“The nation’s eyes are on Virginia,” Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin told a crowd Saturday, during the final weekend of campaigning before the state’s election on Tuesday. “And as Virginia goes, so goes the nation.” Democratic candidate (and former governor) Terry McAuliffe, with whom Youngkin is locked in a near dead heat, also made his closing message to voters a national one. “[Donald] Trump wants to win here so he can announce for president for 2024,” he said Sunday. “That’s the stakes of this election. He wants to get himself off the mat.”
The former president, who has endorsed Youngkin, lost the state by ten points last year. While Youngkin has been careful not to tie himself too closely to Trump, his campaign has harnessed distinctly Trumpy cultural issues, especially about education, helping to galvanize a coalition of so-called parents for Youngkin with attacks on race-focused curriculum changes and COVID precautions. “He’s turned our school boards into war zones,” McAuliffe said over the weekend, per the New York Times, which concluded in conversations with voters “that many Virginians view this election as something symbolically greater than a face-off between two candidates for governor.”
Tensions are high ahead of Election Day in Virginia, a state Democrats have held for more than a decade and whose current gubernatorial contest is seen as a bellwether for the 2022 midterms—and an unexpectedly murky one at that. “No one knows,” one of McAuliffe’s advisers, asked for a prediction about Tuesday, told Politico. “It’s a toss-up.” FiveThirtyEight had Youngkin with a slight lead on Monday morning. Both candidates spent the weekend criss-crossing the state to get out the vote, with McAuliffe on Saturday traveling “more than 120 miles” to “eight stops in six cities” during an 11-hour period, the Times reports, noting while McAuliffe “hustled through sparsely attended events from morning to night,” Youngkin “greeted crowds of more than 1,000.”
According to Axios, much of the focus should be on Loudoun County, a place some 40 miles outside of D.C. that’s seen as “ground zero” for the GOP culture war issues that have bolstered Youngkin’s prospects. With its fast-growing population, the county is also “a diversifying area key to Democratic success” in the rest of the state. Loudoun, the wealthiest county in the U.S., is reportedly expected to go to McAuliffe even if Youngkin wins overall, “but insiders are watching how much [Youngkin] can reverse the big gains Dems have made in the county in the past three major elections,” Axios reports. Youngkin assured reporters over the weekend that “we’re going to make some really surprising gains across the commonwealth.”
It was in Loudoun County where Politico’s Playbook—alongside “an Allbirds-clad,” Halloween-parade campaigning McAuliffe—got “a sense of how on edge everyone is in American politics a few days before the most important election of 2021.” On Sunday, just after the parade, a Youngkin supporter reportedly posted up in front of McAuliffe’s campaign bus “screaming apparently unintelligibly, about Loudoun County schools”; there was some concern among McAuliffe staffers that the man might be armed. (McAuliffe was on the bus conducting an interview.) Staffers called police to the scene, who talked the Youngkin supporter down. “In the end it was nothing,” Politico wrote. “But we have rarely been out on the trail when there was such a heightened sense of alarm about the possibility of an interaction between a campaign and an opponent’s supporter escalating to something more sinister.”
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