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      Republicans continue to stymie Democrats on voting rights. Will anything change?

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      The fight to voteUS SenateRepublicans continue to stymie Democrats on voting rights. Will anything change?Republicans filibuster Democratic efforts to pass billMove escalates pressure on Senator Joe Manchin The fight to vote is supported byAbout this contentSam Levine in New YorkThu 4 Nov 2021 10.00 EDTLast modified on Thu 4 Nov 2021 11.55 EDTHello, and happy Thursday,No, it’s not deja vu: Senate Republicans once again used the filibuster on Wednesday to stymie Democratic efforts to pass a significant voting rights bill. It’s the fourth time it’s happened this year, the most recent coming just two weeks ago.But Democrats and other voting rights advocates hope that this time is different.They never really expected 10 Republicans to sign on to the bill and advance it. Instead, they hoped to use the vote as a final chance to show the West Virginia senator Joe Manchin and Arizona senator Kyrsten Sinema, two of the staunchest filibuster defenders, that there is no hope of passing a voting rights bill while the filibuster remains in place.Democrats’ stinging Virginia defeat raises stark questions for Biden’s tenureRead moreIt’s a development that significantly escalates pressure on Manchin specifically. The voting rights bill that Republicans blocked in late October was one he personally helped write and sought GOP input on. The measure Republicans blocked on Wednesday, which would have restored a critical provision of the Voting Rights Act, is one he supports. Manchin has said that “inaction is not an option” on voting rights. But now Republicans have made it clear that while the filibuster remains in place, inaction is the only option.Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterSo where do things go from here? To start, I think we’ll begin to see a lot more explicit language from Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, about changing the rules of the filibuster. While Schumer has repeatedly said “all options are on the table” when it comes to voting rights, he’s stopped short of outlining specific changes he’d like to see or calling out Manchin and Sinema specifically. It’s only recently that Schumer has begun to talk about the need “to restore the Senate as the world’s greatest deliberative body”. I expect we’ll also see some increased pressure from the White House.Schumer continued that rhetoric on Wednesday after the filibuster. He described it as a “low, low point” in the history of the Senate, and questioned whether some of Congress’s greatest legislative accomplishments would have been able to overcome the filibuster if they had been proposed in today’s Senate.Per a senior Dem aide, Schumer met with King, Kaine and Tester earlier today to talk about next steps on voting rights and to have “family discussions” with their colleagues about how to “restore the Senate” and find a pathway forward on the legislation.— Marianne LeVine (@marianne_levine) November 3, 2021
      But will this be enough to sway Manchin and Sinema? I’ve written before about why I’m cautiously optimistic they will come around on voting rights. Manchin didn’t seem to be budging after Wednesday’s vote.“We’ve got Lisa Murkowski, we just need nine more,” Manchin said, according to Politico. “We need other people to be talking to each other and find a pathway forward. It can’t just be one or two people talking to both sides.”But as Democrats get mired in negotiations over the infrastructure bill, it may be harder to pressure their two holdouts. Biden said during a town hall in late October that it would be hard to deal with the filibuster while infrastructure negotiations were ongoing.In any case, the next few weeks will be critical in determining whether Democrats can actually protect access to the ballot box.Readers’ questionsPlease continue to write to me each week with your questions about elections and voting at sam.levine@theguardian.com or DM me on twitter at @srl and I’ll try to answer as many as I can.Also worth watching …
      I spoke with election officials across the country about the wave of threats and harassment they’ve seen over the last year
      Republicans in North Carolina and Ohio are pushing maps that would give them an extreme partisan advantage for the next decade.
      TopicsUS SenateThe fight to voteRepublicansDemocratsUS politicsJoe ManchinnewsReuse this content More

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      Biden says 'people are upset' after Democrat loss in Virginia – video

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      Joe Biden said “people are upset and uncertain about a lot of things” after Democrats suffered the loss of a gubernatorial seat in Virginia. Republican Glenn Youngkin defeated Democrat Terry McAuliffe one year after the party took control of the White House and Congress. Biden won Virginia by 10 points in 2020 before the victory of political newcomer Youngkin.

