Glenn Youngkin is feeling it, and so is the mid-day crowd, decked out in Youngkin and Trump 2024 gear and wearing T-shirts depicting President Joe Biden as a marionette controlled by communists or sporting slogans such as, “I don’t co-parent with the government.”
The 54-year-old businessman wasn’t supposed to be here – not in politics and certainly not within striking distance of becoming Virginia’s 74th governor. But Democratic voter malaise and a fired-up GOP base are adding up to a welcoming political landscape for the first-time candidate for elected office, who hopes to deliver a big gift to national Republicans with a victory Nov. 2.
He’s thrilled to have the press at his event, a wide-smiling Youngkin says to reporters several times, even as he is badgered with questions about a GOP rally the night before where attendees pledged allegiance to a flag used by Capitol insurrectionists on Jan. 6. He tells his supporters that “all eyes are on Virginia. Why? Because America needs us to make the statement.”
He dances around the question of whether he wants former President Donald Trump to campaign alongside him in Virginia, where the polarizing political figure could incite Democrats and independents to vote as much as Republicans. Asked how he feels about Trump characterizing him as “a good guy” when calling into the Take Back America event in Richmond, Youngkin looks sheepishly pleased.
“I am a good guy,” he said. “I appreciate the fact that President Trump acknowledges it.”
Officially, the Virginia governor’s race is a contest between two men at ideological poles: Youngkin, a wealthy businessman who casts himself as a conservative outsider bent on lowering taxes and banning “critical race theory” in schools, and 64-year-old Terry McAuliffe.
Best known during his first run for Virginia governor in 2009 as the charismatic fundraiser at the center of the Clinton money machine, McAuliffe was once derided as a carpetbagger in state Democratic circles. But after his win in 2013 and a generally successful term in office, he has since reinvented himself as an experienced political hand who can further a traditional Democratic vision by working across party lines.
In reality, the race is about something much bigger: the fate of a (barely) in-charge Democratic Party anxiously trying to rack up some legislative wins in Washington and avoid a political bloodletting next year and in 2024.
A Democratic win in Virginia, a state President Biden won by 10 points in 2020 and where the party controls both houses of the legislature and every statewide elected position, would be a relief for the majority party. A GOP win would be devastating for Democrats and a momentum-fueling trophy for Republicans hoping to flip both the House and the Senate next year.
Virginia for the most part has been trending blue since 2008, when former President Barack Obama captured the state for his party for the first time since 1964, but it’s not tinted in indelible ink, experts note. In an off-year election, and at a time when Democratic voters are dispirited, keeping the state in Democratic hands is not a given.
“It’s still close enough that it won’t take a large shift for Youngkin to pull off an upset, and that will have national implications,” says longtime Virginia politics watcher Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. “The perception is that Virginia is bluer than it is – and that’s why a Youngkin upset would be devastating” for Democrats, he adds.
How worried are Democrats? Enough that first lady Jill Biden will campaign for McAuliffe in Virginia on Friday. Obama will campaign in the state later this month, and voter-motivator Stacey Abrams, a former Georgia state lawmaker, will step in to help turn out the Black vote. Biden is also expected to make an appearance on McAuliffe’s behalf.
