No, McAuliffe Didn’t Lose Because Democrats Failed to Pass Biden’s Left-Wing Agenda

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Wednesday, November 03, 2021

 

Yesterday, before the results from Virginia were in, the New Republic issued the following warning:

 

Virginia is a state that’s been trending blue for a while now. The state hasn’t voted for a Republican for president since George W. Bush in 2004, and Democratic margins have been increasing (Joe Biden won it by double digits). Within the state, Democrats control the governor’s mansion, the attorney general’s office, the secretary of state’s office, and both chambers in the state’s legislature. Both of Virginia’s Senate seats are held by incumbent Democrats who haven’t been in any serious electoral peril for some time now — even after a presidential election where Senator Tim Kaine was on the losing ticket.

 

But gridlock in Congress has acted as a depressant for Democratic voters and activists. Democratic leadership in the House of Representatives has desperately worked to cobble together an infrastructure deal that would (among other things) offer McAuliffe at least a last-minute boost. On Monday, Senator Joe Manchin once again quashed those hopes when he held a press conference saying he needed to study the fiscal impact of the budget bill before deciding whether he’ll vote for it.

 

This idea — that “gridlock in Congress has acted as a depressant for Democratic voters and activists,” and cost McAuliffe the election — is being widely repeated today. But, really, it doesn’t make a great deal of sense. Turnout in Virginia was really high — so high, in fact, that Terry McAuliffe got more votes last night than any Democrat has ever got in any gubernatorial race in all of Virginia’s history. He lost because Glenn Youngkin got more.

 

It is, of course, impossible to know to what extent the actions of the Democratic Party in Congress caused this. But if we are to speculate, as so many people are, it would make much more sense to speculate in the other direction: That is, to propose that the more than a million people who voted for the Republicans were sufficiently fired up enough by the Democratic Party’s behavior to overcome the record turnout for their candidate.

 

Why were they fired up? Local issues played a large part, of course. But, evidently, so did the national environment. And that national environment has not produced an electorate that is clamoring for a spending spree. Au contraire. As I noted last night, the exit polls showed that:

 

President Biden’s job approval in the state is 45–54; 52 percent of Virginia voters consider the Democratic Party to be “too liberal,” as opposed to 13 percent who consider it “not liberal enough”; and 77 percent described themselves as either “conservative” (37 percent) or moderate (40 percent), compared with 23 percent who described themselves as “liberal.”

 

This, I observed, was “not an electorate that spends its days retweeting Bernie Sanders.”

 

But don’t take my word for it. This morning, the Democratic-aligned think tank, Third Way, managed simultaneously to push for the Democrats to pass their spending bills and to admit openly that “voters don’t know what’s in the bills, and what they think they know, they mostly don’t like.” Insofar as it goes, that is a defensible position; Third Way is a think tank, not a polling operation. But it is not a position that can be squared with the idea that McAuliffe and his party suffered a rout last night because the Democrats failed to ram a massive expansion of the government through a tightly divided Congress.