A Republican victory in Virginia might not mean what you think it means

As the people of Virginia go to the polls to elect a new governor, all eyes are on the first big political test since Joe Biden swept to power in November.

There is nothing certain about the result in Tuesday’s election: the governorship of Old Dominion tends to go to the opposite party of the current president and Biden’s approval ratings are at an all-time low; but a Republican hasn’t been elected to the post for more than 10 years; and the two candidates, Democrat Terry McAuliffe and Republican Glenn Youngkin, are now neck-and-neck in the polls.

Democrats have been sending in the big guns to help McAuliffe. Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and Stacey Abrams have all come out to rally voters. Bill Clinton’s campaign manager James Carville (a.k.a the Ragin’ Cajun) has reportedly been pulling strings behind the scenes.

There have been calls for Donald Trump to stump for Youngkin, whom he has publicly endorsed. But those calls are mainly coming from Democrats. They see him as electoral poison in a state that Biden won by 10 points, and believe he could work his magic for them again by repelling suburban voters and independents as he did last November.

Youngkin himself has been circumspect about invoking the twice-impeached president, treading a fine line between politely welcoming his endorsement and then quickly changing the subject.

Some observers think a Republican victory could even point to a world where GOP candidates can win without Trump. Doug Heye, a Republican consultant and former RNC official, told CNN: “Regardless of whether or not he wins ... it looks like Youngkin is showing Republicans that they don’t need to be wedded to Trump. Sure, they don’t want to cross him and alienate his base. But, especially with Biden’s low numbers and McAuliffe’s vulnerabilities on things like education, Republicans can play on Democrats’ field. That’s the first step in putting Trump in the rearview mirror.” Could a Youngkin triumph be the first sign of the Republican Party breaking free from the suffocating embrace of their disgraced former leader?

Perhaps – but there might be a twist. Sure, Trump lost his party the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives in one term (the first president to achieve that hat-trick since Herbert Hoover in the 1930s). He lost the popular vote by almost three million in 2016 and then by seven million in 2020. He faces a tsunami of legal action over the coming years. He was impeached twice, once for inciting the worst attack on the seat of US democracy since the British burned down the White House in 1814, all so that he could overturn an election he lost. But, as The Independent’s Eric Garcia has written, for most in the GOP he is still the only game in town.

Even longtime pillars of the pre-Trump GOP like Senator Chuck Grassley, seeking re-election at the age of 88, have found themselves bending the knee. With a smirking Trump standing behind him, Grassley told a rally in his home state: “I may have been born at night, but I wasn’t born last night. If I didn’t accept the endorsement of a person that’s got 91 per cent of the Republican voters in Iowa, I wouldn’t be too smart.”

And a victory in Virginia for a Republican holding Trump himself at arm’s length may have limited impact on the political landscape. Because many of the issues he is running on are Trumpian in nature.

Alongside the traditional conservative fare of big tax cuts, Youngkin has been immersing himself in the culture wars that Trump did so much to stoke. He has vowed to ban “critical race theory” from schools (interpreted by many as code for teaching about the mistreatment of Black Americans), and most recently released a campaign ad featuring the mother of a Virginia student who tried to have the Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison’s book Beloved banned from her son’s English curriculum. The son in question went on to briefly work for Trump at the White House, and the mother and her husband are both Republican activists. The supposedly disturbing scenes which the mother was seeking to protect her teenage son from concerned the day-to-day realities of slavery.

Youngkin has also opposed vaccine mandates (though he has said he himself is vaccinated and says he thinks everyone should be). He has also indulged Republicans who support Trump’s so-called Big Lie that the 2020 election was somehow stolen from him.

So even if the 45th president eventually becomes dispensable himself, it could be a sign that his nativist reshaping of the party has been successful enough to work without him. And with voter restriction laws coming into place in states like Georgia, Florida and Texas which critics say aim to ensure one-party rule for decades to come, the future could be looking bright for the Trump wing of the GOP.