In this edition: Virginia's battle of extremes, a member-on-member clash in West Virginia, and a GOP victor in Iowa talks about why he won.
Mandatory in public school curriculums since 2018: This is The Trailer.
CULPEPER, Va. — The “Beloved” bill died on Terry McAuliffe's desk five years ago, as the Democratic governor vetoed a string of Republican-backed education legislation. Had it passed, K-12 educators would have been required to notify parents if “sexually explicit content” appeared in their curriculums — Toni Morrison's “Beloved” was an example — and let kids opt out of the lessons. When Republicans lost control of the state legislature in 2019, the idea was mothballed, seemingly for good.
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It was resurrected over a few seconds in the final debate last month between McAuliffe, the Democratic nominee for his old job, and Glenn Youngkin, his Republican opponent. After a back-and-forth about parents criticizing sexually explicit material at school board meetings, McAuliffe vented: “I don't think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” Republicans saw a political gift, big enough to sweep this year's statewide and state legislative elections.
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“When he said parents can't tell schools what they should be teaching in schools, I don't want parents in the schools, I literally almost fell down,” Youngkin told supporters at a “Parents for Youngkin” rally here on Wednesday, predicting a 10-seat gain for the GOP in the House of Delegates.
“I was like, yo, we just won the election!” state Sen. Amanda Chase said at a rally a few hours later near Richmond, which was organized by conservative radio host John Fredericks and not attended by Youngkin. “Tell the independents. Tell every parent!”
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Democrats, not surprisingly, argue that Republicans are completely misreading the issue. Like every recent campaign for governor here, the McAuliffe-Youngkin contest is ending with dueling accusations of extremism — Youngkin accusing McAuliffe of wanting to ruin schools with racist indoctrination, McAuliffe arguing that his opponent is fueling a far-right campaign against democracy.
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Conservative activists have driven the effort to change school curriculums, and Republicans see the issue as a way to win over independents and non-White parents who have drifted away from the party. Democrats, who say that only low turnout can defeat McAuliffe, see the Republican response as a way to motivate the party's base, and see that — not an effort to convert new voters — as the point of the GOP's campaign.
“They're pitting parents against parents and using our students as pawns,” McAuliffe told The Washington Post after casting his early vote Wednesday. “These school board meetings, the visceral, screaming hatred that's coming out — a lot of this has been promulgated by Donald Trump, and a lot of it's been promulgated by Glenn Youngkin.”
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Virginia Democrats believe they've been here before, watching conservatives mobilize around an issue that doesn't move votes. In 2017, Republicans closed out their campaign by accusing Democrats of allowing the MS-13 gang to thrive in Northern Virginia, then by crying foul over a liberal Latino group's ad that portrayed a racist truck driver threatening non-White children. In 2013, McAuliffe triumphed despite his opponent, future Trump appointee Ken Cuccinelli, linking him to national Democrats and the disastrous rollout of HealthCare.gov.
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McAuliffe's team is also skeptical about a conservative focus on schools, one that's evolved since Youngkin entered the race. At the start of the year, Youngkin and other Republicans rallied around a cry to “open the schools,” which became moot as public schools reopened. During the Republican nomination fight, Youngkin echoed other conservatives in criticizing rules that allowed transgender students to play team sports consistent with their gender identity. That did not become a flash point in the race with McAuliffe, as it had in other races in other states.
The conservative campaign against critical race theory had more staying power, even if it is not taught in the schools. By the summer, Youngkin had locked arms with the parents and activists showing up in force at school board meetings to condemn what they saw as the teaching of racism in the guise of social justice. On his first day as governor, he promised, he would ban the use of CRT, an intellectual movement that examines the way policies and laws perpetuate systemic racism.
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“It's a perfect storm,” said Terry Schilling, the president of the conservative American Principles Project, who said he had seen the quality of public education in Virginia's Fairfax County decline. “Parents are realizing that the Terry McAuliffes of the world who don't want them involved in education have won for the moment. They don't have any control over their kids' education. And so now they have to take it back.”
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McAuliffe has dismissed the issue completely — not getting into details about what will and won't be taught, but saying that Republicans have invented a fake and racially motivated issue for an election. When asked about it, he pivots immediately to his own education funding plan, noting that he launched his comeback bid by promising to give Virginia the highest teacher pay in the country.
“The Youngkin position on this is right out of the Trump playbook,” said Anne Holton, who served as state education secretary when McAuliffe was governor and supports his 2021 bid. “It is all designed to rile up his base.”
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The undercurrent of the Youngkin attack is that McAuliffe is, in the Republican's words, “crazy” enough to implement the agenda of the far left. The Democrat's response has been to continue tying Youngkin to Trump, and by extension, suggesting that anything he says about education is paranoid and politically motivated. On Wednesday, McAuliffe cited recent polling to say the issue simply wasn't cutting Youngkin's way, pointing out that he has the advantage in polls when voters are asked about “education” in general.
