The Democrats’ capture of the state legislature in Virginia on Tuesday is nothing short of humiliating for Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who staked immense political capital on the races by making them straightforwardly about his ambition to pass a 15-week abortion ban he has championed.
But the GOP governor’s comeuppance isn’t just about the durability of abortion rights as a political winner for Democrats. It also shows that right-wing culture-warring on education — built around a “parents’ rights” agenda limiting school discussion of race and gender — has utterly lost its political potency, allowing Democrats to respond with their own affirmative liberal cultural agenda.
Strikingly, more than $5.5 million was spent on ads about education in the Virginia legislative contests, according to data provided by the tracking firm AdImpact. While it’s unclear what percentage focused on “parents’ rights,” some Republicans modeled their campaigns on the way Youngkin turned that issue into a 2021 victory — an upset that led many pundits to declare education a political loser for Democrats even in blue territory.
Not this time. In Schuyler VanValkenburg’s ouster of Republican state Sen. Siobhan Dunnavant in a district near Richmond, “parents’ rights” loomed large because the GOP incumbent sponsored a law, signed by Youngkin, purportedly aimed at sexually explicit materials in schools that facilitated a rash of book removals.
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Dunnavant accused her opponent of being willing to expose kids to such materials. But VanValkenburg took this head-on, running ads attacking that law and castigating book bans, while reassuring voters that as a high school teacher, he knows “the difference one book can make for a child.”
That suggests it’s politically potent to elevate the fight into a high-minded debate over the freedom of young minds to inquire, rather than letting Republicans drag it down into a muck of grubby accusations about porn in schools and “grooming” children.
VanValkenburg said he encountered many voters who perceived the right’s culture wars as not just a gratuitous attack on schools, but a broader effort to expand government intrusion into kids’ education. “The reason the book-banning is so visceral is that it hits on both those things,” he told me.
Youngkin’s first act as governor was an attempt to expunge critical race theory in schools, which included a tip line so parents could report offending teachers. Del. Rodney Willett, who won reelection in a swing district outside Richmond, said the tip line and the law facilitating book removals badly resonated with parents who have developed attachments to public schools as centers of community in the suburbs.
“They’re saying, ‘We don’t trust teachers, we’re not going to give them autonomy in the classroom,’ ” Willet said of Youngkin and Republicans, adding that voters regularly told him: “We need to be doing everything we can to keep our teachers.”
Then there’s Danica Roem, a delegate who on Tuesday was chosen by voters as the first openly transgender state senator in the South. She defeated a Republican who campaigned on banning transgender athletes from high school sports.
“She had every trans attack thrown at her, and she still won,” said Heather Williams, the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee’s interim president. “These culture-war issues that Republicans are trying to lead on — they’re not where the country is.”
In a state Senate race in a suburban Loudoun County district, Republican Juan Pablo Segura leaned hard into the school wars, vowing his top priority was to notify parents of any perceived interest in transgender identity by their kids. Yet Democrat Russet Perry prevailed after stressing abortion rights and arguing that Youngkin-style culture-warring is politicizing and destroying education.
That’s instructive, because when Youngkin overperformed in Loudoun County in 2021, pundits gushed that he had cracked the code on how to wrap right-wing culture-warmongering in non-threatening packaging. Democrats, we were told, must reshape their education stances to accommodate the explosive parental revolution that he had tapped into — even in the socially liberal suburbs.
After Tuesday night — in which a slate of liberals also won election to the embattled Loudoun school board — that now looks like a serious overreading. While the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision that overturned abortion rights undeniably shifted our cultural politics more than anything else, it’s also encouraging voters to be more attuned to GOP radicalism on other fronts.
“Dobbs was the lightbulb for a lot of voters on GOP extremism, making it harder to reach suburban voters with cooked up cultural grievances,” said Jared Leopold, a Democratic consultant in Virginia. “It turns out that talking endlessly about critical race theory is not a successful way to win critical races.”
Liberals shouldn’t grow too hubristic about these developments. As Semafor’s David Weigel notes, Republicans still ran ahead of where they should have in a blue state such as Virginia. But still: The right’s culture-warring fell dramatically short of the promise it held for Youngkin last time around, and the robust liberal mobilization in response shows no signs of going away.
