No film director could have choreographed it better. At the very moment Joe Biden emerged from his helicopter into a cold, dark night on the White House south lawn, a new adversary was delivering his victory speech before a hot-blooded crowd in northern Virginia.

The cable news split screen took place just after 1am on Wednesday. The president, a Democrat, was returning from G20 and Cop26 summits in Europe. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, was celebrating a stunning victory in the race for governor of Virginia. The message from voters was emphatic.

The Republican party was back in business, ready to take on a weakened president whose party is racked by infighting. Youngkin showed the way by deploying a formidable new weapon to which Democrats had no answer: a racist culture war fought over children.

The businessman turned politician promised to ban critical race theory (CRT) from Virginia’s schools on his first day in office. It mattered little that CRT, an academic discipline that examines the ways in which racism operates in US laws and society, is not taught in Virginia’s schools.

Moral panic over CRT has been fuelled for more than a year by Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News and other rightwing media, an apparent backlash to racial justice protests that followed the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis last year. In such hands, CRT became a catch-all for any teaching about race and American history.

“It is a very convenient soundbite for encapsulating everything about the reckoning after George Floyd’s death and the Black Lives Matter movement,” said Tanya Hernández, a law professor at Fordham University in New York.

“It is a way censor to gag and suppress any kind of reconsideration of our status quo.

“Those who are making a lot of noise about critical race theory have no interest in learning what it’s really about because it’s not their focal point, just a nice encapsulation as a reference point of everything they don’t like. They don’t want any discussion about the accuracy and the truthfulness of our racial histories to be taught to children.”

Youngkin turned the manufactured controversy into a seductive argument, even citing civil rights leader Martin Luther King on the stump.

He told supporters: “What we don’t do is teach our children to view everything through a lens of race, where we divide them into buckets – one group’s an oppressor and another group’s a victim – and we pit them against each other and we steal their dreams. We will not be a commonwealth of dream-stealers.”

It proved the right dog whistle in the right place at the right time. Youngkin tapped into a surge of frustration among suburban parents after months of school closures due to the coronavirus pandemic. This included grumbles about teachers’ unions, mask mandates and what they witnessed about their children’s education during months of remote learning.

A self-declared outsider with a suburban dad persona, if with a background in private equity, Youngkin promised to empower parents even as his Democratic rival, Terry McAuliffe – a career politician who launched his campaign with the slogan “Our Kids. Our Schools. Our Future” – vowed to keep them away from the curriculum.

Tara Setmayer, a senior adviser to the Lincoln Project, a group opposed to Donald Trump and Trumpism, said: “Republicans are the masters at finding an issue playing on the racial resentment and grievance within the Republican party base and creating this perception that somehow this is a threat to children, to white America, and some type of invasion of the education system.

“Critical race theory doesn’t even exist here and most people don’t know what it is. But it is a masterclass in how perception is reality and, when propaganda isn’t pushed back on, it can metastasise in ways that become problematic in campaigns. That’s exactly what happened in Virginia.”

‘The party of parents’

Youngkin’s success with CRT makes it likely to become a core part of Republican strategy for next year’s midterm elections. The House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, has announced support for a Parents’ Bill of Rights opposing the teaching of CRT. Jim Banks, chairman of the conservative House study committee, issued a memo suggesting: “Republicans can and must become the party of parents.”

Democrats are likely to resist by contending that many top Republicans’ underlying goal is cutting funding from public schools and giving it to private and religious alternatives. The vast majority of American children attend public schools.

Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House principal deputy press secretary, told reporters on Thursday: “Republicans are lying. They’re not being honest. They’re not being truthful about where we stand. And they’re cynically trying to use our kids as a political football. They’re talking about our kids when it’s election season but they won’t vote for them when it matters.”

In many ways it is a case of back to the future, the return of a culture wars playbook that has served Republicans for more than half a century. In 1968, Richard Nixon’s “law and order” campaign wooed the south by appealing to racial fear and resentment without using overtly racist language.

