What Virginia’s defeat means to Biden

By Costas Raptis

Virginia is an American state in which during last year’s presidential election Joe Biden prevailed over Donald Trump by ten percentage points. But in Tuesday’s Republican primary, Republican nominee Glenn Yangin won by a three-point lead over Democrat Terry McOliffe, who had previously served as governor of Virginia.

The significance of the event cannot be underestimated. Virginia borders the federal capital, Washington, and is a Southern state where Republicans have not won since 2009. Its increasingly diverse population makes it an indicator of broader constituencies.

Last Tuesday’s twist was not the only one for the Democrats. In the state of New Jersey, where Biden had a 16-point lead, incumbent Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy was re-elected by a marginal margin of 50.8%. Not to mention the disappointing poll performance of the White House tenant himself, exactly one year after his election and ten months after taking office.

But especially Virginia offers interesting conclusions. All commentators have argued that Yangin, the former CEO of the colossal Carlyle Group, is a moderate Republican, much closer to Mitt Romney than to Donald Trump. And yet: more or less the same commentators, especially those more friendly to Republicans, hastened to recognize as the decisive element of his victory the identical counterterrorism of white suburbs, in other words the prevalence of a “Trump-free Trump.”

The electorate that went to the polls on Tuesday was less “colorful” than at other times, with a white vote share of 74%, up 7% from last year. McOliff’s popularity began to plummet, the outgoing governor said during a televised debate with his opponent that “parents can not be the ones to determine what is taught in schools.”

But the discussion of parental rights is just a coded way of addressing the divisiveness of Critical Race Theory, the federally encouraged introduction to the curriculum of teaching the darkest aspects of American history. slavery, and the labeling of “systemic racism” that they have inherited, endowing white Americans with privileges to this day.

Adopting the phraseology of Martin Luther King, Jr., who envisioned a time when people would be judged by their character rather than their skin color, Yangin promised to ban teaching from day one in the governor’s office. of Critical Race Theory in Virginia Schools. He thus became the first “respectable”, mainstream Republican who dared to take advantage of the white identity policy.

He did not have to return to any sensitive issues during the campaign, once the message had been received. At the ballot box, 61% of white voters preferred him, just 53% who had preferred Trump last year.

Of course, liberal commentators prefer to focus on identity issues, which are certainly always strong in the United States, leaving much smaller facts in the background, such as the fact that Democrats are once again lagging behind in fulfilling the economic and social promises that brought them in charge. But with Congress’s amputation of pandemic support policies and the simultaneous short-circuiting of Biden’s key foreign policy ambitions, such as a return to the international agreement on Iran’s nuclear program, the current presidency seems to have lost much of its its dynamics. “Trumplessness without Trump” is already here, while the unpredictable former president himself has nothing but laid down his arms for 2024.