      Body blow for Biden as voters in Virginia and New Jersey desert Democrats More

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      Democratic governor Phil Murphy is New Jersey’s first to win re-election in 44 years

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      New JerseyDemocratic governor Phil Murphy is New Jersey’s first to win re-election in 44 yearsThe tight race was viewed as a referendum on Murphy’s – and more broadly, Democrats’ – leadership throughout the pandemic Maanvi Singh and agencies@maanvissinghWed 3 Nov 2021 20.04 EDTLast modified on Wed 3 Nov 2021 20.29 EDTThe Democratic governor of New Jersey, Phil Murphy, has narrowly won reelection, eking out a victory that spared Democrats the loss of a second gubernatorial seat.Murphy, a former executive at Goldman Sachs and ambassador to Germany, became the first Democratic governor to win reelection in New Jersey in 44 years. He defeated Jack Ciattarelli, a Republican and former assembly member.Murphy won following a tight race that was widely viewed as a referendum on the Democrat’s leadership throughout the pandemic. The governor issued stringent health orders to slow the spread of Covid-19, and has earned high marks from constituents for his leadership. He was one of the first governors to require Covid-19 vaccinations for public school teachers.What you missed: results from five US races on TuesdayRead moreBut Ciattarelli, like many Republican politicians across the US, seized on growing backlash and frustrations over mask mandates, school closures and other pandemic restrictions, waging a formidable campaign with spending that nearly equalled the governor’s. But while Republican voters came out in much higher rates for Ciattarelli this year than they did for his GOP predecessor in 2017, Murphy’s advantages, including 1 million more registered Democrats, proved too much for the Republican to overcome.That the race remained so close well into Wednesday evening, however, is likely to be an encouraging sign for Republicans ahead of the 2022 midterms, especially given the party’s victory in the Virginia gubernatorial election, where Glenn Youngkin, a Republican businessman, staged an upset victory over the incumbent Democratic governor, Terry McAuliffe.The Virginia race and other elections on Tuesday were seen as an early referendum on Joe Biden’s presidency and the Democrats’ national agenda, providing the first major tests of voter sentiment since the president took office. McAulliffe’s loss and Murphy’s narrow victory point to a potentially painful year ahead for Democrats as they try to maintain thin majorities in Congress.The closeness of the race has surprised experts, who watched public polls showing Murphy leading comfortably and looked to his party’s registration advantage of more than a million voters.“If you asked anybody several months ago within the state, I think anyone would have predicted a high double digit landslide for Murphy,” said Ashley Koning, the director of the Eagleton Center for Public Interest Polling at Rutgers University.Murphy built his campaign around the progressive accomplishments he signed into law, such as a phased in $15 an hour minimum wage and paid sick leave along with taxes on the wealthy. He also brought on Democratic allies, including Senator Bernie Sanders, to campaign for him.A spokesperson for Ciattarelli said Wednesday that the campaign was focused on the vote count and said that a possible legal pursuit of a recount was on the table. Murphy also called Wednesday morning for every vote to be counted.Ciattarelli is a former state Assembly member, serving until 2018. He’s the founder of a medical publishing company called Galen Publishing, and served as a local and county official in Somerset.TopicsNew JerseyUS politicsDemocratsnewsReuse this content More

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      How did Republicans turn critical race theory into a winning electoral issue?

