The takeaway here isn’t “Youngkin is a juggernaut” or “Virginia is becoming a red state” so much as it is “Inflation can and will destroy Democrats in all but the most liberal strongholds.”
But that’s good enough for the GOP’s purposes. Scanning the list of Virginia’s 11 congressional districts, it looks like three Dems are all but certain goners this fall — Elaine Luria, who represents an R+1 district, Abigail Spanberger, who represents an R+3, and probably even Jennifer Wexton, whose district is D+6.
Donald McEachin’s Richmond district is D+10, which might be enough to send him back to Congress next year. But I wouldn’t be making any down payments on a home in D.C. just yet if I were him.
If all four go down, eight of Virginia’s 11 districts could have Republican congressmen next year. It’s not unlikely. It might even be probable at this point.
A new poll of Virginia from PPP has loads of bad news for Democrats. Let me remind you that this is a state that hasn’t gone red in a presidential election since 2004 and which Biden won by double digits as recently as two years ago.
All you need to know about why Youngkin is net +9 on approval while Biden is net -14 is the right track/wrong track questions. Asked if Virginia is on the right or wrong track, Virginians split nearly evenly at 37/41. Asked if the U.S. is on the right or wrong track, it’s … 15/76. That’s how a Biden +10 state ends up with Democrats leading on the generic ballot by a mere point.
And that’s not the only poll showing Youngkin far outpacing Biden. In fact, this new one from Roanoke College shows the governor getting more popular over time, albeit within the margin of error:
Youngkin’s approval rating in the poll out Friday did not change significantly from Roanoke College’s survey in February, with 53 percent of Virginians approving of his performance — similar to 50 percent in the earlier poll, and well within the poll’s margin of error.
However, his disapproval rating had dropped significantly, to 35 percent from 41 percent in the February poll. Youngkin’s approval outpaced his disapproval by 18 points, doubling the nine-point margin from February…
Both polls had reflected similarly negative views of the performance of Biden, however, and the new Roanoke College survey finds that Biden’s approval rating is 37 percent among Virginians, while 57 percent disapprove, a wider disapproval margin than in the February Roanoke poll.
53/35 versus 37/57. If I’d told you a year ago that one of those numbers would reflect the approval of a Democrat in Virginia and one would reflect the approval of a Republican and asked you to guess which is which, you’d guess the opposite of what the truth turns out to be.
And to give Youngkin his due, it’s not like Republicans are suddenly much more popular across the board in VA. Trump polls even worse than Biden does in the Roanoke survey at 34/59 favorability. Virginians like their governor.
Which raises an obvious question: Should the GOP look for more Glenn Youngkins to run in swing states?
The answer — yes — is also obvious but not as clear cut as you might assume. Tim Miller reminded everyone yesterday that the feelgood story of Glenn Youngkin, Romneyesque Republican, cracking the code of the post-Trump GOP and winning in a blue state isn’t as storybook as you may assume. The problem for any traditional country-club Republican nowadays is surviving a primary, not a general election, and Youngkin never had to worry about that. That’s because the Virginia GOP gamed its gubernatorial primary last year to benefit him at the expense of the less electable MAGA bombthrower Amanda Chase. Instead of a statewide primary, Virginia Republicans held an “’unassembled convention,’ with about 30,000 pre-registered Republicans voting at nearly 40 sites across the commonwealth.” They used ranked-choice voting too, which tends to favor centrists over fringier types in later rounds. If Youngkin had had to face Chase in a straight-up popular vote of the state’s Republicans, what would have happened?
We just got a glimpse of what would have happened in Pennsylvania, writes Miller. Dave McCormick is a Glenn Youngkin type — mega-rich, successful in business, not very MAGA but pretend-MAGA enough to keep centrist Republicans and the populist base inside the tent. But there was no gamed primary for McCormick. So not only did he lose, he failed to crack 32 percent even with Mehmet Oz and Kathy Barnette dividing the hardcore Trumpist vote.
You see, the one big flaw in the Glenn Youngkin Model is that it was never really road-tested.
Glenn was chosen in a convention, not a primary, so he didn’t have to face the full GOP electorate. Plus his opponents didn’t raise any money to compete with him. And running for state office, rather than a federal office, gave him a bit of cover when he would duck and dip his way around the latest Trump-induced hot-button national issues…
[O]nce the Glenn Youngkin Model faced actual Republican voters and real intra-party competition, its defects were exposed.
McCormick wasn’t capable of answering repeated questions about election fraud and what he would do in Washington should another election challenge arise. His ability to deftly avoid the culture-war issues that turn people off in the suburbs was stunted because he was forced to engage with one Trump-endorsed opponent who actually had money to compete and another upstart grassroots firebrand who was more in touch with the base.
If the Virginia GOP hadn’t put a thumb on the scale procedurally to get Youngkin nominated, they might have ended up with Chase as nominee. Which means, almost certainly, that Terry McAuliffe would now be in his second term as governor. All the normie suburban voters in Virginia who deemed Youngkin sufficiently un-Trumpy to prefer him to McAuliffe would have gone the other way if offered the firebreather Chase as an alternative instead. The same scenario (almost) is playing out in Massachusetts: Republican Charlie Baker, the most popular governor in the country, decided not to seek a third term because he likely would have been defeated in a GOP primary by MAGA voters, who are likely to nominate a no-hope righty populist.
So Massachusetts will end up with a Democratic governor next year instead.
The path to better candidates starts with radical primary reform in America, but the GOP is so frightened of its base that any reform in the near term is likely to favor MAGA candidates over centrists rather than vice versa. Already in Georgia there’s movement to change the state’s rules so that members of one party can’t cross over and vote in the other’s primary, which may have helped Brad Raffensperger finish above 50 percent in his primary with Jody Hice. Georgia politicians are resisting changing those rules for now but it’s a matter of time before Trump starts complaining about them.
