Virginia Mega Thread: The Youngkin Administration

[wbrocks67]

1 year to course correct.

1 year.

Otherwise, well, I know some of y'all are too young to really remember 2010. Let me just say it is PAIN.

https://twitter.com/Redistrict/status/1455709997887787009?s=20

It’s over.

While Democrats certainly have an uphill battle next year, I think the fact that some pundits are acting like things will be the exact same in 12 months is a bit misguided.

The insurrection was only 10 months ago. Look at how much has changed. Biden's approvals were like +10 in June, just 5 months ago. We honestly don't know what Nov 2022 will look like

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

1 year to course correct.

1 year.

Otherwise, well, I know some of y'all are too young to really remember 2010. Let me just say it is PAIN.

https://twitter.com/Redistrict/status/1455709997887787009?s=20

It’s over.

While Democrats certainly have an uphill battle next year, I think the fact that some pundits are acting like things will be the exact same in 12 months is a bit misguided.

The insurrection was only 10 months ago. Look at how much has changed. Biden's approvals were like +10 in June, just 5 months ago. We honestly don't know what Nov 2022 will look like

Exactly, we don't know what Nov 2022 will look like.
A week is a lifetime in politics, evenmoreso a year.

[Southern Reactionary Dem]

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.

Perhaps Democrats should do this, but "Democrats" are not a Council of a dozen people in the northeast dictating everything state parties do. There is no guarantee that the Ababama Democratic party would become more socially conservative simply because the DNC commanded them to. The onus is not only on the Democratic party to go out on a limb to try out this, there has to be a marketable demand coming from below as well.

Where is this Demand? I see plenty of wannabe populists who vote Republican while blasting Democrats for being too corporate, but then push comes to shove simply fall in line behind the GOP and have done nothing to push the party in a more populist direction. Where is the pro minimum wage faction of the Republican party? The anti toll roads faction? The negotiate drug prices faction? Where are the cracks that Democrats are supposed to exploit?

I would not mind it if this happened, but the conclusion I heave reached is that many of these people you speak of democrats appealing to are simply not serious. Either as flat out concern trolls, or they secretly want the coastal elites they hate to do all the hard work for them rather than grinding to take over state parties, all the while screaming angrily that the party that they didn't vote for is betraying them, while being silent on the party they did vote for.

That faction you are saying doesn't exist does indeed not exist among the politicians... but it's a huge faction of the voters.... Many are former Conservative Democrats such as myself. That's the core of the problem. R politicians don't represent the economic interests or views of their voters to a very large extent. Even Steve Bannon will tell you this. Polling consistently shows that the R party is hated by R voters more than the D party is by D voters.

How do you think Trump steamrolled in the R primary while promising single-payer healthcare (he praised the Australian system), raising taxes on the wealthy (did the opposite) as well as protectionist trade and cutting off the supply of illegal immigrant labor? That's the opening. You disarm the cultural issues off the bat and then the debate becomes who's more friendly to the working class.... the GOP doesn't want to debate on those terms.

I also think the Democrats should return to nomination via convention in some of these areas.

So why no take action to change the Republican party then? If you are umsafisfied with a republican officials economic position economic positions but find voting for democrats unpalatable, the solution is to run as a republican yourself and seek to oust the incumbent. Why then do we see such passivity among these voters? Sure they might gravitate towards a politician with populist rhetoric when they show up but where is the proactive action at the state level? How many state legislators have they elected? City Council members? Why are these populists so upset then the coastal elites they hate don't come down from their ivory tower to save them from the mean republicans they associate with?

Because these kinds of voters are pessimistic about the system in general and aren't prone to activism in the same way socially liberal Democratic voters are (who tend to be the majority of the people left that still have any institutional faith). That's always been the case. That lack of activism started to shift among the conspiracy theorists late last year, but they obviously aren't a viable electoral coalition. It's also kind of a chicken/egg debate. Are these people no longer Democrats because there's no longer a viable Democratic candidate for them or is there no viable candidate because these people are no longer Democrats? I personally think it's the former. John Bel Edwards getting re-elected shows me Democrats can still be competitive if they run candidates to fit the area. I guess everyone forgot about the Howard Dean strategy?

