The new governor of Virginia will be Republican Glenn Youngkin.
Youngkin is a political neophyte who describes himself on his Twitter account as, “Former dishwasher, basketball player, player & businessman. Not a politician. Republican running for governor to make Virginia the best place to live, work and raise a family.”
Actually, he is the former co-CEO of the Carlyle Group, a major investment company, and he has a graduate degree from Harvard Business School in 1994.
With 2,505 of 2,855 precincts in, Youngkin is winning 51.6 to 47.7.
He’s new to politics, but Chugiak/Eagle River Assemblywoman Jamie Allard says it’s a repeat of what Anchorage saw in the spring election. Virginia, she said, seems has had enough of radical leftist politics, and a clear majority of them went with Youngkin.
“Virginia just pulled a Bronson,” Allard said, as she watched returns from her home. She was referring to Anchorage Mayor Dave Bronson, who upset the Democrat political establishment by winning the Anchorage mayoral race, when many thought he was too conservative to do so.
Youngkin defeated Democrat incumbent Gov. Terry McAuliffe, handing an embarrassing defeat to President Joe Biden and former President Barack Obama, both of whom campaigned for McAuliffe in recent weeks. During the last 60 hours of the campaign, the left-wing Lincoln Project pulled a stunt in which it paid men who were dressed as supposed white nationalists to pose in front of the Youngkin campaign bus with tiki torches. The stunt was an imitation of a supposed white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017. The men declared “We’re all in for Glenn.”
The same kind of race-baiting tactics were used by mayoral candidate Forrest Dunbar’s camp in Anchorage, which tried to paint Mayor Bronson as a white nationalist.
Last week, the Lincoln Project claimed responsibility for the tiki torch white nationalist posers, and for paying the demonstrators to cast Youngkin in an ugly light. The Lincoln Project spent over $304,000 opposing Youngkin, who was endorsed by former President Donald Trump.
The shift in Virginia could signal a tidal change in America. Traditionally a blue state, seven of the last 10 governors of the state have been from the Democratic Party.
Tiana Lowe, a writer for the Washington Examiner, wrote that “Louden County voters voted like their daughters’ lives depended on it,” referring to the incident in Louden County where a high school girl was sodomized by a teenage boy who wore a dress and accessed the girls’ restroom under the school district’s “gender fluid” policy.
“Youngkin turned the traditionally blue state into a national bellwether by embracing what Barack Obama branded the ‘phony culture wars’ riling public school systems,” Lowe wrote.
“Youngkin managed to crush former Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat, in unprecedented time for a state that as recently as last November went for Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential race by 10 points. Despite McAuliffe’s best attempts to refocus the race on ex-President Donald Trump, Youngkin drew from parents’ fury not with partisan issues, but with academic curricula ridden with the racial essentialism of “critical race theory” and the school closures amid the pandemic,” she wrote.
“It was close, but then, in the weeks leading up to the election, something bigger happened — the horrific rape case in a Loudoun County public school and the school board’s brazen, transparently mendacious cover-up. While liberals tried to characterize the rape case, which culminated in two felony convictions against a “gender-fluid” teenage boy accused of sodomizing a teenage girl, as mere anti-trans activism, the school board’s decision to silence the victim’s father and allow the convicted rapist to attend another county school despite pending criminal proceedings likely influenced the county’s surge of support toward Youngkin,” Lowe wrote.
Virginia Republicans are set to win all three statewide races one year after Biden carried the state by 10 points.
Another odd tie between the campaign of Mayor Dave Bronson and Governor-elect Glenn Youngkin — they both used the same campaign consultant: Axiom Strategies.
