The Blue Tsunami
There’s no denying that Virginia was swamped Tuesday night by a blue wave. Make that a blue tsunami.
The Democrats not only swept the top three statewide offices, but they flipped 13 seats in the House of Delegates. Every corner of the commonwealth was at least tinged blue.
Looking for a sliver of sunshine, Republicans? The Liberty University precinct reportedly voted 95.11% Republican.
That’s all I have for you.
The only folks who had a worse night than Winsome Earle-Sears were the pollsters. As usual, they got it wrong.
As I pointed out last week, Virginia is a tough place to poll. While pollsters consistently had Abigail Spanberger leading in the governor’s race, few - if any - predicted a 15 point landslide. (Ralph Northam won by less than 10 in 2017.) No pollster that I encountered forecast a 10.5 point rout by Ghazala Hashmi for lieutenant governor. And until the final few days almost all polls showed the Attorney General race within the margin of error. Jones won by 6.5 points.
So what did we learn from Tuesday’s election results?
Well, we learned a lot about Virginia Democrat voters. Some of it is troubling.
We learned that wanting to kill your political opponents, piss on their graves and merrily muse about the deaths of their “little fascist” children is not a deal breaker for Democrats when selecting a top law enforcement officer. Neither is likely lying to a court about the community service a candidate did to avoid jail.
Good to know.
Jay Jones is our next attorney general and that’s on Virginia’s Democrats who would have happily voted for Thomas Matthew Crooks if he’d survived his assassination attempt on Donald Trump.
No surprise here, really. The Dems have a stunning tolerance for bad behavior. Shoot, they were able to rally behind a governor whose nickname in medical school was “Coon Man” and who sashayed around in blackface. In fact, Jay Jones proudly touted his Ralph Northam endorsement.
Advice to scandal-ridden Democrat candidates: Just hang around and refuse to resign and your party will rally behind you. No matter how odious your behavior.
This may be news to the Jones voters and to those who cheered the assassination of Charlie Kirk, but many of us on the other side of the political aisle now worry that some of you secretly desire us dead.
That’s not an exaggeration, by the way.
Oh, we also learned that Democrats will enthusiastically vote for a candidate who hobnobs with the Hamas-loving “Free Palestine” crowd. And we knew always knew that their standard bearer, Abigail Spanberger, supports euthanasia and abortion until birth.
Shoot, for all we know, Spanberger may be a member of Ralph Northam’s slap-em-on-a-tray-and-keep-them-comfortable-until-they-die club.
These positions can only be considered moderate when compared with the lunacy of someone like Zohran Mamdani.
OK, what did we learn about Republicans on Tuesday? First, they were fatally underfunded. According to VPAP, Abigail Spanberger spent $61,543,244 while Winsome Earle-Sears spent $34,207,891 on their respective campaigns.
Northern Virginia accounted for 88% of Spanberger’s impressive victory. Across the four counties and five cities that make up NoVa, Spanberger took 72.3% of the vote to Earle-Sears’ 27.4%.
The government shutdown, kept alive by Sens. Mark Warner and Tim Kaine left approximately 140,000 Virginia federal workers without paychecks in the waning weeks of the campaign. These voters were not in a happy mood. They’re part of the true-blue voters of Northern Virginia and it appears every single one got to the polls and took 40 friends.
We also learned that Winsome Earle-Sears was a weak candidate, despite her admirable story of immigration and service in the Marine Corps. Her campaign was virtually invisible until late summer and when it emerged, her messaging was off. Earle-Sears persisted in focusing on cultural issues long after it was clear that the economy was going to drive voters to the polls.
On top of that, she was an outspoken Trump critic in the past and that may have caused many MAGA voters to shrug and stay home. Trump himself enthusiastically endorsed Jason Miyares’ candidacy he failed to mention Earle-Sears by name.
Then there was the tireless, but broke John Reid, who drove himself from one corner of the commonwealth to the other during his Quixotic campaign. A scandal in the spring about a social media account linked to explicit content - that Reid, who is gay, insisted was not his - caused a serious rift in the Republican ticket that never seemed to heal.
Gov. Glenn Youngkin reportedly called on Reid to drop out of the race. Reid refused and henceforth every effort to portray some sort of unity on the GOP ticket appeared forced and phony.
By contrast, the Democrats were cohesive, even after the far more serious Jones scandal broke. During early voting, Spanberger proudly showed her ballot to prove that she voted for her running mate despite what The Washington Post called his “deranged” text messages.
The Post also opined that decency was on the ballot in Virginia and that “If Jones rides Spanberger’s coattails to victory, it would be a sad reflection of a discomfiting willingness among voters to prioritize partisanship over human decency.”
Yep, that happened. Now we have to live with it.