[MT Treasurer]

Yoú have to be a serious D hack to spin this as "this doesn’t tell us anything about 2022." If Republicans lost a high-profile, high-turnout, nationalized gubernatorial campaign in Iowa (as well as all of their statewide offices, one of which was held by an incumbent) and were only three points away from an embarrassment in Tennessee, no one would pretend that this somehow wouldn’t foreshadow a disastrous environment for them in next year's midterm elections. Obviously federal races aren’t gubernatorial races, but there was a very clear pattern in those elections, and it’s very, very bad for Democrats across the board. You can maybe explain away the PA races (but even that would require letting the "D base turns out at a far higher rate than the GOP base, especially without Trump on the ballot" theory go), but if you had told anyone in January 2021 that Northern Virginia and New Jersey of all places would have such sizable swings to the Republicans, you would have been laughed off the forum and mocked relentlessly.

[Amenhotep Bakari-Sellers]

Yoú have to be a serious D hack to spin this as "this doesn’t tell us anything about 2022." If Republicans lost a high-profile, high-turnout, nationalized gubernatorial campaign in Iowa (as well as all of their statewide offices, one of which was held by an incumbent) and were only three points away from an embarrassment in Tennessee, no one would pretend that this somehow wouldn’t foreshadow a disastrous environment for them in next year's midterm elections. Obviously federal races aren’t gubernatorial races, but there was a very clear pattern in those elections, and it’s very, very bad for Democrats across the board. You can maybe explain away the PA races (but even that would require letting the "D base turns out at a far higher rate than the GOP base, especially without Trump on the ballot" theory go), but if you had told anyone in January 2021 that Northern Virginia and New Jersey of all places would have such sizable swings to the Republicans, you would have been laughed off the forum and mocked relentlessly.

Lol the Debt Ceiling and Dem two bills will be passed by Congress next Nov, Youngkin won by 4 pts in a Southern state, you have to be an R hack to think 45 percent Approvals are gonna stay forever, it doesn't

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

Yoú have to be a serious D hack to spin this as "this doesn’t tell us anything about 2022." If Republicans lost a high-profile, high-turnout, nationalized gubernatorial campaign in Iowa (as well as all of their statewide offices, one of which was held by an incumbent) and were only three points away from an embarrassment in Tennessee, no one would pretend that this somehow wouldn’t foreshadow a disastrous environment for them in next year's midterm elections. Obviously federal races aren’t gubernatorial races, but there was a very clear pattern in those elections, and it’s very, very bad for Democrats across the board. You can maybe explain away the PA races (but even that would require letting the "D base turns out at a far higher rate than the GOP base, especially without Trump on the ballot" theory go), but if you had told anyone in January 2021 that Northern Virginia and New Jersey of all places would have such sizable swings to the Republicans, you would have been laughed off the forum and mocked relentlessly.

I'd be saying the same things I'd be saying now, if T-Mac won.

[Amenhotep Bakari-Sellers]

The Election is ye from now anything can happen between now and a yr and 2024

It's probably too late for Covid to end by 2022 but not too late 1400 days from now which Biden will benefit from is Covid leaces

[wbrocks67]

Yoú have to be a serious D hack to spin this as "this doesn’t tell us anything about 2022." If Republicans lost a high-profile, high-turnout, nationalized gubernatorial campaign in Iowa (as well as all of their statewide offices, one of which was held by an incumbent) and were only three points away from an embarrassment in Tennessee, no one would pretend that this somehow wouldn’t foreshadow a disastrous environment for them in next year's midterm elections. Obviously federal races aren’t gubernatorial races, but there was a very clear pattern in those elections, and it’s very, very bad for Democrats across the board. You can maybe explain away the PA races (but even that would require letting the "D base turns out at a far higher rate than the GOP base, especially without Trump on the ballot" theory go), but if you had told anyone in January 2021 that Northern Virginia and New Jersey of all places would have such sizable swings to the Republicans, you would have been laughed off the forum and mocked relentlessly.

