Why the Democrats Lost: One Virginian’s View

Election season is over, and now it’s finger-pointing season. Having lost the Virginia gubernatorial election, Democrats are looking for culprits.

Some blame the candidate, but Terry McAuliffe is the same candidate who won in 2013, the only time in the last two decades that a candidate won the Virginia governor’s race the year after his party won the White House.

Some, including McAuliffe, blame the U. S. Congress for failing to pass the infrastructure bill and the Build Back Better bill before the election. But Virginians are smart enough to know that a candidate for governor has no control over the timing of federal government legislation.

Here’s my theory: Virginians don’t like change, and we’ve had quite a lot of it over the past two years.

An old joke goes like this: How many Virginians does it take to screw in a light bulb? Three: one to screw it in, and two to talk about how much better the old bulb was.

Maybe the problem wasn’t federal government inaction, but state government action over the past two years. Under the leadership of Governor Ralph Northam, Virginia Democrats, who won control over the state legislature two years ago, have accomplished quite a lot. We abolished the death penalty, legalized pot, and made it possible for local governments to take down Confederate monuments.

I approve of all those actions, but I can understand why conservatives in the state are reeling right now. And why even some middle-of-the-road Virginians might be saying, “That’s enough change for now. Let’s take a break.”

The winner — by a slim majority — Glenn Youngkin has been vague about what he wants to accomplish, and he’s promised a lot of things he can’t deliver. He can’t take critical race theory out of the schools because it was never there to begin with, and he can’t give control of the schools to parents because schools are controlled by school boards, which are elected by all citizens, not just those with school-age children. What goes on in public schools is the business of every citizen; the public schools are not the private property of parents.

And he probably won’t eliminate the sales tax on groceries. Some liberals have been trying to abolish the grocery tax for years because it puts too much of the tax burden on the poor. But it hasn’t been eliminated because the state is required to balance its budget, so cutting one tax means raising other taxes or cutting spending, and nobody wants to do either of those things.

So Youngkin probably won’t get much done. Maybe that’s the whole point.