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      US politicsHow did Republicans turn critical race theory into a winning electoral issue?Glenn Youngkin won the race to be Virginia’s governor having exploited concerns over teaching about race in schools David Smith in Washington@smithinamericaWed 3 Nov 2021 14.28 EDTLast modified on Wed 3 Nov 2021 15.34 EDTWhat is critical race theory?Developed by the former Harvard Law professor Derrick Bell and other scholars in the 1970s and 80s, critical race theory, or CRT, examines the ways in which racism was embedded into American law and other modern institutions, maintaining the dominance of white people.CRT argues that racism is not a matter of individual bigotry but a systemic issue that creates an uneven playing field for people of colour.Body blow for Biden as voters in Virginia and New Jersey desert DemocratsRead moreKimberlé Williams Crenshaw, a law professor widely credited with coining the term, told the New York Times: “It is a way of seeing, attending to, accounting for, tracing and analyzing the ways that race is produced, the ways that racial inequality is facilitated, and the ways that our history has created these inequalities that now can be almost effortlessly reproduced unless we attend to the existence of these inequalities.”A year or so ago few people had heard of it, yet Republicans have whipped up a moral panic that CRT is being rammed down the throats of schoolchildren. They caricature it as teaching Black children to internalise victimhood and white children to self-identify as oppressors.Is it taught in schools?No, it is not a part of the secondary school curriculum. The National School Boards Association and other education leaders are adamant that CRT is not being taught in K-12 schools, which teach students from five to 18 years old.But Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News and other rightwing media have turned it into a catch-all buzzword for any teaching in schools about race and American history. They loosely apply it to concepts such as equity and anti-bias training for teachers.Patti Hidalgo Menders, president of the Loudoun County Republican Women’s Club in Virginia, told the Guardian last week: “They may not call it critical race theory, but they’re calling it equity, diversity, inclusion. They use culturally responsive training for their teachers. It is fundamentally CRT.“It’s dividing our children into victims and oppressors and what’s a child supposed to do with that?”Efforts to weaponise CRT were reinforced by former president Donald Trump and a rightwing ecosystem including influential thinktanks. Last year Christopher Rufo, a conservative scholar now at the Manhattan Institute, told the Fox News host Tucker Carlson that CRT was a form of “cult indoctrination”.In January the Heritage Foundation hosted a panel discussion where the moderator, Angela Sailor, warned: “Critical race theory is the complete rejection of the best ideas of the American founding. This is some dangerous, dangerous philosophical poisoning in the blood stream.”What role did CRT play in Virginia’s election?Winning Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin’s signature issue was education. He hammered government schools on “culture war” issues such as race and transgender rights and falsely claimed that his Democratic opponent, Terry McAuliffe, called his friend, President Joe Biden, and asked the FBI to silence conservative parents.Youngkin said he would ban the teaching of CRT in Virginia classrooms. At a campaign event in Glen Allen last month, the candidate said to applause: “What we won’t do is teach our children to view everything through the lens of race. On day one, I will ban critical race theory.”McAuliffe was forced on to the defensive and had to engage with the issue. He accused Republicans of using the Trump playbook of division and deceit, a message that did not cut through in the same way.Why did the issue resonate with voters?This can be seen as a rightwing backlash to last year’s Black Lives Matter protests and conversations about structural racism that followed the police murder of George Floyd, an African American man in Minneapolis. It also can be seen as a response to America’s changing demographics, specifically the increase in the minority population.It also comes after lengthy school closures during the pandemic infuriated many parents. School board meetings in Virginia and elsewhere have turned ugly, even violent, and protest signs calling for bans on masks and CRT are sometimes almost interchangeable.This week conservatives targeted school board elections nationwide over masking rules and teaching racial justice issues. In Virginia, 14% of voters listed education as a top issue, and about seven of 10 of those voted for Youngkin.McAuliffe did not help himself when, during a debate, he said, “I don’t believe parents should be telling schools what they should teach” – a line that was constantly replayed in Youngkin attacks ads.Youngkin also highlighted a high school bathroom sexual assault case in affluent Loudoun county, in northern Virginia, to argue against allowing transgender students into their chosen restrooms.Is it just Virginia?No. Officials in Republican-controlled states across America are proposing numerous laws to ban teachers from emphasizing the role of systemic racism. Legislation aiming to curb how teachers talk about race has been considered by at least 15 states, according to research by Education Week.Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, has described CRT as “state-sanctioned racism”.Brad Little, the governor of Idaho, signed into law a measure banning public schools from teaching CRT, which it claimed will “exacerbate and inflame divisions on the basis of sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, national origin, or other criteria in ways contrary to the unity of the nation and the wellbeing of the state of Idaho and its citizens”.Red states are also targeting the 1619 Project, a series by the New York Times which contends that modern American history began with the arrival of enslaved people four centuries ago and examines that legacy.Republicans are expected to use the Youngkin formula to woo suburban voters in next year’s midterm elections for Congress.TopicsUS politicsRepublicansRaceDemocratsVirginiaexplainersReuse this content More

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      Body blow for Biden as voters in Virginia and New Jersey desert Democrats