But the GOP governor’s comeuppance isn’t just about the durability of abortion rights as a political winner for Democrats. It also shows that right-wing culture-warring on education — built around a “parents’ rights” agenda limiting school discussion of race and gender — has utterly lost its political potency, allowing Democrats to respond with their own affirmative liberal cultural agenda.
Strikingly, more than $5.5 million was spent on ads about education in the Virginia legislative contests, according to data provided by the tracking firm AdImpact. While it’s unclear what percentage focused on “parents’ rights,” some Republicans modeled their campaigns on the way Youngkin turned that issue into a 2021 victory — an upset that led many pundits to declare education a political loser for Democrats even in blue territory.
Not this time. In Schuyler VanValkenburg’s ouster of Republican state Sen. Siobhan Dunnavant in a district near Richmond, “parents’ rights” loomed large because the GOP incumbent sponsored a law, signed by Youngkin, purportedly aimed at sexually explicit materials in schools that facilitated a rash of book removals.
Press Enter to skip to end of carousel
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Dunnavant accused her opponent of being willing to expose kids to such materials. But VanValkenburg took this head-on, running ads attacking that law and castigating book bans, while reassuring voters that as a high school teacher, he knows “the difference one book can make for a child.”
That suggests it’s politically potent to elevate the fight into a high-minded debate over the freedom of young minds to inquire, rather than letting Republicans drag it down into a muck of grubby accusations about porn in schools and “grooming” children.
VanValkenburg said he encountered many voters who perceived the right’s culture wars as not just a gratuitous attack on schools, but a broader effort to expand government intrusion into kids’ education. “The reason the book-banning is so visceral is that it hits on both those things,” he told me.
Youngkin’s first act as governor was an attempt to expunge critical race theory in schools, which included a tip line so parents could report offending teachers. Del. Rodney Willett, who won reelection in a swing district outside Richmond, said the tip line and the law facilitating book removals badly resonated with parents who have developed attachments to public schools as centers of community in the suburbs.
“They’re saying, ‘We don’t trust teachers, we’re not going to give them autonomy in the classroom,’ ” Willet said of Youngkin and Republicans, adding that voters regularly told him: “We need to be doing everything we can to keep our teachers.”
Then there’s Danica Roem, a delegate who on Tuesday was chosen by voters as the first openly transgender state senator in the South. She defeated a Republican who campaigned on banning transgender athletes from high school sports.
“She had every trans attack thrown at her, and she still won,” said Heather Williams, the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee’s interim president. “These culture-war issues that Republicans are trying to lead on — they’re not where the country is.”
In a state Senate race in a suburban Loudoun County district, Republican Juan Pablo Segura leaned hard into the school wars, vowing his top priority was to notify parents of any perceived interest in transgender identity by their kids. Yet Democrat Russet Perry prevailed after stressing abortion rights and arguing that Youngkin-style culture-warring is politicizing and destroying education.
That’s instructive, because when Youngkin overperformed in Loudoun County in 2021, pundits gushed that he had cracked the code on how to wrap right-wing culture-warmongering in non-threatening packaging. Democrats, we were told, must reshape their education stances to accommodate the explosive parental revolution that he had tapped into — even in the socially liberal suburbs.
After Tuesday night — in which a slate of liberals also won election to the embattled Loudoun school board — that now looks like a serious overreading. While the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision that overturned abortion rights undeniably shifted our cultural politics more than anything else, it’s also encouraging voters to be more attuned to GOP radicalism on other fronts.
“Dobbs was the lightbulb for a lot of voters on GOP extremism, making it harder to reach suburban voters with cooked up cultural grievances,” said Jared Leopold, a Democratic consultant in Virginia. “It turns out that talking endlessly about critical race theory is not a successful way to win critical races.”
Liberals shouldn’t grow too hubristic about these developments. As Semafor’s David Weigel notes, Republicans still ran ahead of where they should have in a blue state such as Virginia. But still: The right’s culture-warring fell dramatically short of the promise it held for Youngkin last time around, and the robust liberal mobilization in response shows no signs of going away.
