‘Democrats have to come to terms with wokeism’: Pundits weigh in on disaster result for the left in Virginia

Rush to interpret the causes and implications of Terry McAuliffe’s narrow loss is already underway

Democrats are absorbing the shock of losing the Virginia gubernatorial election – and the political commentariat are weighing in on what caused the loss and what it means for the party’s future.

High up the list of targets for blame are the progressive left and the failure to pass the Biden agenda through Congress. However, others are pointing out that the result is in fact roughly in line with Virginia’s behaviour in previous off-year elections – and that if exit polling is to be believed, the underlying dynamics of the two parties’ electoral coalitions show little sign of change.

As the results sank in, MSNBC host Joe Scarborough weighed in on Morning Joe with his diagnosis: the Democrats’ embrace of so-called “woke” culture is inevitably hurting them with voters they might otherwise be able to win over.

“People are saying, ‘oh, he won based on something that’s not real, that doesn’t exist, CRT or woke-ism, whatever you want to call it’... People say, ‘oh, it’s because [voters] are racist’. No, they’re lifelong Democrats, and they’re talking about what’s going on on college campuses,” he said.

As Mr Scarborough sees it, many Democrats are blind to the seriousness of this problem because the intensity of the discourse around it smothers public dissent. “Wherever we go, when nobody is watching, when the cameras are off, when people aren’t worried about people calling them bigots, it’s happening,” he claimed. “That played out last night in Virginia.”

Mr Scarborough, however, hardly represents the dominant view of why Mr Biden lost. Many progressive pundits, including some at his own network, see the race fundamentally differently.

Joy-Ann Reid, host of The ReidOut, tweeted that the strategy that Republican Glenn Youngkin deployed in his successful campaign has long worked wonders for the right.

“McAulliffe’s problem was that A) the overall mood narrative is bad for Dems & Biden, and B) Youngkin, like the Republican he is, filled the vacuum with inchoate fear of threats to the cherished historical narrative of a glorious history of unbroken white Christian great/goodness. It’s not like that’s not easy to do in America, where a portion of the population has always prized group dominance over democracy and shared progress.”

She also defended progressives from accusations that it was their agenda that undermined Terry McAuliffe’s chances. “Progressive Dems are almost alone in vigorously defending the kind of people who would actually be open to voting Dem and would reward them if they delivered,” she wrote. “But for doing that, they take a beating from their party and the Beltway press. So here we are.”

Ms Reid’s point about the racial factor is borne out by the breakdown of the result at county level, which showed a dramatic partisan gap between Virginia’s whitest and least white counties. Other data showed that voting patterns changed dramatically among white women in particular; while those with college degrees swung slightly towards the Democrats, those without swung dramatically the other way.

Besides racial divisions, which undeniably came to the fore as Mr Youngkin explicitly attacked critical race theory and “wokeness” as supposed enemies of the American way of life, there is also the matter of the Democrats’ failure so far to get Joe Biden’s agenda through Congress, something for which moderates and progressives are already blaming each other.

“The party’s inability to pass Biden’s economic program has already done a lot of damage,” wrote commentator Zachary D Carter. “Since March, the consistent message voters have been getting from Democrats in Washington has been ‘we think this is very important to your family, and we can’t get it done’.”

Others, however, pointed to some structural factors that made the election a tough one for Democrats regardless of the internal dynamics of the race. Amy Walter of the Cool Political Report argued that because the Virginia GOP chooses its nominees via a convention system, Mr Youngkin was spared “a long, drawn out primary where Trump and Trump-ism would be a bigger presence”. Mr Trump endorsed Mr Youngkin but did not campaign for him, making it harder for Democrats to label him an out-and-out Trumpist.

The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson, meanwhile, noted that for nearly five decades, the party that holds the presidency has almost invariably lost the Virginia governorship.

However, while turnout was indeed high by off-year standards, predictions that it would necessarily help the Democrats did not prove accurate.

As political scientist Michael McDonald pointed out, “Turnout matters because of the proscription for the Democrats moving forward. Their base is not demoralised by what’s going on in DC – they’re still voting at levels that helped them win in 2017 and 2018, if not higher. The difference is Republicans are mobilized even more.”

Some pundits also theorised that the result could signal deeper problems for Democrats that go beyond what’s happened in the off-year election cycle. The New York Times’s Trip Gabriel, for example, wrote that the results of Tuesday’s elections “were foreshadowed a year ago, when suburbanites’ rebuke of Trump did not translate downballot, and Dems lost House seats & suffered crushing losses in legislative races. None of Ds targeted chambers flipped even though Biden won many of the swing districts.”

Quotes given on the record by congressional Democrats themselves seemed to indicate an atmosphere of circumspection about what to do next, superficially at least. Some emphasised the need to get the Biden legislation passed, while others – most notably Nancy Pelosi – insisted that Virginia’s decision does not change the party’s agenda.

Joe Biden, however, had his own analysis. Speaking at the Cop26 summit in Glasgow before flying home as the election results came in, Mr Biden himself poured cold water on the idea that congressional Democratic gridlock was the deciding factor in the race – which he boldly predicted Mr McAuliffe would win.

“I don’t believe, and I’ve not seen any evidence, that whether I’m doing well or poorly or whether I’ve got my agenda passed or not is gonna have any real impact on winning or losing,” he told a press conference. “Even if I had passed my agenda, I wouldn’t claim we won because Biden’s agenda passed.”