Reblogged:Dems Suffer Trump's Fate in Virginia

[Gus Van Horn blog]

Glenn Youngkin (Image by Kate Magee Joyce, via Wikipedia, license.)

The off-cycle elections, particularly in the blue states of Virginia and New Jersey, have received lots of attention as political barometers ahead of next year's mid-term Congressional elections, and the news has been bad for the Democrats, who lost Virginia's governorship and control of its House of Delegates over education. In even bluer New Jersey, the race for governor remains too close to call.

In Virginia, gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe did himself no favors by dismissing the idea of parents having a say in the educational curriculum of public schools -- at a time when many parents were concerned about their children being indocrinated with the bigoted, incorrect, and insulting tenets of Critical Race Theory there.

In addition memories of endless and needless school closures that started early in the pandemic were fresh on the minds of many voters. The sum total was that the Democrats faced an electorate angry with them over its autocratic and insulting style of government -- just like Donald Trump did a year ago.

The good news here is that Americans, despite their steadily weakening grasp on the proper purpose of government, aren't going to stand for being pushed around and condescended to.

The bad news, of course, is that weakening grasp of the proper purpose of government. Quoting from the AP story:

A former private equity executive, [Governor-elect Glenn] Youngkin presented himself as a nonthreatening suburban dad in a fleece vest. He embraced Trump just enough to win the GOP primary and rev up the party base, but was also able to target more moderate voters by talking about fiscal management and investing in schools and campaigning without the former president at his side.

So Youngkin is not a Trump clone, but there is also not even a whiff as far as I can tell of privatizing education -- which is what would, for starters, make top-down attempts at indoctrination impossible.

In other good news, a measure to replace the police department in Minneapolis -- one of the few places I could imagine such nonsense passing -- failed. That and New York City's election of a former policeman as Mayor should tell the Democrats that even in this day and age, most people have enough sense to understand that we need the government to perform a police function.

Whew! As appears to be the case so far in the Democrats' budget impasse, not all Democrats are completely nuts.

Such is what passes for good news these days. Its deeper meaning is that America isn't dead.

Dum spiro spero.

-- CAV

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[Reidy]

Yes, Youngkin has said nothing about privatization, but he's not the only one talking about schools. Betsy DeVos is using the election to sell school choice, and I doubt that she'll be the last.

She's not hard-core herself; what she wants, rather than privatization, is private schools alongside government's, as we already have for universities.

[Boydstun]

Conveyed by The Washington Post - Exit polling of Virginia voters voting on 2 November 2021.

“Which of these five issues mattered most in deciding how you voted for governor today?”

Taxes - 15%

The Economy / Jobs - 33%

Education - 24%

The Coronavirus Pandemic - 15%

Abortion - 8%

The first two categories (48%) are traditionally called “bread and butter issues”, and I’d wager these three mostly mean wanting (top priority) to have lower taxes; more production, trade, and income; and more job opportunities (a seeming cognitive dissonance while in my Virginia town a good while now there are many more positions than can be filled at a wage feasible for the businesses to be able to continue).

I voted by mail, and that has become routine by now. I don’t know if news polling of mail-ins (about a third of the voters, I think) would be significantly different from the exit polling results shown above.

The last three categories (47%) seem to be mainly within the umbrella-category “ideological/cultural”.

My husband and I do not think it likely that in real behavior the new administration will try to finagle a way of getting our marriage into the new US Supreme Court for revoking (Thomas and Alito were saying a year ago they’d love to revisit the issue), notwithstanding the new Gov’s successful wooing of this state’s “evangelical” bigots who advocate getting rid of same-sex marriage. (When we moved to the state a dozen years ago, they had written prohibitions of same-sex marriages or unions into the state constitution.) In recent times, my husband jokes he has been leaning so far Left, he might fall over. His attitude towards the Republican win this week is in this ditty.

The Democratic Senate of Virginia was not up for election this year and will not be up until 2023.