Battleground Virginia Race Is A Referendum On America's Broken Politics

Every four years we hear the same disclaimer not to read too much into the Virginia Governor's race, which along with New Jersey's gubernatorial race is held on odd-numbered years exactly 12 months after a Presidential election.  But every four years, the race proves instructive about the national headwinds.  To be sure, a generation ago Virginia was to the right of the country whereas today it's to the left of the country, but is nonetheless instructive in finding out which party's base is most energized and which one is either lethargic or sufficiently outnumbered.   The fact that Virginia maintains its absurd one term limit for Governors is even more useful in that every gubernatorial contest is an open seat without incumbency complicating the narrative.  

With that said, the incumbency matter is a bit more muddled this year as former Democratic Governor Terry McAuliffe is running for a non-consecutive second term.  Deep-pocketed Republican businessman Glenn Youngkin is his challenger and is proving to be a useful emissary for his party, well-financed and a blank slate with no voting record to be used against him.  This is allowing him to run as a moderate business Republican who the GOP hopes can poach some of the upscale suburban voters that have consolidated toward Democrats in recent cycles and who the Republicans can't win statewide without.

Thus far it seems to be working.  The election is 10 days away and most polls show the election is within the margin of error.  The necessary disclaimer here is that four years ago, polls showed a margin-of-error race between Democrat Ralph Northam and Republican Ed Gillespie as well, but on election night Northam won by a very decisive 9 points.  Maybe that will happen again, but I'm not at all confident that the Democrats' base is as energized this year or that independents are as unified in opposition to Republicans.  The more likely outcome is a race that resembles the 2013 gubernatorial race, also featuring McAuliffe, where lethargic Democratic turnout got conservative dark horse Republican Ken Cuccinelli within two points of victory.  Given that Youngkin is much less conservative than Cuccinelli and the political climate is worse for Democrats than it was in 2013, I think McAuliffe will be lucky to prevail at all.  My current bet is a narrow Youngkin victory, which would send entirely justifiable shock waves through Democratic circles.  If Democrats are losing in present-day Virginia in a highly nationalized campaign, it really doesn't bode well for the party in the 2022 midterms.

But that takes to me to an interesting piece of conventional wisdom from Democratic nominee McAuliffe from the campaign trail, who pressed Congressional Democrats to pass the Build Back Better plan currently languishing in the hypothetical stage in the House and Senate as a way of boosting Democratic turnout, believing that doing so boosts his chances for victory.  But is that how that works?  It's a long-debated "chicken or egg" dichotomy in politics.  Is the incumbent party hurt more at the polls by passing legislation or by not passing any legislation?  Certainly in recent electoral politics, driven by base turnout to the degree that it is, the answer seems to be both.  Independents are more likely to want a "check" on an ambitious governing party AND more likely to want to throw the bums out if they are deemed incompetent.  It's a "heads I win, tails you lose" situation that explains why partisan advantage seems to change hands every two to four years, both historically and even more so in modern times.

Contrary to McAuliffe's supposition, a scenario where voters go to the polls in larger numbers to reward the governing party for a job well done is the least likely of all to materialize.  There's no evidence of it happening in any election cycle since the Great Depression.  And particularly in the case of Build Back Better, where a majority of voters don't even know what's in the legislation and would see no tangible benefit from it in the immediate future, it's highly unlikely that its abrupt passage in Congress would result in Virginia voters coming out in large numbers to thank McAuliffe's party on November 2.

With that said, I was probably too hard on the Democrats with my criticism last month about the grotesquely unwieldy process Build Back Better is going through and their miserable job of selling it to the American people.  Fact is, the reconciliation process ensured there was no better way to proceed with this.  In order to get the legislation through with only 50 votes and avoid monolithic Republican filibuster, the entire package had to be shoehorned into a budget reconciliation bill, meaning the agreed-upon dollar amount had to be decided before specifics in the legislation can be debated.  This prevented Democrats from pitching potentially popular concepts to the public in a meaningful way because the negotiations were always poised to cut the topline budget number and leave many of the early benefits on the cutting room floor.

It's a horrific way to have to govern, but the abuse of the filibuster to stop every piece of legislation from normal debate or up-and-down votes meant that this legislation would never get the treatment of New Deal or Great Society legislation.  Back then, individual items could be debated and voted upon  in the way our government intended, but will never happen again so long as the Senate filibuster exists in its current form.  I've been reluctant to call for the elimination of the filibuster, but it's increasingly clear that the nation is ungovernable without major filibuster reform.

With that said, Republicans came within 90,000 votes out of more than 155 million votes cast in 2020 of controlling the Presidency, the Senate, and the House.  The Democrats threaded a needle and won bare majorities in all three governing bodies, but they absolutely do not have a mandate.  So do they have any credible claim toward passing their muscularly progressive Build Back Better agenda, either through the reconciliation gimmick or possible elimination of the filibuster?  And was there ever a realistic path to get there when their "50th vote" for sweeping climate change legislation in the Senate comes from a guy representing the nation's largest coal-producing state?

Republicans certainly would govern this way if the shoe was on the other foot, and in a way it was following their narrow trifecta win in 2016, passing an unpopular tax cut for the rich, and with John McCain's thumb being the only thing standing in the way of their plan to snuff out Obamacare.  Knowing that the other guys will do it without breaking a sweat, it's understandable that the Democrats feel like they have no choice but to use this narrow window they have to bulldoze through a generation's worth of legislative priorities in one big gulp. 

Not only will it not end well for them, but it all points to a systemic breakdown in our form of government that will not be easily remedied and seems poised to lead the country to a place as dark as the January 6th insurrection on a chronic basis as voters on both sides will feel a credible claim to the other guys refusing to play by the rules.  Back in 2000, after the historically close Presidential election between Al Gore and George W. Bush, we were told the country was as divided as it had been since the Civil War.  But those days seem quaint and naive in retrospect as the political divisions of 2000 were small potatoes compared to what we're seeing today and the legislative process looked like a model of efficiency.

The excitement of election season hasn't gone away completely for me but with each passing cycle it gets harder to find the energy to truly care who seizes control of the government, knowing that their control will be fleeting and the country will only become more bitterly divided as a consequence of the winning party's stewardship.  And I sense that more people feel like I do, especially on the Democratic side, making us vulnerable to Trump's near-inevitable return to the electoral spotlight heading into 2024.  Unfortunately for Terry McAuliffe, the closest thing we'll get to a comprehensive answer to the question of Democratic and independent voter exhaustion is only a little more than a week away.  McAuliffe may or may not pass the test, but it's expecting a lot to believe that anything his party can pull off in the Senate and House chambers will be the trigger that reassures voters that our current system in any way works.