Dems Suffer Trump's Fate in Virginia

Glenn Youngkin (Image by Kate Magee Joyce, via Wikipedia, license.)

The off-cycle elections, particularly in the blue states of Virginia and New Jersey, have received lots of attention as political barometers ahead of next year's mid-term Congressional elections, and the news has been bad for the Democrats, who lost Virginia's governorship and control of its House of Delegates over education. In even bluer New Jersey, the race for governor remains too close to call.

In Virginia, gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe did himself no favors by dismissing the idea of parents having a say in the educational curriculum of public schools -- at a time when many parents were concerned about their children being indocrinated with the bigoted, incorrect, and insulting tenets of Critical Race Theory there.

In addition memories of endless and needless school closures that started early in the pandemic were fresh on the minds of many voters. The sum total was that the Democrats faced an electorate angry with them over its autocratic and insulting style of government -- just like Donald Trump did a year ago.

The good news here is that Americans, despite their steadily weakening grasp on the proper purpose of government, aren't going to stand for being pushed around and condescended to.

The bad news, of course, is that weakening grasp of the proper purpose of government. Quoting from the AP story:

A former private equity executive, [Governor-elect Glenn] Youngkin presented himself as a nonthreatening suburban dad in a fleece vest. He embraced Trump just enough to win the GOP primary and rev up the party base, but was also able to target more moderate voters by talking about fiscal management and investing in schools and campaigning without the former president at his side.

So Youngkin is not a Trump clone, but there is also not even a whiff as far as I can tell of privatizing education -- which is what would, for starters, make top-down attempts at indoctrination impossible.

In other good news, a measure to replace the police department in Minneapolis -- one of the few places I could imagine such nonsense passing -- failed. That and New York City's election of a former policeman as Mayor should tell the Democrats that even in this day and age, most people have enough sense to understand that we need the government to perform a police function.

Whew! As appears to be the case so far in the Democrats' budget impasse, not all Democrats are completely nuts.

Such is what passes for good news these days. Its deeper meaning is that America isn't dead.

Dum spiro spero.

-- CAV