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Many factors outside of politicians control that affect how people see them. and i think that s something that must drive political analysts and political operatives crazy trying to figure out what those things are because you try and look at these myriad factors like, if, for example, you run these counterfactual scenarios. if the infrastructure bill had passed, would mcauliffe have won? maybe, possibly not, because the jobs were still not created in virginia. maybe he could have talked about the passage a little bit more but youngkin would still have been running his education strategy of trying to get, you know, white virginians worried about critical race theory and gender taught in classrooms. i mean, that still would have been the same. the mcauliffe campaign still probably would have been focused on trying to compare youngkin to trump, which i think is one of the biggest takeaways from that election, that, you know, democrats are going to need to shift a little bit since trump ....
And you know, you write that terry mcauliffe s loss isn t the predictor of 2022 results that some are already claiming. but why not? because you know there are others who sounded less optimistic. absolutely. so, i m not saying that there s a zero percent chance that there s any sort of linkage between what happened in the virginia governor s race and what happens in 2022. what i m saying is that there s a lot of people out there who are trying to make the case that there s an automatic causation sort of effect, you know, that because we saw this loss in virginia, which has been a state where the governor has been a democrat for a very long time now, it feels like, to his republican challenger, that we re automatically going to be seeing a loss for democrats in midterms, that whatever youngkin managed to pull off in virginia would be replicated around the country somehow in enough congressional races, which are very different than gubernatorial races, that we may as well just say the ....
That going to the midterms because once it s passed, people will be impacted and they ll feel the difference in their everyday lives. matt, obviously this shadow of donald trump was part of these elections, particularly in virginia. but you write there was a failure of mcauliffe to successfully tie youngkin to trump. trump is less on the present as he used to be, which some republicans are grateful for. tell us what you think, what role he played on tuesday, but more than that, how his shadow will affect the midterms. this is so interesting, right? first of all, i think there was pent-up demand for a normal republican. there were a lot of people who grew up with reagan and bush, and they want to be republicans, and they couldn t in good conscience vote for donald trump. and so they had this pent-up demand, and i don t think biden i think there was an ....
And also talking about the issues that people really care about. when you talk to democrats especially when they are looking back at the mcauliffe campaign, we look at him spending a lot of time trying to tie youngkin to trump, right? that didn t seem to work. he talked about a lot of different issues. he talked about critical race theory and how it is not being taught in schools. but he didn t do a good job of selling it to people and what he would be doing as governor. it surprises people because he was essentially an incumbent, having been an governor before. so there is a lot of things that the democratic party has to figure out. but they have to thread the theelds between talking about race and being real about it and talking about january 6th, and making sure things like that never happen the our democracy. voting rights bills. and also talk about the kitchen table issues. ....
Controlling congress. i think it does come down to getting these bills passed to prove that the biden promise of the 2020 campaign, which is that he was competent, he was in charge, he was going to be able to get things done on behalf of the american people, is a promise he can keep. the other thing, looking into the data a little bit from tuesday, particularly in virginia that i think is of real concern, what s driving speaker pelosi and i think the president to act here is you saw a lot of voters come out of the exit polls that voted for youngkin. they were biden voters. that s eating into biden s support with biden voters. he has to turn that an gram. he also can t afford the wait to roll this out around thanksgiving because it is going to get swallowed whole by the holiday. time is of the essence. the three of us have talked many times about the asymmetric ....