Virginia gubernatorial election 2021

Welcome to the grubby world of politics, Governor-elect Glenn Youngkin. A breathless report on the Democrat blog Blue Virginia on Friday claimed to have uncovered yet another racism scandal involving a Virginia politician, asserting that the new Republican governor hadn’t been “vetted.” But just how damning is what’s been unearthed? “A recently-obtained copy of Glenn Youngkin’s prep school yearbook (Norfolk Academy, 1985) shows that his senior prom, entitled ‘An Oriental Occasion,’ featured white students offensively dressed in ‘rice hats,’ sandals and geisha robes serving their tuxedoed, all-white peers. Youngkin is pictured right next to these racist stereotypes.

The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows is a collection of ingenuous words devised by a young man, John Koenig, who spent seven years reflecting on gaps in the English language. He was especially interested in situations that spark an emotion that feels distinct from the general flow. English has taken on words from other languages, such as the German schadenfreude, for the pleasure we feel in an opponent’s misfortune. The elections this month lit up schadenfreude circuits like Times Square among conservatives.

Glenn Youngkin’s victory over Terry McAuliffe is a loud wake-up call for the Democrats, who attempted to fuse the GOP candidate for Virginia governor to Donald Trump’s hip and failed miserably. Joe Biden won the commonwealth by ten points a year ago — yet Youngkin beat his Democratic opponent by two points. A slew of other Republican victories in key states have led to frantic analyses on cable news and soul-searching postmortems about why the Democrats proved so unpopular. Sure, anti-incumbent sentiment and Biden’s historic disapproval ratings haven’t helped, but one clear takeaway has emerged: the Trump boogeyman no longer works.

Tuesday was a very bad night for the Democratic Party. They lost the Virginia governorship and House of Delegates, almost lost the New Jersey governorship, and lost several local school board seats in crucial electoral states such as Pennsylvania, New Mexico and Colorado. Blue states that kept schools closed or mostly shuttered for the duration of the pandemic now play host to legions of angry, fed-up parents. Nationally, Joe Biden’s approval ratings are crashing harder than Hunter Biden after a stint at the Chateau Marmont, and his domestic agenda is stalled in Congress, thanks to two Democratic senators who clearly saw the writing on the wall and the red wave coming: Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema.

Of all the clowns to come prancing out of the Terry McAuliffe campaign car in recent weeks, it was the Muppets that finally got me. McAuliffe recently ran a get-out-the-vote commercial that featured several Sesame Street-style puppets singing about how much they love the people in their neighborhood. "Except for Larry who doesn't vote," they finish, upon which some poor schlub comes bumbling in and they all stare at him judgmentally. Next up: Snuffleupagus on why he's passionately in favor of rolling back voter ID laws. Or something. The ad technically wasn't cooked up by Team McAuliffe; it appears to have been created in 2018 by the left-leaning PAC Priorities USA. But the fact that they decided to dust it off despite it being so creepy and coercive speaks volumes.

As much as former Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe would like voters to believe it, Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin is not Donald Trump. Yet Youngkin has inspired the same level of desperation and hysteria as the former president from his opponents and the media. The Lincoln Project celebrated Halloween a few days early this year by sending young Democratic activists to a Glenn Youngkin rally dressed as white nationalists. They came clad in the Charlottesville special: white button downs, khaki pants, camo hats and carrying tiki torches. Images of the trick initially spread on social media with the allegation that the individuals were Youngkin supporters.

Cockburn’s rug-cutting days are behind him. An unfortunate misunderstanding with the wife of an Ecuadorian chargé d’affairs during a Georgetown salsa class means he now steers well clear of the dancefloor. But he learned enough in his time to know that Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic candidate for Virginia governor, has a strong claim to the title of worst boogier inside the Beltway. The Macker’s moves gained fresh attention when the former governor, floundering in his bid for another stint in his old job, started shaking his hips alongside Joe Biden at a rally in Arlington this week. Everyone else on the stage seems to know what to do: stand, smile and wave. Pretend we’re not bombing in the polls, pat each other on the back, hold our hands in the air.

Cockburn lost a game of darts with Amber Athey at the weekend, so he got the distinct pleasure of trekking over to the Virginia Highlands Park in Arlington on Tuesday, to watch a cavalcade of Virginia Democrats — and President Joe Biden — stump for Terry McAuliffe, one week ahead of Election Day. (Amber, meanwhile, was indoors at a Loudoun County school board meeting, which you can read about here.) He joined a single-file line of Democrats at just after 5 p.m. that stretched the full width of the park. At its head, a group of Youngkin supporters were gathered on a verge, wielding signs that read “LET’S GO BRANDON,” “Virginia runs on Youngkin” and “More like Terry McAwful.

Is Virginia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe really “losing it”? Last week, McAuliffe snapped at a tracker who asked him if he really believes that parents shouldn't have a say in their children's education, demanding to know if the tracker is vaccinated and questioning why he wasn't wearing a mask. It was a bizarre exchange and suggested the stress of the campaign may be getting to McAuliffe. His Republican challenger, Glenn Youngkin, responded to this revealing moment during a radio interview with Larry O'Connor and me on WMAL last week. “Terry is really starting to lose it,” Youngkin said. “I mean, he really is. He's desperate. He knows that he has absolutely fallen behind in this race. We have huge momentum.

Election audits of the 2020 election are under attack in the media. It’s easy to see why some calls for audits have drawn criticism. But audits can serve a very useful purpose. Glenn Youngkin, the Virginia Republican nominee for governor, is calling for an ‘audit’ of the state’s voting machines. The former co-CEO of the Carlyle group says: ‘I grew up in a world where you have an audit every year, in businesses you have an audit. So let’s just audit the voting machines, publish it so everybody can see it.’ Kari Lake, a former Phoenix news anchor whose candidacy for governor of Arizona has been endorsed by Donald Trump, said she would not have certified the 2020 election results in the state. She cited ‘serious irregularities and problems with the election’.

Former Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe, in the recent Virginia gubernatorial debate against Republican nominee Glenn Youngkin, touted an odd endorsement: founder of the Weekly Standard and editor-at-large of the Bulwark, Bill Kristol. 'I left a huge surplus when I left office. And that's the reason so many Republicans have endorsed me — over two dozen prominent Republicans. Tonight, I have the leading conservative in America here, Bill Kristol, who has endorsed my campaign for governor,' McAuliffe said. https://twitter.com/greg_price11/status/1442999842771546113 Any right-leaning politico couldn't help but laugh at the notion that Kristol is the nation's 'leading conservative’.

Terry McAuliffe, Virginia’s former governor and Democratic power broker, is seeking to return to his old job in 2021. Polls show him narrowly ahead of his Republican opponent, Glenn Youngkin, by a one- to four-point margin. That is by no means a safe distance for McAuliffe in a state that is widely understood to reflect national sentiment. Virginia’s 2021 gubernatorial race, one year ahead of the congressional midterms, will be the first major contest held in the blazing light of Biden’s constitutional bonfire. Many Americans believe that the government is absconding with their rights and liberties, and high on the list of stolen articles is their right to have some say in the education of their children.