While the McAuliffe campaign sure put a lot of effort into making Youngkin out to be a Trump clone in Northern Virginia, there didn’t seem to be any effort to replicate the Georgia runoff by convincing rural MAGA voters that Youngkin wouldn’t fight hard enough for Trump or the fraudits or against the people behind the pandemic or whatever else is riling up the base these days. Do these voters really think that when the 2024 election needs to be stolen that Willard Glenn Youngkin is the man they want with the pen? No way! But this type of messaging was absent from the campaign.

Or if that model isn’t one that appealed to Democrats, why not try to replicate what Obama did to “vulture” capitalist Mitt Romney in 2012?

Are you telling me that Democrats couldn’t come up with any plan that would have depressed support for the co-CEO of a private equity company? Glenn Youngkin is straight out of out-of-touch-elite central casting. The guy looks like he finished watching his kids’ Duke lacrosse match and then got on a private jet to Mechanicsburg to tell the factory owner that the suits were shutting things down. I’m not an oppo research man anymore, but I find it hard to believe that the Carlyle Group didn’t provide for some fruitful opportunities here. A two-second google search of “Carlyle Group controversy” brings up accusations of running nursing homes that neglected the elderly and bankrupting a company that put food on the shelves at grocery stores. Democrats couldn’t use any of this private-equity baggage to convince the voters who are taking horse dewormers to stick it to Big Pharma that this guy wasn’t on their side? Really?