures repeatedly posted this statement on Facebook posts only putting up the caption "there it is".

[StateBoiler]

Why are there no articles about VA Republicans being exhausted or tired? Why is the negative narrative always placed on the Democrats?

https://twitter.com/washingtonpost/status/1450049792562933760

Yes, that conservative Republican-leaning publication the Washington Post.

(If anything the article is meant to be a boot up the ass to certain activists of "don't take this for granted, get out there!"

[StateBoiler]

Idle comment: I feel knowing exact turnout numbers beyond anecdotal observation before or during Election Day should not be allowed and is kind of cheating. We don't report the results of all votes cast before Election Day or as the day goes on, why should you allow political campaigns to attempt to extrapolate exact turnout numbers into how they're doing?

[StateBoiler]

I’ve seen enough. TMac has won.

There you have it. LOW INFO VOTER has seen enough.

[StateBoiler]

https://twitter.com/mschlapp/status/1455532199541985290?s=20

I was told at my polling station I couldn’t vote without pants. Knowing what nudists think about pants, isn’t this just an illegal barrier to voting? But I can count on one thing our judges will do nothing.

This absolutely could constitute an illegal barrier if there was insufficient notice such that a person would show up without a mask and be turned away, effectively preventing them from voting entirely if it is prohibitively difficult for them to get their hands on a mask and return before polls close.

I know your post was a joke, but there is a much more reasonable inference of implied notice of a requirement of pants. Pants are required pretty much everywhere. At the other extreme, you'd have something like a poll worker requiring you to show them a printed picture of Elvis (with absolutely no explicit notice). This falls somewhere in the middle, probably closer to pants, but not close enough that I don't think it could be challenged if someone was really prevented from voting.

I've thought about this in the past year due to Covid. If you say a person has a right to vote and conditions on said right to vote are illegal as one party does, you can't put a mask mandate on a person attempting to vote. National Democrats so far have been smart enough to not tie "you must wear a mask" to vote because it completely undermines their argument against voter ID's.

[StateBoiler]

I’ve seen enough. TMac has won.

There you have it. LOW INFO VOTER has seen enough.

Tmac was always going to win this.

Well, he should. That we've gotten to this point it's up in the air shows the Republican is running ahead of expectations.

[StateBoiler]

Youngkin's margin as percentage reporting has steadily been going up has been staying right around 200k.

Meanwhile Ciattarelli's vote difference is still slipping backwards. Still early days there in comparison to Virginia.

[StateBoiler]

LOL.

CNN: Mayor of New York City - TOO CLOSE TO CALL

[StateBoiler]

CNN not picked up talking about it yet, but in New Jersey Ciattarelli has cut the margin down to Murphy to 28k at 25% in. It was at 62k.

[StateBoiler]

I say this as a democrat.

Democrats have to run on Kitchen table issues. Plain and simple.

Does the national Democratic Party even know what a kitchen table is? I'm being flippant, but half-serious for a talking point. I look where I am and the Democrats are so literally beyond dead. They might as well be Curtis Sliwa trying to win an election tonight.

[StateBoiler]

So for my Atlas peeps who were politically aware at the time (instead of being a dumb 15-year old who was more concerned with how skinny her jeans were...):

How does this compare to, say, Scott Brown's special election upset in Massachusetts? I do recall commentators heralding that as a pure rejection of Obama (as many will likely say this was a rejection of Biden).  

I was fourteen but I lived in Massachusetts and I paid some attention to the race. I don't think the comparison makes sense. A Republican winning a gubernatorial race in a mildly Democratic state is very different from a Republican winning a Senate election in an extremely Democratic state. That said, Scott Brown succeeded because of how non-nationalized the race was. If it was purely a referendum on Obama and national Democrats, Coakley would be in the Senate instead of Warren.

Coakley was also an absolutely terrible candidate.

[StateBoiler]

The black-haired girl to McAuliffe's left looks like she's about to cry.