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But Republicans see tremendous political energy growing out of the protests of school boards, and in taking the sides of the parents waging those protests. On Oct. 4, the Department of Justice announced it would create a task force to “address the rise in criminal conduct directed toward school personnel,” shortly after the National School Boards Association sent the Biden administration a letter citing various kinds of harassment. (Some was verbal, some escalated to threats against educators.) On the campaign trail, Youngkin joined other conservatives in calling that a political assault, by worried Democrats, on ordinary parents expressing legitimate worries. He often went further, suggesting that McAuliffe may have been behind the DOJ's decision.
“He calls his friend Joe Biden. Joe Biden calls the attorney general. And the attorney general calls the FBI in to silence parents,” Youngkin said in Culpeper. White House spokesman Andrew Bates denied that McAuliffe had ever called Biden on the issue — “absolutely false” — and McAuliffe denied it himself in a Thursday call with reporters.
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“I'm not in the business of telling the DOJ what to do or not to do,” he said. “If the attorney general of the United States of America thinks there are things that needs to be looked at, things that need protection, they're certainly entitled to do whatever they're going to do.” Youngkin, he said, was enmeshed in a “conspiracy theory,” which was McAuliffe's cue to talk again about how the Republican had to be goaded into saying that Joe Biden had legitimately won the 2020 election.
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The Republican nominee had been cautious about embracing some elements of his party, skipping the Wednesday night rally where Trump called in to urge support for Youngkin and where a flag “carried at the peaceful rally with Donald J. Trump on Jan. 6" was displayed for a Pledge of Allegiance. Like other candidates running this year, he's mocked Democrats for mentioning Trump at all, when there are other issues in front of voters — such as, which candidate would let parents know what their kids were being taught, and give them the power to change it.
“The country needs us to win,” Youngkin said. “I get more emails and texts from parents all over the country saying: Please stand up for us, too! And when Virginia parents make a statement that will be heard around the country, it will be heard in every single school district.”
Reading list
“Youth voter turnout in Virginia soared with Trump in office. Will it stay that way?” by Karina Elwood and Teo Armus
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How Democrats plan to remind their voters that there's an election this year.
“Dems sweat size of Biden agenda with crucial midterms looming,” by Sarah Ferris and Marianne Levine
Too big? Not big enough? They do eventually want to pass something.
“'I think our work here is done.' Virginia's redistricting commission is staring at failure,” by Mel Leonor
A nonpartisan committee runs aground.
“Trump calls in to rally hosted by Bannon for Virginia GOP candidates,” by Laura Vozzella
An ex-presidential appearance at a rally where the Pledge of Allegiance was delivered to a flag waved on Jan. 6.
“The unlikely issue shaping the Virginia governor’s race: Schools,” by Lisa Lerer
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Critical race, critical race theory.
Ad watch
Youngkin for Governor, “Stand Up for Parents.” The GOP nominee for governor has been relentless in attacking Democrat Terry McAuliffe for saying that he didn't want parents “telling schools” what to teach. Most of the spots on that topic have looped the quote itself; this one adds a testimonial from Glenn Youngkin himself, sitting in a classroom and thinking about how “the Virginia I grew up in” let parents play a role in education. “Now the FBI is trying to silence parents,” Youngkin adds, an exaggeration of the Department of Justice memo about looking at harassment or threats aimed at school board members. He closes by promising to raise teacher pay and “pass the largest education budget ever,” trying to cut into McAuliffe's year-long messaging about adding resources for educators.
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Terry McAuliffe for Virginia, “Agenda.” Youngkin's opponent is sticking to familiar themes, too: This is the umpteenth ad reminding voters that Youngkin launched his GOP bid with a focus on “election integrity,” calling it the most important issue for a state where the 2020 election wasn't particularly close. Clips of Trump voicing conspiracy theories about that election are spliced together with clips of Youngkin discussing election integrity.
Keep Keller, “Fighting Crime.” Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller, a Democrat, won decisively in 2017 but has been on the defensive all year about the city's rising crime rate. Here, he goes after Bernalillo County Sheriff Manny Gonzales, a conservative Democrat challenging him in the Nov. 2 election, by warning that he would actually make the city less safe — unlike the incumbent. “He tripled the homicide unit,” the ad says of Keller. “Four hundred new police officers.”
