"Let's Go Brandon"? Will Virginia Results Free Joe Biden?
Joe Biden's Scotts-Irish Problem Continues Apace... Virginia Is For The Kids
There are quite a number of hot takes to be had in the Virginia gubernatorial race and the results from it are altogether interesting. I must confess that I thought the once and now not future governor Terry McAuliffe had it in the bag, alongside where he keeps the rest of his foreign dirty money, but it looks not to be. So sad. So sad.
I didn’t vote in the election nor did I donate money. I maintained a warmth but not a fondness with both camps. I kept confusing both candidates in my mind’s eye so I thought it best not to participate. I didn’t care for how Glenn Youngkin treated people I knew and I couldn’t quite overlook the aww shucks hilly billy turned hedge fund investor demeanor of Terry McAuliffe. I participated sociologically and observed my girlfriend cast her vote. I bounce between Texas and Virginia and I haven’t yet got the place I want in Virginia in every sense of the term place.
Private equity baron Youngkin’s victory means that Republicans are beginning to understand that they can complete on at least one part of the HEH agenda. What’s the HEH agenda? It’s Health Care, Education, and Housing.
Youngkin ran on excellent schooling — an issue that was a sure fire winner in the over educated and neurotic Northern Virginia suburbs, where the word striver doesn’t begin to capture the sentiment.
Children have more or less been locked up and locked down and there had to be someone who suffered for that even if the restrictions were sensible which they weren’t. It turned out to be the incumbent party — the Democrats — chose the teacher unions over the children and the trannies over the children, at least two of whom were probably assaulted in Loudoun. We just can’t have a system that views parents as impediments.
You might be surprised then to know that the places where it’s easiest to have a large family are also the places where there is a lot more Republican politics.
This is Steve Sailer’s “Affordable Family Formation” and every year the single, childless sorts who pretend to run national elections strenuously avoid noticing that political reality. Republicans have families and Democrats largely don’t.
When Youngkin made it about the family and the prerogative of the family he mobilized an army of people who were willing to overlook his goofiness or his status as a private equity mogul. He didn’t seem as fake as Romney and he could even “hoop” to borrow Barack Obama’s with it verb. (Indeed, post-Afghanistan, the Beltway being denied $300m a day due to the withdrawal may well have helped Youngkin, the federal contractor-turned-candidate.)
The naked political reality that the rednecks were facing is that Youngkin was what was offer and so they decided to follow Trump and give Youngkin a shot.
For their pains redneck America was smeared at by the good white coalition that makes Northern Virginia its nesting ground. It was decidedly weird when McAuliffe’s people tried to hand out copies of Beloved. We all know that private equity barons can’t read guys. They speak, write, and think Excel.
Nor, for that matter, do many of the downstate rednecks who sought revenge both for the felling of their statues and of their president — Donald J. Trump.
It wasn't Beloved, it was these books "Gender Queer and Lawn Boy", bringing in Randi Weingarten as a surrogate while VA Public School teachers jumped the vaccine line and still refused to teach while calling them "heroes" and trying to fire vaccine hesitant nurses and first responders.
The ramifications could not be clearer. On the most important matter Youngkin’s narrow victory means the end of the covid mandates. President Biden can either get with the science on coronavirus like our European allies who have more or less opened up fully and jettisoned all mandates or vaccines — or he and his party will continue to lose still more elections.
That Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona made a move and announced a deal on prescription drug reform testifies to how the real players see an opportunity before them.
A savvy agent makes a move when she wants to and Sinema is moving accordingly on her own schedule. She faces the Arizona voters in three years. Who even knows if Joe Biden will be alive then?
In general I support price controls on pharmaceutical drugs. I think there’s something unconscionable about Americans subsidizing the costs of other nation’s single payer systems. Indeed Americans are paying pharmaceutical corporations more for the world’s top-selling drugs than the rest of the world combined. This is wrong and it must stop.
And I believe housing is for living, not for investments. Zillow’s news that it was walking away from algorithmic purchasing of homes previews a large housing market correction.
With pricing drug reform and housing stock going on the market, well, those are two strikes against the mob. We may well get the Build Back Better agenda but not from the Biden presidency. Oh well.
*****
Now to be fair Terry McAuliffe hasn’t as yet conceded and it is his right to contest it to an endgame but still it doesn't look good for his chances. AP, MSNBC, are all calling it for Youngkin.
Neither side had quite the blow out it was expecting. Youngkin by 2+ isn’t quite Youngkin by +8 as foretold by the prognosticators at Fox News. Could it be that those polls were designed to get Youngkin, who “loaned” himself $20 million, to spend, spend, spend on Fox News? Oh my. How cynical you are, Mr. Johnson!
Trump lost Virginia by a ten point margin in 2020. Could he have won it had he not gone with the Jared Kushner strategy and maximized the ethnic and racial groups least likely to vote for him? One wonders… what if Trump had made a sincere play for the suburban white woman that Youngkin wooed and Trump had erstwhile won in ‘16?
What really was the difference between McAuliffe and Youngkin anyway?
Youngkin’s gambit of respecting the former president while also seeking to distance himself from him worked. McAuliffe is 1-3 in gubernatorial races. Is this fall of the House of Clinton? Or just the end of the bagman-turned-candidate?
We have the first use of facial recognition in a state where facial recognition by the police is officially illegal. We saw the Israelis deploy it quietly against the Russian aligned Lincoln Project. (Both John Weaver and George Conway have close Russia ties through the lobbying world.) As far as I know that wasn’t Clearview.AI but I wouldn’t say even if I knew. You should not believe me.
Ted Cruz is a winner, too. He embraced Youngkin early and enthusiastically though how sincere that was and how much it was to placate a would be donor who shared his consultant ahead of 2024 is anyone’s guess.
Defund the Police is dead too. The police won, too — notwithstanding the silliness of the city of my birth which elected Harvard know nothing millennial Michelle Wu Mayor.
This gives Biden an opening. He can embrace facial recognition, genetic forensics, satellites and the like to win back the police unions he’s otherwise lost. The Biden who gave us the crime bill and who cut deals with Senator Strom Thurmond can come back— and win again. They've already conveyed they're going to double down on their woke BS agenda.
Enough of this woke speak. Give us the gaffing Joe. No malarkey, please!