Glenn Youngkin will be the next governor of Virginia and while it is true that Terry McAuliffe ran a dreadful campaign, that should not diminish what Youngkin achieved. Youngkin built a bridge from the GOP’s Trumpist past to, what should be, its post-Trump future.
No Republican is going to win by being anti-Trump, he is just too popular in the party for that. But, outside of the party, he is toxic. Youngkin threaded this needle by simply being not Trump. He refused to go along with Trump’s 2020 grievances, but he also knew that he was not running against Trump, he was running against McAuliffe, so he ignored the “Republicans” in the Lincoln Project and commentariat who demand he denounce Trump. He knew that Virginia voters, whether they are Republicans or not, want to focus on the present and the future, not the past.
That is why McAuliffe’s attempts to portray Youngkin as Trump in a vest fell flat. It simply was not true. At the same time it, not repeating Trump’s 2020 conspiracies allowed Youngkin to portray McAuliffe as a complete and utter hypocrite on the issue of being a good small-d democrat where one is obligated to accept the results of elections, even when one loses.
Go back to 2012 and a lot of conservative critiques of the Romney campaign were that Romney (and previous GOP candidates) were insufficient fighters. When Team Obama came out with the War on Women narrative, it seemed like Romney’s response was to say “that’s not very nice” and then go back to a PowerPoint presentation on one of his 59 ways to fix the economy. Trump, by contrast, was a blunt instrument against the left. He would not back down. He would not apologize. Of course, he was also an unrepentant a-hole about it.
Youngkin proved you can be a fighter and be a completely normal person at the same time. He showed a willingness to engage in the culture war, something Republicans have traditionally ran away from, and turned it into victory. Sure, it helped McAuliffe made the age-old political gaffe of accidently telling the truth, but Youngkin took advantage of that.
Youngkin is a businessman, it would have been really easy for him to revert to the old GOP playbook of talking about taxes and regulations. The problem for fiscal conservatives is not that tax cuts are bad or that small businesses are unimportant, but that most people do not own small business and so the portion of the population you are tailoring your message for is too small. Contrast that with education.
Plenty of people have kids in public schools and they are concerned about what they are learning. They are repulsed by the Kendi-ization of life in general, but as Cdr. Salamander likes to say on Twitter, “If you want to radicalize the normies, go after their kids.”
Yet, he never called people ugly or used crass language. He just talked about an issue people care about. A normal guy talking about issues people care about. What a novel concept.