New York Times political reporter Jeremy Peters wrote about the tight Virginia governor’s race between Democrat Terry McAuliffe (the former DNC head who previously served as Virginia’s governor from 2014-2018) and Republican Glenn Youngkin: “Running in Virginia, Youngkin Shifted Tone With Hard Right Turn.”
Youngkin has a lead outside the margin of error in at least one poll in the runup to Tuesday’s vote, which is doubtless why alarmed stories like the one in Saturday’s TimesThey are now available.
Glenn Youngkin attempted to sound like the Republican that dominated Virginia’s party in 2009, the last time a Republican had been elected to the statewide office.
To praise free markets and job creaters and avoid discussing divisive social topics, he avoided any discussion. Conservative activists didn’t know much about him and what he thought as a consequence.
Peters introduces Glenn Youngkin to us, the cynical Republican fraud:
In the days leading up to Tuesday’s election, many Republicans said they didn’t really know the true beliefs of Mr. Youngkin. They cheered him up regardless. He took a radical right turn, and started promoting causes that were animating conservatives, and those who supported the former president. This included the discussion about teaching racism and transgender rights at schools.
To Mr. Youngkin’s critics, his culture warrior persona is cynical and disingenuous — just the kind of transactional decision that a career investment manager with a fortune estimated at close to $400 million would make to win.
But to his Republican supporters, whether or not it’s an act isn’t really the point.
As long as Mr. Youngkin is saying what they want to hear and signaling what they understand he cannot say out loud — running on the issue of “election integrity,” for instance, rather than wholeheartedly accepting Mr. Trump’s lies about election fraud in 2020 — many conservatives see his campaign as providing a template for how to delicately embrace Trumpism in blue states.
Peters had some negative Republican critics.
Mr. Youngkin’s Republican detractors, however, see an opportunistic politician pandering to the party’s base.
“Whether he believes in this Trump stuff or if he’s trafficking in it, I don’t know,” said David Ramadan, a former Republican member of the Virginia House of Delegates who now teaches at George Mason University. “But if he doesn’t really believe this stuff and is just trafficking in it,” Mr. Ramadan added, “that’s worse than believing it.”
Some traditional ingredients were added by him. New York Times red flags, like “angry parents” and Republicans “seizing” on an issue.
As the country’s culture wars reached a boiling point earlier this year, Loudoun County’s angry parents denouncedSchools administrators who implemented a curriculum that taught black students to be racist were punished. The issue was brought up by Mr. YoungkinSurprisingly, conservatives assumed that he was more like the Republicans who are out of favor with the activists base.
Then he propagated the common liberal falsehood of Critical Race Theory.
Youngkin also pledged that, if elected, that he would ban critical race theories from public schools. It is an academic body that examines the impact of systemic racist behavior that has rallied conservatives all over the country. It’s not taught in Virginia classrooms and it is usually not presented until college.
In fact, CRT is possible in elementary schools.
Peters ignored the negative polling results for McAuliffe, Democrat.
….a Fox News survey released Thursday showed Mr. Youngkin pulling away from Mr. McAuliffe, with an eight-percentage-point lead among likely voters, exceeding the poll’s margin of sampling error.
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