[StateBoiler]

Rare for me to not be negetive but what is the alarmist about NJ?

I know 51% is in but almost all of it is GOP. So shouldn’t the remaining 49% be overwhelmingly Dem?

Ciattarelli winning Bergen County.

[StateBoiler]

Waiting for Youngkin vs McAuliffe 2025 rematch predictions

Youngkin can't run for a second consecutive term.

Somehow I forgot that

It's a weird law. But it goes all the way back to the 1830s

North Carolina had the same law for a long time. It allowed for incumbent reelection maybe 1970sish.

[StateBoiler]

On the bright side, Democrats will more than likely be picking fresh faces in 2025 instead of has-beens like Terry McAuliffe or Mark Herring.  At least I certainly will.   

Herring has been fighting a windmill saying the ERA is now part of the Constitution. He'll be running for Senate next open seat opportunity.

[StateBoiler]

TMac's campaign looks inept because it threw a lot of things at the wall to see what would stick. It was beyond their control that nothing could stick in the face of people wanting to try something different and having a Republican who wasn't Trump or a nutcase on the ballot.

A political strategist would tell you that's bad campaigning because you're supposed to have a focused message instead of being all over the map.

[StateBoiler]

* Republican Senate refusing to confirm Dem President appointees and the geography of current coalitions making it virtually impossible for Dems to win the Senate.

In both cases, our democracy will no longer be working as a democracy.

I always love the blissful ignorance of people not recognizing for almost the entirety of the second half of the 20th century Congress was one-party government. Or how Democrats ran most southern states for a century straight unchallenged. They only started to have a problem with it when their side was on the losing end.

As a person that has joined the Libertarian Party of Indiana and is now a county party chair in a county where our candidate for Governor in 2020 received more votes than the Democrat, let me tell you that this is all Democrats' fault of they're allowing a small group of people to dictate what the entire national party stands for, completely destroying localism. Part of that is the nationalization of politics which true, Democrats can't really control. But you can and realize and accept you're a coalition with widely disparate views and to do change slower instead of overreaching. (Throw on top of it there is no margin to speak of in either body so nothing is getting through that's not unanimous inside your own caucus.) The Voting Rights Act for example: you could break that into a bunch of smaller bills and get bipartisan support for some of it I'd bet $100 on, thereby creating positive change for the conduct of voting and elections. But they had no interest in doing so without some pet initiatives. You can see it in the infrastructure bill thread the vitriol and hatred for Manchin when Manchin is more representative of what West Virginia Democrats think than what most people on here posting are. People think that just because he has a D next to his name he should rubber stamp anything Pelosi or Schumer put in front of him.

Whatever. If Democrats want to become the Republican Party of the 1930s of a bunch of moneyed city elites out of touch with the rest of the country (including minority working-class voters), I'm not going to stop them. It leads to me having 2nd-party status in my corner of Indiana. I'm running candidates next year and the local Democrats probably are not bothering for the 2nd time in a row.

[StateBoiler]

TMac's campaign looks inept because it threw a lot of things at the wall to see what would stick. It was beyond their control that nothing could stick in the face of people wanting to try something different and having a Republican who wasn't Trump or a nutcase on the ballot.

A political strategist would tell you that's bad campaigning because you're supposed to have a focused message instead of being all over the map.

Forgive me, which campaigns were you chief strategist for, again?

I just heard it from the Strategists Podcast where one of the show hosts just successfully ran a campaign to get his candidate victory in the Mayor of Calgary election.

[StateBoiler]

What's the GOP expected to get done with a trifecta in VA?

They dont have a trifecta. This is just stopping the radically insane last 2 years where the Dems rammed through hundreds of bills no one had time to read that did stupid things like accidentally eliminate comp time, ban plastic water bottles and styrafoam, criminalize letting a balloon go, gutting jury trials, etc.

...spending state funds suing the federal government that the ERA is now part of the Constitution...

