What The Virginia Election Means For The Country
What The Virginia Election Means For The Country
COVID-19 has fundamentally changed American politics.
The Virginia gubernatorial election is about schools. It isn't about Donald Trump, or inflation, or defund the police or Medicare for All or Joe Biden's infrastructure agenda. It isn't really about Critical Race Theory or transgender rights -- though these are shading the situation a bit by highlighting anxieties surrounding the school system. Fundamentally, the contest is about schools -- specifically, how many parents remain frustrated by the way public schools have handled COVID-19.
Whether today’s Virginia results translate to other states will depend on how well schools in those states handled COVID-19, and whether a major national issue can take the place of these local frustrations in voters' minds. All the usual caveats about drawing too many conclusions from a single contest apply -- things can change, there's a whole year between today and the 2022 midterms, and Virginia isn't a perfect microcosm of America. But given the very public, ongoing dysfunction among Democratic leaders in Washington, the tight race in Virginia looks like a five-alarm fire for the party's near-term electoral future, no matter who ultimately pulls out a victory.
Virginia is a blue state, but it isn’t that blue. Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) has been winning statewide elections since 2002, but he almost lost his seat in 2014 after running a bad campaign in a Republican wave election. The GOP has only held the governor's mansion in four of the last 20 years, when Bob McDonnell won the governor's seat in 2009 -- one year after Barack Obama became the first Democratic presidential candidate to carry the state since 1964 (keen observers will note that this year’s election also takes place one year after a Democratic presidential victory).
In 2009, a Republican winning back the Governor's mansion wasn't particularly frightening for Democrats as a national party. But in the years since, Virginia has become a model for the party's strategy in other states: maintain big margins with Black voters, win over immigrant families by pointing to GOP xenophobia, and turn suburban homeowners blue with appeals to competence and moderation.
This became a model because it worked, at least in Virginia. In 2002, both Virginia senators were Republicans, along with 8 of its 11 House seats. Today, the governor, both senators and 7 House members are Democrats.
The key to all of this has been a shift in suburban and exurban voting, a phenomenon familiar to people who follow national political demographics. The reason Democrats should be hitting the panic button right now -- no matter who wins the governor's mansion tonight -- is that Republicans have figured out how to swing a bunch of these voters back into their camp. If they can sustain this program in other suburbs in other states, the Democratic Party's national viability is in serious trouble.
COVID-19 has been terrible for everyone, and it has been especially hard on parents. Unpredictable school closures didn't just screw up parental work schedules, they drove millions of parents, including 3 million women, out of the workforce altogether. Remote learning doesn't work well for most kids and has been accompanied by rising levels of depression and anxiety among students. Between April and October of last year, the proportion of mental health visits to doctors spiked 24 percent nationwide for kids aged 5 to 11, and 31 percent for kids age 12 to 17. Existing disparities in learning got worse -- with the biggest hits coming down on kids with disabilities, kids from low-income families and kids from Black and latino families -- all demographics that Democrats expect to do well with at the ballot box.
Most students in Northern Virginia public schools went almost a full year without in-person schooling, and both teachers and teachers unions pretty consistently supported keeping the schools closed in the name of public health. Whether these decisions were ultimately reasonable is hard to measure -- but the Governor was largely absent on school policy at a time when a lot of parents were really angry.
Polling indicates that they are still really angry. Education is the top issue in the contest, according to the latest Washington Post-SCHAR poll, narrowly edging out the economy, 24 to 23. Democrats typically do really well on education in Virginia -- suburban voters organize their lives around well-funded public schools. But this year, Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin is up nine points over former Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) among voters who say education is their top priority -- although McAuliffe leads by a point on education overall (still not great by historical standards if you're a Democrat).
The most important data point for the election is public school enrollment in Northern Virginia, and it's very bad for Democrats. Fairfax County, the largest county in the state, has lost more than 10,000 students since the start of the pandemic -- a decline of about 5 percent. In neighboring Arlington County, the dropoff is 3.9 percent, in Loudon County, it's 3.4 percent. Those may look like modest declines, but they should not be happening in prosperous counties where the population is growing quickly. The public schools in all three counties have a reputation for quality. People move to there for the schools. Some of that movement can be chalked up to white flight from DC, but a lot of it can’t — Northern Virginia is a pretty diverse place.
Most of the coverage surrounding Virginia has focused on culture war issues. Youngkin is running an ad featuring a wealthy suburban mom who wants to ban Toni Morrison’s Beloved in Fairfax County. There has been a flood of stories about Republican rage over vaguely defined problems with vaguely defined Critical Race Theory in history classes, and a lot of attention to a sexual assault case in Loudon County that conservatives have successfully transformed into a battle over transgender bathrooms. The case had nothing to do with transgender issues, but that no longer really matters politically.
Conservative political activists want these issues to prove that the wokeness is unpopular and that an anti-woke backlash will bring Republican salvation not only in Virginia, but across the country. The truth is a bit more complex. Polling suggests there is something of an anti-woke backlash taking place -- but it's not clear how electorally potent it will be, and there's a reason why the right has settled on K-12 schools as the epicenter of its anti-woke narrative. A lot of suburban parents lost faith in Virginia's public schools over the past year, and as a result, they're more open to conservative narratives about problems in public schools.
I grew up in Northern Virginia and attended Northern Virginia public schools and was back in Northern Virginia from March of 2020 until September 2021. Anecdotally, I've never seen so much anti-teacher sentiment in the region as I did during the pandemic. Every parent I talked to had at least one horror story, and I mostly talk to affluent, upwardly mobile, pro-public-goods liberals.
The good news for Democrats is that education is only narrowly beating out the economy as the top issue for Virginia voters, and that Terry McAuliffe has pretty consistently led throughout the race, despite running a clueless and lethargic campaign. It is totally possible that the COVID school closure frustrations abate with the passage of time, and equally possible that Democrats find a way to refocus political attention on issues where they do better.
But I wouldn't put a lot of money on it. Barring a wild new development over the next year, Democrats should expect to lose Virginia's 2nd, 7th and 10th districts a year from now, and expect a dogfight for the 4th district. These losses alone would be enough to eliminate the current Democratic majority in the House of Representatives, absent offsetting victories elsewhere.
If you project similar troubles in suburban districts in other swing states, you get a disastrous midterm for Democrats. COVID-19 has fundamentally changed American politics, and the Democratic Party hasn’t figured out how to navigate those changes.
Zachary. Why didn't you talk to the parents who worried about sending their kids to schools when there wasn't a vaccine available for them and no one could get a straight answer from the Trump administration about what was going on unless it involved ingesting bleach? There were loads of us who made sacrifices to keep our kiddos safe and there are a bunch of us who agree that the schools should have waited longer. Why aren't you talking to them? I have a child in a Fairfax County School and until I can get her vaccinated, I worry every day about her getting sick because some family of one of her classmates may not care about others. What about the families that have frail parent living with them? Or me, a home health care worker who works with a vulnerable population. Why is that the rich and affluent get all the attention? This was a very disappointing article to read. Northern Virginia is very diverse and some of us also want it to be healthy. For that matter, my daughter's teachers and schools did a great job last year. Some parents however, I guess, didn't want to be bothered with their children's emotional well being.