But the drive to link Youngkin to Trump isn’t going over with some voters. It’s a tired tactic, said Carlson, a 76-year-old retired hospital administrator in Winchester who said he hopes Trump doesn’t run for president again — “too loud and domineering.”

Carlson was drawn to Youngkin’s rhetoric, repeated endlessly in conservative media, about Democrats using the schools to push a social agenda, which Youngkin often summarizes as teaching “critical race theory,” an academic approach used in some college and law school courses to examine racism’s role in U.S. history. Virginia schools officials have said that the approach is not used in the state’s curriculum, and McAuliffe has not advocated for it.

But Carlson put a Youngkin sign in his front yard the day after he heard McAuliffe say in a debate that “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”

In contrast, Carlson said, “this guy” — Youngkin — “wants to teach people how to think, not what to think.”