On the menu today: Two political earthquakes are coming our way. One is in Virginia, almost regardless of who wins, and one is on Capitol Hill, where the Democrats appear set to spend about $3 trillion on priorities that are not what is worrying Americans the most right now. Oh, and one liberal policy analyst argues that the Build Back Better legislation’s child-care provisions are going to backfire spectacularly and make preschool and afterschool child care unaffordable for most families.
Two Imminent Political Earthquakes
The first political earthquake that is about to rock our world is coming Tuesday, in the Virginia governor’s race, where the conventional wisdom is rapidly shifting from “Is Terry McAuliffe going to blow this?” to “Is Glenn Youngkin going to win by a significant margin?”
Last night, a Fox News poll suggested that the momentum had completely flipped, and that McAuliffe was now the trailing underdog:
Republican Glenn Youngkin has moved ahead of Democrat Terry McAuliffe in the Virginia governor’s race, less than a week before the election.
McAuliffe receives 45 percent to Youngkin’s 53 percent in a new Fox News survey of Virginia likely voters. Youngkin’s eight-point advantage is outside the poll’s margin of sampling error.
That’s a big shift from two weeks ago, when McAuliffe was ahead by five, 51-46 percent.
An internal poll found Republican gubernatorial nominee Glenn Youngkin ahead of Democratic former Gov. Terry McAuliffe by 4 percentage points, signaling significant gains in a competitive race for Virginia governor.
The Republican Winsome Sears for Lieutenant Governor Campaign poll conducted by co/efficient, provided exclusively to the Washington Examiner, found Youngkin with 47% support among likely voters and McAuliffe with 43 percent. Third-party candidate Princess Blanding had 5 percent support, and another 5 percent were undecided.
If you want to dismiss the second one as an internal poll, fine. But almost every other poll since mid October has shown a tie or McAuliffe ahead by one. And the way McAuliffe is campaigning, he’s acting like he’s afraid he’s trailing or tied, so it seems likely that his own polls are showing similar results.
You may have noticed I write about polls less often since the 2020 election; right now, it’s just not clear that pollsters are accurately measuring who is going to cast a ballot. (You could argue that the entire coverage of the South Carolina, North Carolina, and Maine Senate races in 2020 was shaped by wildly inaccurate polling that understated support for the Republican candidates in those races.)
There’s another important caveat for Republicans to keep in mind: In 2017 the polls showed Ralph Northam with a modest lead — 3.3 percentage points in the RealClearPolitics average — and Northam won by almost nine percentage points. So it is possible for Democratic candidates to perform significantly better than the final polls suggest they will.
But it doesn’t feel like this is a race in which McAuliffe is doing just fine. Former Democratic governor Doug Wilder has declined to endorse a candidate. McAuliffe wasn’t a particularly beloved governor when he was in office eight years ago, and he used his money and name-recognition to overtake three other African-American rivals in the primary. (One was the infamous Justin Fairfax, so McAuliffe’s not all bad.) Usually, but not always, the party that lost the White House the previous year wins the Virginia gubernatorial election, because the grassroots of the party out of power are angry and fired up, while the grassroots of the party in power are tired and complacent. (Here in Democratic-leaning Authenticity Woods in Fairfax County, it feels as if there are fewer McAuliffe yard signs than expected, and more Youngkin yard signs than usual, but that could just be what I’m attuned to notice.)
Yesterday afternoon, I tweeted that, “If Youngkin wins, we will analyze it to death, but a pretty significant chunk is that Terry McAuliffe is just a piss-poor candidate who got up on stage and undermined his own campaign, over and over again.” Some people interpreted this as contending that the issues didn’t matter, which isn’t what I said at all. The point is that, similar to Hillary Clinton’s insufferably smug, arrogant, and self-righteous demeanor when she denounced the “basket of deplorables,” McAuliffe managed to articulate his views on key issues in a manner that maximized the antagonism to those who didn’t already agree with him.
“I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach,” McAuliffe said in one of his debates with Youngkin. (As Phil Klein observed, this isn’t really a gaffe. It is what most Democrats think.)
McAuliffe called parental objections to critical race theory “a conspiracy theory” and “a racist dog whistle.”
