Voters in Virginia rejected Democrats’ desperate claims of racism on Tuesday, electing Republican Glenn Youngkin as governor and fellow Republican Winsome Sears — the first black woman to hold statewide office — to lieutenant governor.
Democrats — and journalists — played the race card with increasing urgency as their main candidate, former governor Terry McAuliffe, began fading in the polls.
They said that Youngkin’s attack on Critical Race Theory in the schools was a “racist dog whistle.” The pseudo-Republicans of the disgraced Lincoln Project sent faux white supremacists to troll a Youngkin rally. And journalists frantically tweeted a photo of a man wearing a Confederate flag jacket at Youngkin’s last big event.
Voters looked past all of that and voted based on the issues: the faltering economy, the left’s ideological stranglehold on the schools; and the failed leadership of President Joe Biden, who has been in a nose dive since the Afghanistan withdrawal.
For Republicans, Youngkin’s win, and the other successes of the evening, show that the party can win when it avoids traps set by Democrats and the media and focuses on the issues that voters care about.
For Democrats, the loss is an opportunity to examine the leftward drift of the party, and realize that voters want more than race and Trump Derangement Syndrome.
However, the likelier outcome is that the “progressives” will dig in, seeing the loss as evidence that the party needs to do more to motivate its base, such as passing massive spending bills that are currently held up by moderate opposition in the Senate.
To that end, the race card will continue to be played — against targets within the party as well as outside of it.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.