Democrat Terry McAuliffe lost his race for Virginia governor last night. Republican Glenn Youngkin, a financier from the posh Fairfax County exurb, Great Falls, beat McAuliffe in narrow win. On his coattails were a former Marine and gun rights activist, Winsome Sears, as Lt. Governor and a Cuban-American attorney general, . Here, I'm going to just excerpt rural relevant parts of media coverage, starting with Tim Miller for the Bulwark:
In Tuesday’s results coming out the races in Virginia and New Jersey, many of the suburban red dogs and independents who had been powering the blue wave backslid towards the Republicans, while the rural whites continued their march rightward.
In the next few days, barrels of ink will be spilled writing about what happened in the burbs and the merits of the CRT wars, but for present purposes, here’s the main takeaway: Republicans actually came up with a plan to eat into the Democrats’ new coalition and that plan worked. They didn’t throw up their hands and decide the burbs were lost forever. They keyed in on an issue where the Democrats were out of step with the views of some of their voters and won on it. That’s Politics 101.
Meanwhile the Democrats don’t even seem to be trying to do the reverse—to chip away at the GOP hold on working-class whites—despite the fact that there are plenty of potential opportunities to wedge them.
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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.
Here's what Sarah Rankin and Nicholas Riccardi had to say for the AP:
When Virginia Republicans nominated Glenn Youngkin as their candidate for governor, they wondered whether the first-time candidate could master a high-level political maneuver — appealing to educated suburbanites without dampening the enthusiasm of white, rural voters who came out in droves to vote for Donald Trump.
On Wednesday, it became clear just how well Youngkin pulled it off.
The former private equity executive became the first Republican candidate to win statewide since 2009, thanks to a campaign that rallied right-leaning voters both in the growing suburbs in the north and the shrinking towns of Appalachia. That turnout helped Youngkin chip away at parts of the Democrats’ coalition and give Republicans hope for a 2022 comeback.
The performance could be a road map for GOP electoral dominance in next year’s election, when Democrats’ control of the House and Senate is on the line. Republicans lost ground in educated suburbs across the country during Trump’s tenure, while supercharging support in rural areas. After Trump left office, Democrats braced for the possibility the GOP could regain some support, but doubted it could continue to maintain such enormous rural margins.
Youngkin proved them wrong. In tiny, rural Lee County at the southwestern edge of Virginia, where Trump won 84% of the vote last year, Youngkin managed to improve that margins. He won Lee County with 87.6% of the vote.
And this is from Politico, the bit under the subheading "Rural America roars again":
Youngkin’s gains in the suburbs were necessary — but not sufficient — to overtake McAuliffe. He also needed Trump Country to show up in full force, and it did.
Trump, predictably, issued a statement crediting “my BASE” for Youngkin’s victory. But in counties throughout rural Virginia, Youngkin ran even with or, often, ahead of Trump. He won 66 percent of the vote in Roanoke County, in Southwest Virginia, up from Trump’s 60 percent. In Bedford County, where Trump won 73 percent of the vote, Youngkin won 79 percent.
Moreover, turnout in many of these counties easily surpassed the last governor’s race four years ago, a sign that Trump’s base was motivated to turn out without Trump on the ticket himself, or even an in-person Trump rally.
The other side of that coin: Democratic candidates continue to sink to new lows in rural areas, especially among white voters. According to exit polls, Youngkin won white voters without a college degree — who are overrepresented in rural areas — by a 3-to-1 margin, 76 percent to 24 percent. Trump won those voters by a smaller, 62 percent to 38 percent margin against Biden in 2020.
Here's an excerpt from an opinion piece by Tom Perriello, a former Virginia congressman and gubernatorial candidate:
Republicans can win by running up numbers in vast expanses of low-population rural areas, and Democrats ignore those areas at their peril. The two groups in Virginia most likely to benefit from debt-free community college, for instance, are white rural families and recent immigrants or their children. We will not rebuild a common American dream when the establishment cares more about the price of the bill than the price Americans are paying to have a future. We do not need to win back all the old Johnny Cash Democrats, but authentic reformers with roots in these communities can level the score.
Speaking of "authentic reformers with roots in these communities," I continue to be inspired by the rural organizers I follow on Twitter. They include Anderson Clayton in Person County, North Carolina, profiled here in the Daily Yonder. She's a great follow and will lead you to other rural organizers in places like Iowa and west Texas.
Get more context on the Virginia gubernatorial race from this 2017 story on Virginia's uneven recovery from the Great Recession, published in the run up to the last gubernatorial election in that state. Also, here's a visual history of 73 years of election results in Virginia, this published after that 2017 election.
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