The Tribune

With CHARLIE HARPER

TUESDAY might have answered the biggest contemporary question in American politics.

Republican Glenn Youngkin not only captured the governorship of the Commonwealth of Virginia for his party’s first such triumph since 2009, but he carried with him into office the state’s first black female lieutenant governor and swept aside a two-term Democratic attorney general.

While the election had seemed to tighten considerably in the waning weeks of a long, acerbic campaign, the nonetheless surprising result seemed to offer the US a political path forward that does not include pouting, puerile, pernicious and petty Donald J Trump.

Such a path was not previously apparent, leaving the country vulnerable to the dangerous, demagogic rhetoric and divisive policies of the former president and acolytes such as the governors of Florida and Texas and senators such as Texas’ Ted Cruz and Missouri’s Josh Hawley.

It’s not as though the former president has experienced an epiphany and now realises that despite his enduring support among the self-identified rank and file Republican voters who respond to poll questions, he may represent the biggest threat to a Republican resurgence that seems to be gaining significant momentum.

In a tele-rally on the eve of Virginia’s momentous election, and after what were reportedly quiet and sensitive negotiations between Trump’s camp and the Youngkin inner circle, Trump rambled on for six minutes extolling Youngkin, a “fantastic fellow”. According to news reports, Trump also repeated numerous mendacious, tired taglines. He claimed that a victory by Democrat Terry McAuliffe would “destroy your neighbourhoods, wreck your schools, endanger your security and crush your property values”.

In fairness, these charges all have some indirect basis in policy fact. Progressive and hyper-liberal Democrats across the country, emboldened by Trump’s defeat last year and their part in Joe Biden’s victory, have indeed introduced measures that have proposed the following: zoning changes to reduce the preponderance of single-family homes in relatively prosperous areas to encourage affordable housing; curriculum adjustments in public schools that can be characterised as promoting white guilt over past and continuing racial injustice; defunding city police forces in favour of multi-disciplinary law enforcement staffing that might stimulate criminal violence, and, as a potential result of all of the above, a major depression in currently robust property values in many parts of the US.

A large number of American voters, like voters everywhere else where such choices are confronted, will seek alternatives.

This is not to say that defeated Virginia Democrat Terry McAuliffe openly espoused any of the scary policies outlined above. But even as he doggedly continued to tie Trump to Youngkin, McAuliffe was unable to deflect the shade thrown his way by the Republicans.

Terry McAuliffe also looked old this year. And his candidacy also felt old. This veteran political fixer first made his national name thirty years ago as a prodigious fundraiser for first Bill and then Hillary Clinton. He’s as much a relic of the past as Hillary was as a presidential candidate in 2016. He was also previously governor of Virginia, from 2013-2017. The state constitution does not permit governors to run for a second consecutive term, so McAuliffe was term-limited after four years and only returned to active statewide politics last year.

He was also facing, in Youngkin, someone who looks like a Virginian. With a shock of brown hair constantly unfurling on his brow and an acknowledged folksiness that belies the immense personal wealth that largely allowed him to self-finance his campaign – to the reported tune of $20m – this former investment banker carefully navigated the treacherous path first to nomination and then to general election.

His challenge was what many expect to confront Republicans everywhere next year: At present, it appears that to get the GOP nomination for public office and/or discourage a financially damaging primary election challenge, Republicans must first persuade Trump’s supposedly rabid base of their fealty to him. Then, as Republicans, and Democrats, have mostly been obliged to do for generations in similar situations, they must inch toward the political centre to triumph in the general election.

Because Trump represented such an uncivil, jarring extreme in personal behaviour, many felt that such a delicate balancing act would prove insurmountable for Republicans in 2022.

Youngkin seems to have nonetheless pulled it off.

After publicly bowing down to Trump during the Republican primary campaign earlier this year and emerging with the GOP nomination from a crowded field, Youngkin edged carefully away from the former president. Youngkin managed to be nowhere near Trump’s election eve tele-rally, for example. He never invited Trump to campaign with him. He admitted that Joe Biden was legitimately elected as president last year.

Trump stayed faithfully loyal. This was likely in part because Trump respects power and money above all else and Youngkin has clearly made a lot of money in his career. But in any case, the ex-president issued no snarky reactions to Youngkin’s rebuffs. Indeed, Trump praised him this week again as a “fantastic guy”.

It’s early in the forthcoming process of dissecting this election. But Youngkin won because voters saw him as more a steady, traditional, instinctively conservative Republican. And they seemed to have looked beyond his great personal wealth to see him as more like them than, for example, the aloof Mitt Romney and George H W Bush, whose elitism could not be so easily disguised in their own unsuccessful national campaigns in 1992 and 2012.

Republican, conservative values look good in America this morning.

As Fox News opinion-show hosts Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham smugly but credibly intoned on Tuesday night, the presidency of Joe Biden has stumbled out of the gate in many areas.

First, he has clearly been unable to keep his own party in line. Look for example at the US Senate. Democrats Joe Manchin, a reported coal-mine part owner from West Virginia and Kirsten Sinema, a maverick gadfly of indeterminate policy roots from Arizona, have been allowed to hijack Biden’s ambitious reform agenda on issues like climate change and taxes that enjoy significant popularity among American voters.

Contrast that disorder with the Republicans in the Senate, who continue to do just as Minority Leader Mitch McConnell tells them to do. What are we hearing from the once-rebellious Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Ben Sasse of Nebraska, or Susan Collins of Maine these days? Any dissent from the monolithic GOP resistance to Biden and his policy initiatives? Not recently.

Voters have become inured to Republican obstructionism in the Senate under McConnell. No one, including liberal pundits, expects anything else. But voters could reasonably have expected change and progress under Biden and Democratic working majorities in both houses of Congress. Maybe Youngkin’s success will scare Democrats into compromise and unity on major initiatives now, but the first impressions of Biden aren’t a good look for him or his party.

Biden also does look old. On television, unless he is looking straight into the camera, it is easy enough to view him as the old, balding man that he indubitably is.

Second, the performance of Biden and his party has been susceptible to credible attack on many fronts. Lifting restrictions on climate-threatening practices such as hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) for gas and oil reserves enabled Trump & Co. to tout American energy independence. Now it is easy to superficially link reimposition of climate-friendly government restrictions with rising gasoline prices in the US, which make everything more expensive and have a tendency to drive inflation.

The Democrats’ left wing apparent extremism on education, together with the party’s indivisible alliance with the National Education Association public school teachers’ union, has expanded the party’s vulnerability.

And the debacle at the southern American border, while it has receded from the headlines temporarily, continues to reinforce the notion that Democrats cannot be trusted with matters of national security or foreign policy. Biden’s precipitous, impulsive withdrawal from Afghanistan looks clumsy even though most observers acknowledge it was long overdue.

Furthermore, criticism of the Biden administration from outspoken Democratic representatives like Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Jim Clyburn of South Carolina reveals the impatience on the left to accelerate progressive advances beyond the pace that is acceptable to many Americans.

Biden is now back in the US from the Glasgow climate change summit. Will Youngkin’s Virginia triumph help him to unite his party and rise from the ashes again?