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      US politicsBody blow for Biden as voters in Virginia and New Jersey desert DemocratsGovernor’s races bring more bad news for president whose domestic agenda hangs in the balance Lauren Gambino in Washington@laurenegambinoWed 3 Nov 2021 12.04 EDTLast modified on Wed 3 Nov 2021 15.33 EDTLess than a year after taking control of the White House and Congress, Democrats were reeling on Wednesday from a shocking defeat in Virginia and a too-close-to-call governor’s race in New Jersey as Joe Biden’s popularity sinks and his domestic agenda hangs in the balance.Democrats suffer disastrous night in Virginia and a tight race in New Jersey – liveRead moreIn Virginia, a state that had shifted sharply left over the past decade and that Biden won by 10 points in 2020, Republican Glenn Youngkin, a political newcomer, defeated Democrat Terry McAuliffe, the state’s former governor. And in New Jersey, the Democratic governor, Phil Murphy, was struggling to turn back a challenge from Republican Jack Ciattarelli, an unexpected turn of events in a state that is even more reliably Democratic.“Together, we will change the trajectory of this commonwealth and, friends, we are going to start that transformation on day one. There is no time to waste,” Youngkin said, addressing jubilant supporters in the early hours of Wednesday.Republicans’ resurgence after five years of stinging defeats during the Donald Trump era offers a stark warning for Democrats already wary of next year’s midterm elections. Their wins have echoes of 2009, when Republican victories in Virginia and New Jersey presaged their stunning takeover of the House in the 2010 midterms.“In a cycle like this, no Democrat is safe,” said Tom Emmer, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee. On Wednesday, the group announced it was expanding its list of Democratic targets for the 2022 midterms following Youngkin’s victory.The final weeks of the governor’s race in Virginia were dominated by education, as Youngkin, a 54-year-old former business executive, sought to harness parents’ frustration over school closures, mask mandates and anti-racism curriculum.Exploiting the nation’s culture wars over race and education, Youngkin repeatedly promised to outlaw “critical race theory”, an academic concept about the effects of systemic racism that is not taught in Virginia schools but has nevertheless galvanized conservatives across the country.McAuliffe, 64, worked relentlessly to tie his opponent to Trump in an attempt to revive the backlash to Trump that powered Democratic gains in recent years. But the effort was in vain.Exit polls showed Biden was nearly as unpopular as Trump in Virginia, with Youngkin outperforming the former president in counties across the commonwealth. His success offered Republicans a strategy for how to mobilize Trump’s most ardent supporters while appealing to moderate voters in the suburbs who felt alienated by the former president.Tuesday’s elections were the first major test of the national mood since Biden took office in January, and the results were deeply disappointing for the president and his party as they try to keep control of wafer-thin majorities in Congress.Democrats were not well served by Biden’s sagging poll numbers, which have slumped to near-historic lows after months of infighting among Democrats over his nearly $3tn legislative agenda on Capitol Hill, a devastating evacuation from Afghanistan and the ever-present threat of the coronavirus.