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 Hollywood’s Diversity Battle, Media Amnesia, and the Trump Hangover Good afternoon and thanks as always for reading The Daily Courant, your postprandial guide to all the best journalism on offer at Puck.
Today, we’re reading Peter Hamby‘s opus on the the Virginia gubernatorial race—an off-year Rorschach test that is frighteningly accurate at predicting the national mood. This cycle, of course, it’s a contest of two rich white dads arguing over Donald Trump, vaccine mandates, and critical race theory. A pretty accurate representation, in other words, of the fatuous state of American politics in 2021.
Plus, below the fold, Julia Ioffe reflects on what Democrats misunderstand about their Washington stenographers—and what the Russian opposition media gets right. And don’t forget to listen to the latest episode of The Powers That Be—available now on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
The Virginia gubernatorial race is always a fetish for politicos—an off-year Rorschach test and harbinger of the general mood two years before Iowa. And this year’s iteration is both tamer than ever (a contest between two rich white guy dads) and yet more indicative than ever of what wins in politics in our post-Trump (or is it pre-Trump?) age. Every four years, a divided nation turns its lonely eyes to … the Virginia governor’s race. And by “the nation,” I really just mean bored political reporters, exhausted by the tedium of Washington policy-making and hungry for their next fix of real-world campaign action. Because who in Texas or Colorado or New Hampshire could possibly care about the next occupant of the Virginia Executive Mansion? Especially this year, when the two white guy dad candidates—Democrat Terry McAuliffe and Republican Glenn Youngkin—aren’t exactly Coachella headliners.
But let me say this, as a political reporter and proud son of Richmond: You should care about my esteemed commonwealth. Even if its days as a purebred swing state have passed, the governor’s race in Virginia always has a way of telling us what we need to know about the state of the electorate. Just look back at 2017, when an aging, moderate career politician defeated a Twitter-hyped candidate with progressive ideas in the Democratic primary by putting together a powerful coalition of Black voters and suburbanites who favored pragmatism over radical chic. That Democrat, Ralph Northam, then rode a tide of anti-Trump sentiment to a resounding victory, presaging the Democratic backlash to Donald Trump in the following year’s midterms. Northam somehow managed to win on Election Day despite the election eve consensus on “Morning Joe,” when the pundit panel solemnly agreed that Northam would lose—even though he was leading all the polls—because Republicans were braying about crime and Donna Brazile wrote a book criticizing the Democratic party or something.
Yes, Virginia has it all: A nationalized race offering clues to the country’s political mood, a test of which party’s base is more motivated, a dash of clueless national punditry. There are two other elections next month, a governor’s race in New Jersey and a mayoral race in New York City, both of which are certain to be won by Democrats. Virginia is the only state this off-year that looks like a battleground state. With the possible exception of laid-off steelworkers, Virginia is home to almost every kind of voter that matters: Suburban moms and dads, inner-suburb millennials, outer-suburb churchgoers, veterans, Black voters both rural and urban, Hispanics, college and non-college whites, farmers, NASCAR fans, campus libs, gun nuts, abortion freaks, dudes who wear croakies and go to the “Rivah” in the summertime.
Today’s Virginia is not the bellwether it was between 2005 and 2012, when it completed its long drift from red to purple to blue. By the time 2020 rolled around, Biden smoked Trump by 10 points in Virginia, giving new meaning to Sic Semper Tyrannis. But non-federal elections there have a different flavor. “What a lot of people miss is how different the electorate can be in an off-year versus a presidential,” said Tucker Martin, a Republican consultant in Richmond who worked for the state’s last G.O.P. governor, Bob McDonnell. “Obama won Virginia by six points in 2008, and then Bob McDonnell comes in the next year and wins the governor’s race by 17.”
In the odd-numbered years following a presidential election, party strategists and reporters still look at the Virginia governor’s race for hints at how the public is responding to the party in power, just across the Potomac…
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