Pundits say Youngkin win offers GOP a blueprint for 2022 success
Keri Rodrigues, president of National Parents Union, emphasizes how advocating for 'wokeness' in education will lose elections
No means no.
From the White House to school boards across America, voters on Tuesday shouted, "No!" to far-left public policy.
NEWT GINGRICH: WHAT GOP VICTORIES IN VIRGINIA AND BEYOND TELL US ABOUT THE FUTURE
They screamed at Democrats: "No!" to reckless spending, meddlesome bureaucrats, bear hugs for criminals, racial fetishism in classrooms and beyond, soaring energy prices, a monthly-average of 179,779 illegal aliens invading the southern "border" on President Joe Biden’s watch, and much more.
More concisely, Voters to Democrats: Drop dead.
(New York Post)
Tuesday’s biggest prize, of course, was Virginia, where first-time candidate Republican Glenn Youngkin defeated Terry McAuliffe, the commonwealth’s last governor, former Democrat National Chairman, and longtime bagman for the Clinton crime family. Youngkin beat McAuliffe handily, 50.9 percent to 48.4 percent.
"Racism still works in Virginia," shrieked former Democratic presidential candidate, ex-Gov. Howard Dean, D-Vt., via Twitter, as the returns rolled in. The Atlantic’s Jemele Hill declared, "This country simply loves white supremacy." Andrea Mitchell of NBC News growled: "It isn’t a dog whistle. It’s a bullhorn."
Evidently, the same white supremists who elected Youngkin also picked Republican Winsome Sears as lieutenant governor. She is a black, Jamaican-born Marine Corps veteran. How racist! They also elected Republican Jason Miyares, who is Hispanic, as their next attorney general. What bigots!
According to exit polls, Youngkin won 13 percent of the Black vote (versus Trump’s 10 percent in 2020) and 55 percent of Hispanics (versus Trump’s 36 percent in 2020). Fox News Channel’s Raymond Arroyo quipped, "It may not be a dog whistle, but it could be a mariachi horn."
For its next trick, this GOP rainbow coalition then elected, as of now, six or seven GOP challengers, apparently evolving Virginia’s House of Delegates from Democrat to Republican.
In New Jersey, Republican Jack Ciattarelli led Democrat Governor Phil Murphy by a breathtaking 61 votes early Wednesday morning, before mail-in ballots helped give the incumbent a 41,000-vote edge. At this writing, the race stands at Ciattarelli 50.8 percent to Murphy’s 48.5 percent, with the Republican not conceding amid reported anomalies in Bergen County and a potential recount. Whatever happens, a former GOP state assemblyman was not supposed to get thisclose to a Democrat governor in a state that Biden won in 2020 by 16 points.
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Democrat Steve Sweeney, the Garden State’s Senate President since 2010, fell to Ed Durr, a Raymour & Flanagan truck driver and Republican newcomer. Sweeney spent $490,726. Durr’s campaign war chest was just $153. Final score: Sweeney 48.2 percent, Durr 51.8 percent.
In New York, Republicans will boost their City Council caucus from three, possibly to six. GOP challenger Brian Fox is 255 votes ahead of aspiring speaker and former punk-rock opening act, Democrat Justin Brannan.
On nearby Long Island, Republicans swept three key races. Brad Blakeman will become Nassau County Executive, and Anne Donnelly and Ray Tierney will serve, respectively, as Nassau and Suffolk counties’ district attorneys. Republicans also took both county legislatures.
Statewide, liberal proposals to include illegal aliens in redistricting, inflict same-day voter registration, and expand no-excuse absentee voting all went up in smoke.
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In yet another act of GOP white nationalism, Hispanic Republican John Lujan won a Texas State House special election in a 78 percent Hispanic district near San Antonio that Biden carried by 14 points. Lujan’s platform: Border security.
As The Texas Tribune’s Patrick Svitek noted, Lujan "captured the seat Tuesday, in exactly the kind of nationally reverberating outcome that Democrats were working to avoid."