“This election is a warning for all Democrats,” Guy Cecil, chair of the Democratic political group Priorities USA, said in a statement. “While DC Democrats spent weeks fighting each other, Republicans were focused on mobilizing their base and peeling away voters from the Biden coalition using deceptive, divisive tactics.”It remains unclear whether the defeat in Virginia will spur Democratic lawmakers to action on a shrunken version of Biden’s agenda – or if it will cause them to retreat from the sweeping plans.On Wednesday, the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, signalled that Democrats were prepared to charge ahead as planned. She announced that the rules committee would hold a hearing on the $1.75tn domestic policy and climate mitigation bill, paving the way for a vote on the legislation and a companion $1tn infrastructure measure.“Today is another momentous day in our historic effort to make the future better for the American people, for the children, to Build Back Better with women, to save the planet,” Pelosi wrote in a letter to Democrats on Wednesday.Arriving at the Capitol on Wednesday morning, Pelosi brushed off any suggestion that McAuliffe’s loss changed the outlook for their agenda. “No, no,” she told reporters.But in the wake of Tuesday’s elections, some Democrats expressed fresh doubt about the party’s resolve to enact both pieces of Biden’s agenda. Centrist lawmakers said the defeat was reason to swiftly pass the bipartisan infrastructure bill, regardless of what happens with the larger spending measure, amid concern that the effort would further alienate moderate and suburban voters who were critical to Biden’s victory in 2020 but shifted back toward Republicans in Virginia on Tuesday.But progressives argued that abandoning their ambitious policy proposals would only spell further doom for their party, in desperate need of an economic message.“The lesson going into 2022 is that Democrats need to use power to get big things done for working people and then run on those accomplishments. Period,” the Progressive Change Campaign Committee said in a statement.“Democrats won’t win simply by branding one opponent after another as a Trump clone, and then hoping to squeak out a razor-thin win. When Democrats fail to run on big ideas or fulfill bold campaign promises, we depress our base while allowing Republicans to use culture wars to hide their real agenda.”Democrats have only a five-vote margin in the House and are tied in the Senate, relying on the vice-president’s casting vote. Historically, the party in power in the White House almost always loses seats in Congress.Elsewhere across the US, it was a night of historic firsts for Asian American candidates, a sign of the growing political strength of the AAPI community amid a rise in anti-Asian hate.Michelle Wu became the first woman and person of color elected to be mayor of Boston in the city’s 200-year history. Wu, a progressive Democrat endorsed by her former Harvard law professor, the Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, defeated fellow city councilor Annissa Essaibi George, who ran as a pragmatist with the backing of the city’s traditional power players.In Cincinnati, Aftab Pureval, the son of immigrants from Tibet and India, defeated the former Democratic congressman David Mann. In Dearborn, Michigan, voters elected Abdullah Hammoud, a state lawmaker, as its first Arab American mayor.In New York City, Democrat Eric Adams, a former NYPD police captain, was elected mayor of the nation’s largest city. He will be the second Black mayor in the city’s history.TopicsUS politicsVirginiaDemocratsJoe BidenUS CongressHouse of RepresentativesNancy PelosinewsReuse this content More

