(New York) A year after giving Joe Biden a convincing victory over Donald Trump in the presidential election, voters in Virginia turned their backs on his party’s candidate for state governor on Tuesday, electing instead his Republican rival.
Deemed improbable just a few weeks ago, this verdict will be like a slap in the face for Joe Biden, who beat his predecessor by 10 points in Virginia, one of the states where his popularity has fallen sharply in the last few weeks. last months. And he will plunge his congressional allies into doubt, even panic.
Glenn Youngkin, a 54-year-old businessman, defeated Terry McAuliffe, a 64-year-old former Virginia governor, using a strategy that risks being emulated by other Republican candidates in the run-up to the election. mid-term, which will take place in November 2022.
Projecting the image of a good father, he kept Donald Trump out of Virginia throughout his campaign and courted both the Republican base and more moderate suburban electorate.
He has succeeded, so to speak, in squaring the circle by posing as an advocate for parents in the battles between some of them and public schools on various issues, including the influence of critical race theory in teaching to primary and secondary students. Developed by legal scholars in the 1970s, this concept is used to examine the legacy of white supremacy over American laws and institutions.
Glenn Youngkin has promised to ban this theory from public schools, even if they do not teach it. Hence the accusation of his Democratic opponent that he hammered this theme to exploit the racial anxiety of the white electorate.
Major blunder
However, Terry McAuliffe helped the Republican candidate’s cause by committing a major education blunder during the last televised debate of the campaign. Alluding to a mother’s efforts to ban the study of Beloved, Toni Morrrison’s novel on slavery, he said: “I don’t think parents should tell schools what to teach. This statement delighted Glenn Youngkin, who used it in an advertisement broadcast to satiety on television.
Voters’ concern about the economy and their weariness with the coronavirus pandemic also played in the Republican’s favor. Clearly, Terry McAuliffe failed to convince voters that there was no real difference between his rival and Donald Trump. He will not fail, moreover, to see in his defeat a consequence of the inaction of the Democrats of the Congress on the economic reforms wanted by Joe Biden. It has been in vain that he has demanded in recent weeks the adoption by the House of Representatives of a bipartisan bill of 1.2 trillion dollars on infrastructure already approved by the Senate.
His defeat could have the effect of deflecting moderate Democrats in Congress from Joe Biden’s most ambitious reform – a $ 1.7 trillion social and environmental program.
The story repeats itself
From a historical point of view, the election of Glenn Youngkin is not a total surprise. In the previous 11 ballots for governor of Virginia, the victory went 10 times to the candidate representing the party that was not in power in the White House.
Joe Biden has therefore suffered the same fate as all American presidents since Jimmy Carter in 1977.
Strategists from both parties and commentators will nevertheless want to see the Republican candidate’s victory as an omen for the midterm elections, which will notably involve the 435 seats in the House and one-third of the seats in the Senate. They will discuss in particular what happened in 2009 after the election of Republican Bob McDonnell, when the Democrats controlled the White House and both houses of Congress. This victory had preceded the thaw suffered by the Democratic allies of Barack Obama during the mid-term elections of 2010. They had notably lost 63 seats in the House – and the majority.
But Tuesday’s election night could differ from 2009 on at least one point. Twelve years ago, Republicans won not only the election for governor of Virginia, but also the election for governor of New Jersey. Chris Christie had defeated the Democratic governor of that state, Jon Corzine. However, at the time of this writing, Democratic Governor Phil Murphy was still fighting a close struggle against Republican Jack Ciatterelli.