[StateBoiler]

Run socially conservative populists.... like legitimate populists... run a bunch of tough Teddy Roosevelt clones who a more traditional electorate can trust to represent them on cultural issues and fight for their best interests on economic issues.

You can't be something you're not.  Democrats like this literally do not exist anymore.  They've all become Republicans.

The last remaining Democrats like this are...blue-collar union and trade workers? I also think the modern Democratic Party's relationship with organized labor is quite tortured.

[StateBoiler]

I'm glad I tempered my expectations for this race after the Tox poll gave me an ulcer. In spite of this, that poll being an outlier after all and me actually nailing my updated Youngkin+2 prediction were the only minor silver linings. It was an excruciating night otherwise, like every election since 2014 (2027 and 2019 excepted).

I want to be sedated.

https://twitter.com/tripgabriel/status/1455892930800066564?s=20

See? I f***ing knew we couldn't trust suburbanites in general. They hate Trump, but only him personally. They're like relapsing addicts with the GOP without him.

So if Democrats can't rely on them, or even voters of color anymore, what does a winning Democratic coalition even look like? Let's face it, we're going the way of the British Labour Party but we can't even partly blame Scotland like they can.

Democrats never want to admit this, but we do in fact need the old New Deal coalition if we want to be as competitive in local and congressional races as we are for the presidency. In safe blue districts/states, run as liberal a candidate as you can find. But down south, Democrats have his really stupid idea of running of socially liberal fiscally moderate-conservative corporatists which NOBODY LIKES OUTSIDE OF THE WEALTHY NORTHEAST. Run socially conservative populists.... like legitimate populists... run a bunch of tough Teddy Roosevelt clones who a more traditional electorate can trust to represent them on cultural issues and fight for their best interests on economic issues. I'm tired of seeing (insert generic effeminate beta male neoliberal here) lose year after year. When they do manage to squeak out a victory, they always sell their voters out to corporate donors.

Do NY and MA determine who gets elected in LA and WV? Not that I'm aware of.

Do people and organizations from New York and Massachusetts send money to candidates in Louisiana and West Virginia? You think no money from outside the state is going to be funneled to whoever runs against Manchin in the 2024 primary?

[StateBoiler]

Small Business owners, Police officers, skilled trade workers, feel left out by the corporate democrats. They are the ones directly dealing with the inflation, the high business taxes ( while Walmart gets away with paying nothing ),

These are also the same group of people that a certain individual in Europe won over in 1933. Because they are the ones most liekly to be affected by economic and social change.

Odd comment to make. That group probably voted for Roosevelt in 1932 as well.

[StateBoiler]

https://twitter.com/gelliottmorris/status/1455980091893235716?ref_src=twsrc%5Etf...

Asians are a relatively insignificant group as far as percentage of electorate unless you're on the West Coast or Hawaii. So how is knowing what the Asian vote in Virginia did even statistically measurable to a high degree of accuracy in an exit poll?

[StateBoiler]

https://twitter.com/gelliottmorris/status/1455980091893235716?ref_src=twsrc%5Etf...

Asians are a relatively insignificant group as far as percentage of electorate unless you're on the West Coast or Hawaii. So how is knowing what the Asian vote in Virginia did even statistically measurable to a high degree of accuracy in an exit poll?

There are a lot of Asians in NJ and NoVA.

Quantify "a lot" and then think of how many of a group you need to poll of those that voted to have an accurate measure of how the whole of the group is acting. Throw in things like you have to account for differences in ethnicity influencing voting meaning it's not a monolithic group (Indians and Chinese are both "Asian", but are completely different groups of people) which means you need to have a larger sample to account for that (also exists with Latinos but not with blacks). You can get the whole "polling a unicorn" factor as well with such a low-percentage group, e.g. something I learned not that long ago is in the 2016 election there was a black voter in Chicago randomly polled that was a Trump supporter and this data point completely screwed up a lot of national polling numbers trying to account for that.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/13/upshot/how-one-19-year-old-illinois-man-is-distorting-national-polling-averages.html