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      Biden plays up positives but frustrations apparent after Cop26 talks

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      Cop26Biden plays up positives but frustrations apparent after Cop26 talksTrip to Glasgow was heavy on dire warnings but light on deep emissions cuts – and ended with him blaming China and Russia Oliver Milman@olliemilmanWed 3 Nov 2021 08.07 EDTLast modified on Wed 3 Nov 2021 11.05 EDTJoe Biden returned to the US in the pre-dawn gloom on Wednesday to a climate agenda still held in frustrating limbo by Congress, following his high-profile cameo at crunch UN climate talks in Scotland that was heavy on dire warnings but light on deep cuts to planet-heating emissions.Nuclear arms hawks give bureaucratic mauling to Biden vow to curb arsenalRead moreThe US president had aimed to arrive in Glasgow for the Cop26 summit with historic climate legislation in hand, which he could use to brandish at world leaders who still harbor resentments over four turbulent years of Donald Trump, where the climate crisis was variously ignored and mocked.Instead, the intransigence of Senator Joe Manchin, a centrist Democrat and leading beneficiary of fossil fuel industry largesse, has left the landmark climate bill pared back and not voted upon, its fate left uncertain throughout Biden’s trip.In Glasgow, Biden vowed America will “lead by the power of our example”, but was the target of activist protests over oil and gas leases issued back home, while leaders of several major emitters either did not show up or failed to submit vastly improved emissions reduction plans.Biden ended his time in Scotland by ladling blame upon China for not taking the climate emergency seriously.“The most important thing the president needed to do was reassure the rest of the world that the US is back in addressing this global crisis,” said Christy Goldfuss, an environment adviser to Barack Obama and now a policy expert at the Center for American Progress.“But we have to have some humility, we have ground to make up. We can’t reclaim the mantle of leadership until the US can deliver on its commitments. Every Democrat, apart from one senator, supports climate action. That is untenable and everyone understands that.”Biden has sought to play up the positives of his time at Cop26, where he has left negotiators to thrash out a deal aimed at averting disastrous global heating of beyond 1.5C. “I can’t think of any two days where more has been accomplished on climate,” he said.The highlights include a global pledge, led by the US and European Union, to slash methane, a potent greenhouse gas, by 30% by 2030, based on last year’s levels. More than 100 countries, including six of the 10 largest emitters of methane, have signed on to the agreement to cut methane, which is spewed out by oil and gas drilling operations and agriculture and is about 80 times more powerful in trapping heat than carbon dioxide.Biden backed this move with new regulations rolled out by the US Environment Protection Agency to cut methane emissions by about 75% from hundreds of thousands of oil and gas wells. “The pledge to cut methane is the single biggest and fastest bite out of today’s warming,” said Durwood Zaelke, president of the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development.There was also a sweeping accord, which Biden vowed to support with billions of dollars, to end deforestation within a decade. The pact encompasses 85% of the world’s forests, vital for biodiversity and to soak up excess carbon from the atmosphere, and is backed by Brazil, Russia and China, countries often reluctant to make such promises.But the US was clearly piqued at how little the relentless diplomacy of John Kerry, Biden’s climate envoy, had done to extract deeper emissions cuts from leading carbon polluters. Neither Russia’s Vladimir Putin nor China’s Xi Jinping, who both offered barely improved new targets at the talks, traveled to Glasgow. Biden’s frustration bubbled over as he prepared to depart on Tuesday.“The fact that China is trying assert a new role in the world as a world leader, not showing up? Come on,” Biden said. “It’s just a gigantic issue and they’ve walked away. How do you do that and claim to have any leadership now? Same with Putin in Russia: his tundra is burning. Literally his tundra is burning. He has serious, serious climate problems and he’s mum on his willingness to do anything.”The blame placed at Cop upon China, which is now the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, comes amid frayed US-China relations on several fronts. The Global Times, a newspaper run by China’s Communist party, said in an editorial that Washington’s attitude had made it “impossible for China to see any potential to have fair negotiation amid the tensions”.Goldfuss said: “The blame game is not something the US should be really playing right now given we have so much work to do ourselves.”Back home, Biden has acknowledged his presidency will probably be defined by the proposed reconciliation bill that contains $555bn in climate measures. The White House says the legislation would bring the country close to the president’s goal of cutting emissions in half this decade and help curb disastrous climate breakdown that is already unleashing severe heatwaves, floods and drought at home and around the world.The far-reaching legislation needs every Democratic vote to pass the Senate but West Virginia’s Manchin has questioned its scope, said it is filled with “gimmicks” and has already ensured that a centerpiece plan to phase out fossil fuels from the American electricity grid was axed from the bill.Democrats continue to fret over the fate of the bill, with a vote that could take place as early as this week, with Biden saying he is “confident we will get it done”. But climate campaigners say the president could do more without the help of Congress to stem the flow of fossil fuels that are causing the climate crisis.The opening week of Cop26 saw Biden’s administration announce it will sell off oil and gas drilling leases across 730,000 acres of the US west, with a further auction of 80m offshore acres of the Gulf of Mexico, an area larger than the UK, set to commence later this month. The International Energy Agency has said that no new fossil fuel projects can commence if the world is to keep to the agreed 1.5C warming limit.“With all eyes on Glasgow this week, the Biden administration seems to be turning its back on reality and throwing climate leadership into the toilet,” said Jeremy Nichols, climate and energy program director for WildEarth Guardians.TopicsCop26Joe BidenUS politicsDemocratsJohn KerryUS foreign policynewsReuse this content More

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      Democrats’ stinging Virginia defeat raises stark questions for Biden’s tenure