Ronald Reagan demonised “welfare queens”. In 1988, a political action committee linked to George HW Bush’s campaign funded a crude advert blaming Michael Dukakis, the Democratic nominee, for the case of Willie Horton, an African American convict who committed rape during a furlough from prison. Bush’s campaign manager, Lee Atwater, bragged that he would make Horton “Dukakis’s running mate”.

Setmayer, a former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill, said: “Lee Atwater, who was considered one of the greatest Republican political operatives, understood that racial resentment animates a lot of white suburban voters and you can manipulate that to get people to the polls. Critical race theory now is the modern day version of the southern strategy.”

Republicans are masters at simplifying messages and repeating them until they become a mantra, she said, while Democrats tend to lecture about policy.

“Republicans are predictable in their methods but Democrats still haven’t figured out how to beat them because Democrats don’t do well in the culture war battle. They should learn from this election cycle that you cannot show up to a political guerrilla warfare fight with a policy pen.”

Trump, who got his big break in politics by pushing the conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was born in Kenya, took the southern strategy to new and unsubtle extremes. Youngkin offered Republicans hope they can put the genie back in the bottle, returning to the coded race-baiting of the pre-Trump era.

He did accept the former president’s endorsement and refrain from speaking ill of him. But during the campaign’s final weeks he almost never spoke of Trump, doubtless aware that he remains a toxic force among suburban voters, especially women. Democrats were unable to find a photo of Youngkin and Trump together and were forced to run ads that spliced them.

Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said: “Ever since [the insurrection at the US Capitol on] 6 January, they have been looking for ways to get around Donald Trump, and they think they’ve found it using this Virginia race.

“It’s to not ignore him, because he will lash out and you’ll lose his base, but it’s to say good things and to make sure you have emissaries, which is what Youngkin did, who are keeping him informed and in the loop and telling him how important he is. And then just never being able to get together. ‘We just can’t get the schedules to match!’ It’s incredible they managed to do it for a whole campaign but they did.”

But it is far from certain this Trump-lite approach will work for Republicans next year. Districts in the House of Representatives have different dynamics from state-wide races for governor; Republican primaries are generally won by the most ardently pro-Trump candidate. Few are able to self-finance like the multi-millionaire Youngkin.

And when the midterms campaign is under way, there seems little prospect of Trump holding back. His rallies are sure to dominate TV coverage and taint all Republican candidates, including those in battleground states who would prefer to keep him at arm’s length. His ego will not allow otherwise.

Kurt Bardella, an adviser to the Democratic National Committee, said: “Donald Trump is not going to sit on the sidelines and make himself disappear from public life as much as the Republican party apparatus may wish that, so they can have their cake and eat it too. In my opinion, the Youngkin win is the exception to the rule. It’s not the new rule yet.”

He continued: “The message for Democrats and for the president coming from Tuesday is: get shit done. It’s a lot easier to knock somebody over who’s standing still than to knock somebody over who’s moving forward. Ultimately, I do believe that the American people respond to action and progress and a momentum.”

‘Mean evil Republicans’

Biden has sunk to 50% disapproval and 41% approval in an Emerson College national poll. He received a boost on Friday when it was announced that the economy added 531,000 jobs last month. After months of stalling, Congress moved towards passing his ambitious legislative agenda.

But Democrats, who narrowly averted disaster in the election for governor in New Jersey, still face the challenge of communicating the benefits of Biden’s plans to voters – one that Barack Obama failed a decade ago. And they will have to find a way to reverse their fortunes in the latest iteration of the culture wars.

Ed Rogers, a political consultant and veteran of the Reagan and George HW Bush administrations and several national campaigns, said of Democrats: “They never respect the legitimacy of their defeat. It’s always because ‘the mean evil Republicans fooled people’. Well, here we are.

“It is a harbinger. This was a time Republicans were supposed to do OK in these little off-year elections. They’re supposed to do real well in the midterms and it’s still certainly on that trajectory. If Democrats didn’t learn anything, they should learn that.”