You have to feel a smidgen of sympathy for Glenn Youngkin, the former hedge fund investor who’s trying to be the first Republican to win a Virginia gubernatorial race since 2009. The state has been trending blue for a long time – most recently, Joe Biden squashed Donald Trump by 10 percentage points – and the last thing Youngkin needs, with his election reckoning 18 days away, is to be slathered in MAGA muck.
But alas, he already is. He can thank Trump for that.
Youngkin has done his herculean best to tap dance for the Trump-besotted base by demanding “audits” of voting machines and vowing to support “election integrity” (dog whistles for the deluded fools who still think the 2020 tally was “stolen”), and he has refused to say whether he would’ve voted to ratify Biden’s victory on Jan. 6 if he’d been a member of Congress. He has pandered to anti-mandate minions, inviting them to get vaccine exemptions for “whatever reasons,” and, broadly speaking, he has declared that “Trump represents so much of why I’m running.” Youngkin has said all those things because he has to. He can’t beat Democrat Terry McAuliffe unless he feeds red meat to the MAGAts.
On the other hand, Youngkin he can’t win on Nov. 2 with the Trump base alone. It’s simply not sizeable enough, not in a state with explosive population growth in the bluest northern counties. Indeed, a new Fox News poll says that Trump’s statewide favorability rating is a mere 44 percent. Therefore, Youngkin needs to grab a sizeable share of independents, to at least persuade folks in the middle that he’s not beholden to Mar-a-Lago. Hence his embrace of state-centric issues, like calling for the elimination of Virginia’s grocery tax. Hence his generally conciliatory rhetoric, a far cry from Trump’s ignorant bluster. Hence his occasional acknowledgments that Biden really did win the presidential race in 2020.
But leave it to Trump and his daft devotees to tip Youngkin’s balancing act.
At a pro-Youngkin rally in suburban Richmond on Wednesday night – headlined by Jan. 6 conspirator and Trump restoration fantasist Steve Bannon – the insurrectionist in exile phoned in to reassure attendees that Youngkin is a chip off the old block, that he’s “a great gentleman…if Glenn gets in there, he’ll do all of the things that we want a governor to do.” The piece de resistance, however, was the presence of an American flag that had been brandished by some of the rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6. (The people who brought the flag to Wednesday’s rally said that Jan. 6 was “peaceful.”) Anyway, the rally-goers proceeded to Pledge Allegiance to the insurrectionist flag.
Youngkin, who did not attend the rally (his lieutenant gubernatorial running mate was scheduled to speak, but ducked out), apparently decided yesterday that pledging fealty to a blood flag was a tad too toxic for his taste. But it took him a while to see the light. When the press initially asked him about the incident, he tried to dodge it: “I wasn’t involved and so I don’t know.” But hours later, he announced that he knew: “It is weird and wrong to pledge allegiance to a flag connected to Jan. 6. As I have said before, the violence that occurred on Jan. 6 was sickening and wrong.”
How can he possibly square his criticism of Jan. 6, and his recent admission that Biden won the election, with Trump’s recycled lie on Wednesday night that “we won in 2020 – the most corrupt election in the history of our country, probably one of the most corrupt anywhere”?
Ya got me.
Democrats have been characteristically freaking out that their Virginia turnout could be tepid – because the liberal base is theoretically fed up with the Biden-Congress failure to pass their ambitious agenda; because Terry McAuliffe is an establishment candidate (a former Democratic National Committee chairman, a Virginia governor once already) – but the Fox News survey says that Youngkin is trailing by five points overall and by 17 points among key suburban females. We live in dire times for democracy, but, at least with respect to the most important statewide election of 2021, never underestimate Trump’s ongoing potential to screw his own side.