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      US politicsDemocrats’ stinging Virginia defeat raises stark questions for Biden’s tenureAnalysis: Glenn Youngkin’s victory comes as the president’s agenda has stalled and danger looms for the party in Congress David Smith in Tysons, Virginia@smithinamericaWed 3 Nov 2021 01.02 EDTLast modified on Wed 3 Nov 2021 02.42 EDTJoe Biden exuded confidence. “We’re going to win,” the US president told reporters before departing Cop26 in Glasgow. “I think we’re going to win in Virginia.”But as Biden returns to Washington, he faces questions about why his prediction was so wrong – and whether Democrats’ loss in the most important election of the year will send his presidency into a downward spiral.Republican Glenn Youngkin poised to win Virginia governor’s race in blow to BidenRead moreThe Republican Glenn Youngkin’s surprise victory over the Democrat Terry McAuliffe in the race for governor of Virginia is a brutal rebuke for Biden, who had personally invested in the race, twice making the short trip from Washington to campaign for McAuliffe at rallies.It will particularly sting because Donald Trump, whom he defeated in Virginia by 10 percentage points in last year’s presidential election, will doubtless seek to claim credit for the result and savor his revenge.But the truth is that this election was more about the current president than the spectre of the last one.Biden’s ambitious agenda has stalled in Congress. By his own admission, the inertia has sucked oxygen away from priorities such as a police reform and voting rights, disillusioning the activists who fuel Democratic turnout. Inflation and gasoline prices are up. Global supply chains are buckling. And Biden’s sunny predictions for post-withdrawal Afghanistan were as off the mark as his predictions for Virginia.The president’s sagging approval rating of 42% combined with historical headwinds to drag McAuliffe down. Nothing energizes a political movement like opposition: the president’s party has lost every election for governor of Virginia over almost half a century – the exception was McAuliffe himself in 2013.But this time McAuliffe failed to inspire. The chairman of Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential primary campaign had a distinct whiff of Clinton 2016: a career politician imbued with a sense of entitlement who constantly found himself on the defensive against an upstart candidate drawing bigger crowds.Like Hillary Clinton’s reference to “deplorables”, McAuliffe made a perceived gaffe – “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach” – which was replayed endlessly in Youngkin attack ads.McAuliffe’s central argument – that Youngkin is an acolyte of Trump – was about the past. Youngkin’s central argument – that schools are under attack from culture warriors on race and gender – was about the future, even if it was riddled with falsehoods. To many voters, the future tends to be more persuasive.Enough of them did not seem to know or care that Youngkin’s arguments on schools were based on a lie. He stoked fears about critical race theory being taught in schools – it isn’t – with a caricature of Black children learning to think they are victims and white children learning to self-hate.It cut through and proved effective in a febrile, pandemic-era atmosphere where parents shout and even turn violent at school board meetings debating issues such as gender identity and mask mandates. Whereas McAuliffe wanted to nationalize the election, Youngkin managed to keep it local, albeit by tapping into Fox News talking points following last year’s Black Lives Matter protests.Expect this incendiary mix of children and racism to be chapter one of the Republican playbook in next year’s midterm elections for Congress. Expect chapter two to be How to Deal with a Problem Called Donald Trump.The 45th president will still be welcome in the safe districts of the Make America Great Again nation, sure to draw fanatical crowds and turn out the vote. But in swing states, Youngkin has shown Republicans the way to have their cake and eat it too.In the Republican primary, he praised Trump and fanned his false claims of voter fraud by raising concerns about “election integrity”. In the general election, he was willing to tacitly pat Trump on the back without ever embracing him – he eschewed mentions of the former president in campaign speeches and must have been tremendously relieved that Trump never turned up in person.Youngkin squared the circle that many Republicans have struggled with, creating a template for how to win over moderates and independents without alienating the Trump base, or vice versa. Call it the Goldilocks principle of strategic ambiguity: neither too hot nor too cold, but just the right temperature.Democrats knew exactly what he was doing. McAuliffe relentlessly tried to conflate Youngkin with Trump. At a rally last week, Biden warned: “Extremism can come in many forms. It can come in the rage of a mob driven to assault the Capitol. It can come in a smile and a fleece vest. Either way, the big lie is still a big lie.”But it was all in vain.Youngkin, like Trump, might have emphasized his status as a businessman and political outsider but otherwise came over as a suburban dad, more polished and less profane: the acceptable face of Trumpism. Yet his tactics were just as dark, dishonest and divisive.Democrats will now need to find a counter-strategy fast. Some commentators have suggested that members of the House and Senate could desert Biden and rush to the exits, retiring rather than facing a bloodbath in the midterms, so weakening the president’s hand at a crucial moment for his agenda. Virginia is a warning cry that the party needs strong leadership to get it done before things fall apart.Wednesday marks the first anniversary of Biden’s defeat of Trump in a presidential election like no other. But the pandemic of Trumpism rages in new and unexpected ways – and the Youngkin variant may prove among the most dangerous.TopicsUS politicsVirginiaJoe BidenDemocratsRepublicansUS CongressanalysisReuse this content More