You're being disingenuous. I never said it tell us "NOTHING" about 2022. If Biden is in the same spot as he is now in a year, then yeah, it's gonna be bad.

But you just proved your own point - in January 2021, things looked a LOT different. If the election was held in January 2021, Dems likely would've won in VA and done better in NJ. Totally different environment - but that's the point. Things are much more different than they were in January, and even much different where they were in June when there was no delta variant, no supply chain issues, no inflation, and Biden was riding high. The point is Dems historically are not in a good place, but no one knows what the environment will be in a year.

COVID could be totally gone, unemployment even lower, supply chain/inflation issues over. Or it could be the opposite. We don't know.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

If people were saying that for sure there would be a good D year in 2022 because T-Mac won, I'd be disagreeing with them, and I'd be labelled an R hack probably.
If people are saying that for sure there would be a good R year in 2022 because Youngkin won, I'd be disagreeing with them as well, and be labelled a D hack as a result.
Whatever. You just show how quick Atlas is to over-extrapolate from an incomplete data set.

[Kamala's side hoe]

https://twitter.com/gelliottmorris/status/1455980091893235716

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

This problem does actually exist with black voters in NoVA, where there are also a lot of African immigrants in addition to old-school African Americans. Maybe not enough to throw off an exit poll, but they’re still there and I see no reason to believe they’re any more politically equivalent to each other than Mexicans are to Puerto Ricans.

Anyway I’m fairly certain VA Asians didn’t vote to the right of the overall vote- they definitely didn’t vote to the right of VA Whites lol.

[Woody]

D +10% to R +2% and D+16% to D+ under 5% is a very strong indicator that Democrats would lose Congress if the election were held now, and backs up the stuff we already know that tells us these bare majorities are not going to hold.

I'm not disputing that these results are a warning to Dems who will likely have a bad 2022, but what comes to mind when I see people make an apples-to-apples comparison is what it would say if we took the shift in KY Gov in 2019 and used it to project federal results in 2020. Dems would have won in a landslide.

1. Democrats didn't win other statewide races in Kentucky that year, nor do they have any force in the assembly.
2. Democrats were running against the most unpopular and incompetent governor in the US. Youngkin was running in a state where the outgoing governor was decent in approval. Ditto with his challenger the term before.
3. Turnout was nowhere near Virginia this year.
4. The Kentucky race was not as nationalized as Virginia.
5. Beshear was the son of a popular governor (name recognition), and was a current statewide office holder.

[RussFeingoldWasRobbed]

There is no way McAullife won hispanics by 37 points. I can buy him winning them but he definitely did worse than biden.

[wbrocks67]

There is no way McAullife won hispanics by 37 points. I can buy him winning them but he definitely did worse than biden.

The truth is probably in between the exits (Youngkin +11 and McAuliffe +37)

[BigSerg]

Yoú have to be a serious D hack to spin this as "this doesn’t tell us anything about 2022." If Republicans lost a high-profile, high-turnout, nationalized gubernatorial campaign in Iowa (as well as all of their statewide offices, one of which was held by an incumbent) and were only three points away from an embarrassment in Tennessee, no one would pretend that this somehow wouldn’t foreshadow a disastrous environment for them in next year's midterm elections. Obviously federal races aren’t gubernatorial races, but there was a very clear pattern in those elections, and it’s very, very bad for Democrats across the board. You can maybe explain away the PA races (but even that would require letting the "D base turns out at a far higher rate than the GOP base, especially without Trump on the ballot" theory go), but if you had told anyone in January 2021 that Northern Virginia and New Jersey of all places would have such sizable swings to the Republicans, you would have been laughed off the forum and mocked relentlessly.