In Minneapolis, birthplace of the defund-the-police movement, one of the Left’s ugliest babies was strangled in its crib. A ballot measure to "reimagine" the 70-percent Democrat city’s police force into a touchy-feely Department of Public Safety crashed and burned — 57 percent No, 43 percent Yes.
Also, torched: Minneapolis City Council members and police-defunding crusaders Phillipe Cunningham, Steve Fletcher, Cam Gordon, and Jeremy Schroeder all lost their seats.
In Democrat-clogged Seattle, voters curled their lips at "police- and jail abolitionist Nicole Thomas-Kennedy," as the Associated Press described her. Instead, they elected law-and-order GOP candidate Ann Davison as city attorney. She is the first Republican in 32 years and the first woman ever to win that seat.
In Seattle’s City Council, the AP reported, "business-friendly brewery owner Sara Nelson was leading Nikkita Oliver, an attorney and activist who founded an arts-based alternative to jail for young people."
New York-based Ryan Girdusky, founder of the 1776 Project PAC, focused on school boards, where social-justice warriors have plotted the Left-wing indoctrination of America’s children — until lately, with scant scrutiny. Girdusky identified conservative candidates eager to triumph on these cultural battlefields. He raised $135,000 and channeled digital ads, mailers, and grassroots campaign materials into seven states.
Among Girdusky’s 58 candidates, 44 prevailed, yielding a powerful 76 percent win rate. These included two each in Minnesota and Ohio, three in Virginia, four in New Jersey, nine in Kansas, 11 in Colorado, and 13 in Pennsylvania. Girdusky’s endorsees scored in such Democrat strongholds as Johnson County (suburban Kansas City), Montgomery County, Pennsylvania (greater Philadelphia), and Passaic, New Jersey (near Newark).
Not bad for a brand-new PAC and the only one devoted to shifting school boards Right. Girdusky did this with no staff. Yes, Virginia, one man can make a difference.
"Parents don’t like condescending attitudes from their elected officials, especially concerning their children’s education," Girdusky told me. "That was the Democrats’ strategy in 2021: Insist Critical Race Theory wasn’t real and attack parents for believing it was, but lay across the railroad tracks to protect it. Voters are smarter than that."
Surveying the smoldering Democrat rubble, House Republican Whip Steve Scalise of Louisiana said, "If you look at a state like Virginia, it was a D+10, if you think about Cook [Political Report] ratings. That means a D+10 state became an R+2 state. That’s a 12-point swing."
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Speaking on Capitol Hill the day after the Democrats’ debacle, Scalise continued, "There are districts all across the country that are represented right now by Democrats in at least D+5, 6, or 7, even D+10 districts that have to be looking in the mirror going, ‘Am I going to keep voting for this big-government socialism?’"
"What’s wrong is this stupid wokeness," James Carville told PBS Newshour. "This defund-the-police lunacy. This ‘Take Abraham Lincoln’s name off of the schools.’ People see that, and it just really has a suppressive effect on Democrats. Some of these people need to go to a woke detox center or something."
If Democrats were smart, they would learn from Carville’s old boss. After HillaryCare and other leftist excesses cost his party the U.S. House in 1994, President Bill Clinton famously "triangulated," steered sharply toward the center, and collaborated with the House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R- Ga., to reduce capital gains taxes and reform welfare.
Alas, too many Democrats are dumb. Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D - Calif., appears hellbent on pushing Biden’s $1.75 trillion (per Penn Wharton: $3.98 trillion) Build Back Better tax-hike, welfare, and red-tape colossus. She and other socialists argue that Democrats got clocked Tuesday for not being Leftist enough.
"I know that Virginia was a huge bummer," Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said on an Instagram video. "I think that the results show the limits of trying to run a fully 100 percent super-moderated [sic] campaign that does not excite, speak to, or energize a progressive base."
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Will Pelosi, AOC, and their comrades wise up or will they keep torturing the American people?
Stumping for McAuliffe in Norfolk on October 29, Vice President Kamala Harris said: "What happens in Virginia will, in large part, determine what happens in 2022, 2024, and on." It would behoove Democrats to reimagine last week’s battle cry as a cautionary tale.