With polls in Virginia now showing Republican Glenn Youngkin leading the gubernatorial race, there’s a sense of panic emanating from the Terry McAuliffe campaign.
At one point earlier in the month, I believe McAuliffe felt he had the ability to go ahead and sew things up, especially given Virginia’s heavy blue lean. This strategy involved bringing in Barack Obama and Stacey Abrams to help rally support. Virginia has experienced wild electoral swings over the past decade, which is a strange state.
His desperate attempts to get big-name Democrats involved in a blitz failed. That culminated yesterday in a disgusting stunt yesterday to paint Youngkin as a white supremacist that The Lincoln Project has taken credit for (though, no one should buy there wasn’t coordination).
The biggest evidence to date that McAuliffe was in the middle of panic attack is perhaps revealed. After months of making his entire campaign about Donald Trump, the Democrat is now saying the race isn’t about Donald Trump.
Never a good sign when a few days before the election you back off your main line of attack against your opponent, presumably because you realize it hasn’t been working https://t.co/9TmM8RsvJD
— Rich Lowry (@RichLowry) October 30, 2021
Terry McAuliffe claimed on Saturday that the Virginia gubernatorial election is “not about Trump” — even though the Democratic gubernatorial candidate has invoked the former Republican President perhaps more than any other political figure.
The comment, which belies the fact that tying Republican nominee Glenn Youngkin to Trump has been a central political strategy for McAuliffe since the start of the campaign, represents a significant shift for the Democrat just days before Tuesday’s election and on the final day of early voting in Virginia.
Here’s the thing with “significant shift(s).” No campaign makes them within days of an election — unless they definitively believe that they are losing.
McAuliffe has made Trump a centerpiece of his campaign, and that’s been a theme repeated by everyone involved. Joe Biden mentioned Trump more than a dozen times in his stump speech as a candidate for governor. In just the past few days, McAuliffe has referenced Trump and his movement multiple times in trying to quell the damage he’s done with the parents of school-age children in Virginia.
So for him, at this incredibly late hour, to try to reset his campaign to be about real issues and not screaming “Trump” over and over is a big red flag. What’s ironic is that had he made this move earlier, it may have actually paid dividends and carried him to victory. Virginia’s leaning blue is evident, as Biden led the state by just 10 points a year earlier. McAuliffe needed to be rational, speak about economic improvement, not become the enemy of parents.
That’s not what happened, though. He instead went on a rant about MAGA as an insider politician, and Youngkin won the battle for issues that voters are concerned about. McAuliffe’s strategic blunder will not be rectified by an eleventh-hour shift in messaging. Given the enthusiasm of Youngkin and early voting, it is clear that Tuesday will be a busy day for McAuliffe.
The only question is whether Virginia’s partisan lean will be enough to save the Democrat. We’ll all find out soon enough.
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