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Poll watch
“Thinking about the economic bill, which would you prefer? For Congress to …” (CNN/SSRS, 1,000 adults)
Pass a bill that enacts all of the proposed social safety net and climate change policies: 41%
Pass a bill that enacts fewer of those policies, but which costs less money: 30%
Not pass any version of the bill: 29%
Polling on congressional Democrats' legislative agenda has been fairly hard to come by, and interest groups have rushed to fill the vacuum by portraying the domestic policy package — and sometimes, the bipartisan infrastructure bill — as trillions of dollars in “socialism.” Voters remain confused about what's in it, which is sensible, because what's in it will change after negotiations. But opposition to the bill itself remains fairly low, with just 29 percent of voters set against passing any version of it. A similar share of adults, 32 percent, say passage of the bill will make their lives worse; 43 percent of voters say their lives would remain “the same,” while a quarter say they'd get better. The Democrats' agenda hasn't yet become as unpopular as the Affordable Care Act was in 2009, or the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was in 2017. That's a source of liberal frustration; advocates want the budget passed now, worried that delay will give opponents, who have been slow to mobilize, time to convince voters to turn against it.
In the states
Oregon. Longtime New York Times reporter Nick Kristof is “reluctantly” leaving the paper to explore a run for governor of his home state, saying in a statement that he had been “seared by the suffering of old friends there” and “concluded that I should try not only to expose problems but also see if I can fix them directly.” He's expected to run as a Democrat, and would join a primary with seven declared candidates, including state Treasurer Tobias Read and state House Speaker Tina Kotek.
Iowa. Democrat Mike Franken announced a campaign for the party's 2022 U.S. Senate nomination, his second run for political office after he lost the party's nod for Iowa's other Senate seat in 2020. “It’s finally up to the Democratic voters in Iowa to decide who they want as their nominee to build a more prosperous future for Iowa and this nation,” Franken said. “You have my undivided attention, Iowa, and the task is clear — toss out the old campaign playbook and win the election.”
This is a thinly-veiled reference to Franken's experience last year, when he entered the primary relatively late, after national Democrats had gotten behind former congressional candidate Theresa Greenfield. She went on to lose in November, as did former Rep. Abby Finkenauer — who national Democrats currently favor as the nominee in the race Franken just joined against Sen. Charles E. Grassley.
Special elections
For just the second time this year, Republicans captured a Democratic-held seat in a state legislature, with Iowa activist Jon Dunwell winning a landslide 20-point victory to capture the state's 29th House District.
Turnout was paltry, with fewer than 5,000 voters showing up — fewer than had voted for Dunwell in his unsuccessful 2020 campaign for the same seat. In an interview, Dunwell credited his success to his decision to challenge former Rep. Wes Breckenridge in the first place, seeing an opportunity in a district that had been held by Democrats since the 1970s, but trended sharply toward Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020.
“I was told: You don’t stand a chance, you’ll never win, he’s a respected police officer and teacher and the Democrats have held this seat forever,” Dunwell said. “We sent a message that things were changing in Jasper County.”
Democrats, who narrowly lost a blue-trending seat in another Iowa race this year, were outmatched even with a nominee who served in the district's largest town, Newton. Dunwell said the issues playing out during the election had helped him, from a debate over a budget package that voters didn't know the details of — “Vote for us and we'll tell you later,” he said — to skepticism of coronavirus mandates.
“People have been living during a period of time when the few are telling the many what they can and can’t do,” Dunwell said. While Trump did not talk about the special election during his visit to Iowa last week, and did not hold his rally in the district, the Republican winner thought the visit had been helpful. “It doesn’t hurt that people can be reminded that there are common-sense answers to our problems, and we can elect leaders who'll implement them.”
Redistricting
Legislators in West Virginia, one of the few states that lost some congressional representation after the 2020 census, approved a new map that packs Rep. David B. McKinley into the same seat as Rep. Alex Mooney, by splitting the state into northern and southern districts. Both Republicans said on Thursday that they'd seek re-election in the new 1st Congressional District. In a statement, Mooney called himself an “unwavering supporter” of Donald Trump; McKinley had voted to accept electors from Arizona and Pennsylvania on Jan. 6, while Mooney voted to contest them. One possible McKinley advantage: He's represented more than twice as much of the new district as Mooney.
In his own statement, McKinley said he'd supported the Trump agenda, setting up a race between candidates with very different West Virginia ties. Mooney, a former chairman of the Maryland Republican Party, moved to West Virginia and, in his first races, lagged behind the rest of the GOP ticket but did not lose. McKinley, a former chair of the West Virginia GOP, flipped his seat in a close 2010 race, beating a conservative Democrat who'd later switch parties.
In Arkansas, where Republicans had never controlled every stage of redistricting before this year, the state approved a map that sliced liberal Pulaski County into three pieces, shoring up what had become the state's only somewhat competitive House seat. Gov. Asa Hutchison declined to take action on the new map, allowing it to become law, while saying he was “concerned about the impact of the redistricting plan on minority populations.” Trump carried the state's current 2nd Congressional District last year by just nine points, and it was the only one where Democrats fielded and funded a competitive candidate in the last decade.
Countdown
… 19 days until elections in New Jersey and Virginia, and primaries in Florida’s 20th Congressional District
… 89 days until the election in Florida's 20th Congressional District