Southern Delegate Punxsutawney Phil was one of the only users who defended NSV, you know....

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

Yoú have to be a serious D hack to spin this as "this doesn’t tell us anything about 2022." If Republicans lost a high-profile, high-turnout, nationalized gubernatorial campaign in Iowa (as well as all of their statewide offices, one of which was held by an incumbent) and were only three points away from an embarrassment in Tennessee, no one would pretend that this somehow wouldn’t foreshadow a disastrous environment for them in next year's midterm elections. Obviously federal races aren’t gubernatorial races, but there was a very clear pattern in those elections, and it’s very, very bad for Democrats across the board. You can maybe explain away the PA races (but even that would require letting the "D base turns out at a far higher rate than the GOP base, especially without Trump on the ballot" theory go), but if you had told anyone in January 2021 that Northern Virginia and New Jersey of all places would have such sizable swings to the Republicans, you would have been laughed off the forum and mocked relentlessly.

Southern Delegate Punxsutawney Phil was one of the only users who defended NSV, you know....

You'll find that I'm forgiving to a lot of people. Defending unpopular forumites from what I consider unfair attacks is a secondary hobby for me on this forum. But go off...
That is all.

[Chips]

Yoú have to be a serious D hack to spin this as "this doesn’t tell us anything about 2022." If Republicans lost a high-profile, high-turnout, nationalized gubernatorial campaign in Iowa (as well as all of their statewide offices, one of which was held by an incumbent) and were only three points away from an embarrassment in Tennessee, no one would pretend that this somehow wouldn’t foreshadow a disastrous environment for them in next year's midterm elections. Obviously federal races aren’t gubernatorial races, but there was a very clear pattern in those elections, and it’s very, very bad for Democrats across the board. You can maybe explain away the PA races (but even that would require letting the "D base turns out at a far higher rate than the GOP base, especially without Trump on the ballot" theory go), but if you had told anyone in January 2021 that Northern Virginia and New Jersey of all places would have such sizable swings to the Republicans, you would have been laughed off the forum and mocked relentlessly.

Southern Delegate Punxsutawney Phil was one of the only users who defended NSV, you know....

You'll find that I'm forgiving to a lot of people. Defending unpopular forumites from what I consider unfair attacks is a secondary hobby for me on this forum. But go off...
That is all.

Same with me.

[BigSerg]

https://twitter.com/RNCResearch/status/1455926946974535684?s=20

[Matty]

Honestly….how did Romney only lose loudoun by 4

[BigSerg]

https://twitter.com/ChazNuttycombe/status/1456321922183188484?s=20

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

Honestly….how did Romney only lose loudoun by 4

Loudoun was a different place back then.
The fact Youngkin lost Loudoun by 10 and Romney lost it by 4 despite the former being a very strong candidate and the latter being a weaker one (though tbf, the best Rs could come up with in 2012) speaks volumes about how much the county has changed.

[ChineseConservative]

Honestly….how did Romney only lose loudoun by 4

100,000 new residents or about 25 percent population growth in 10 years. Primarily Hispanics and Asians.

[Gass3268]

Should Northam call an emergency session to strip powers from the Governor and AG like Republicans did in Kentucky, Michigan, North Carolina, and Wisconsin?

[lfromnj]

https://twitter.com/JosephSzymanski/status/1456304539779440643?cxt=HHwWhoC9pevQ6...

PLEASE.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

https://twitter.com/JosephSzymanski/status/1456304539779440643?cxt=HHwWhoC9pevQ6...
PLEASE.

Must say this would be a big step forward for the Commonwealth of Virginia on a small issue.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

Should Northam call an emergency session to strip powers from the Governor and AG like Republicans did in Kentucky, Michigan, North Carolina, and Wisconsin?

Hell no.