The overwhelming majority of parents in Virginia and elsewhere are just fine with schools teaching kids about slavery, segregation, and the myriad times America did not live up to its ideals and principles, particularly in matters of race, and the ways we still don’t always live up to our ideals. (Ironically, the quality of schools is one of the ways we don’t live up to our ideal of equality of opportunity!) But the overwhelming majority of parents in Virginia and elsewhere oppose teaching kids that America is a fundamentally evil and racist place, or teaching kids that the white ones among them are fundamentally evil and racist and that the black ones among them are doomed to be victims of systemic racism. If McAuliffe were a wiser, shrewder candidate, he would have taken a much more conciliatory approach — “It’s important that we teach kids the truth about American history, but all of this needs to emphasize that we’re all Americans, and we all have a place in the American story,” or something like that. He could have concurred that parents indeed have an important voice in their children’s education, and he could have emphasized the need to make up ground lost during the generally dysfunctional year of “distance learning.” But McAuliffe sent his kids to a $30,000-per-year private school, so any discussion of problems in Virginia public schools is entirely theoretical to him.
McAuliffe also contended that Youngkin questioned the results of the 2020 presidential election, but he himself has repeatedly contended that the 2000 presidential election was stolen and concurred that Stacey Abrams was the legitimate winner of the 2018 Georgia senate race. Early in the Virginia race, Youngkin tried to dodge the question of the 2020 election and hasn’t always been as clear as he ought to be, but he stated in September, “Joe Biden was legitimately elected and there was no significant fraud in Virginia’s 2020 election.”
Assuming all of the pollsters aren’t wildly off, the range of possibilities is anywhere from a narrow McAuliffe win to a surprisingly comfortable Youngkin win, in a state where Biden beat Trump 54 percent to 44 percent. And don’t be surprised if the narrow Democratic majorities in the State Senate and House of Delegates either get even narrower or flip to GOP control.
Even a narrow McAuliffe win will indicate to Democrats that they’re in the deepest of doo-doo for the 2022 midterms and may well perform about nine or ten percentage points behind where they ran in 2020. Meanwhile, just across the Potomac River . . .
A Massive Spending Bill That Ignores Our Current Economic Problems
The second political earthquake that is about to rock our world is that sometime after Tuesday’s off-year elections, Democrats in the House and Senate are almost certain to pass some version of the $1.75 trillion “Build Back Better” legislation and the $1.2 trillion Bipartisan Infrastructure Framework and dump roughly $3 trillion of new federal spending into an economy that is already dealing with serious inflation, after accumulating $6 trillion in new debt over the past two years.
There’s nothing for conservatives to cheer for in here, as Phil Klein lays out. And as the editors conclude, “While the proposal is pared down from what Democrats had been promising earlier in the year, in its current form, it is still large enough to be fiscally irresponsible and economically destructive.”
Perhaps most importantly, the legislation is also not what the American electorate is asking for right now. Ask Americans what’s worrying them today, particularly in the realm of economics, and they’ll probably mention high food prices, high gas prices, skyrocketing inflation, and all the supply-chain issues that are making it harder to find the products they’re used to purchasing. Maybe, eventually, someone will mention infrastructure, traffic, or road repairs.
Interestingly, I suspect one thing you would not hear is, “I can’t find a job because no one is hiring.” The country has 10.4 million unfilled jobs right now. The signs in the windows of businesses have shifted from “help wanted” to “we’re hiring!” to “please be patient as we are short-staffed.” Yet Biden is still touting his plan by saying it “will create millions of good-paying jobs.”
Treasury secretary Janet Yellen contends that these massive spending bills will reduce inflation because the government will be paying more for health care and child care. But this sounds an awful lot like the argument that more government-run financial-aid programs will make higher education more affordable. By having the government pick up the tab, it reduces or eliminates any pressure to reduce prices. And left-learning Matt Bruenig is screaming to Democrats that the bill’s child-care provisions are going to backfire enormously:
Under the Democratic child care plan, child care worker wages are meant to increase to the wages currently received by elementary school teachers. The median child care worker is currently paid $25,460 per year while the median elementary school teacher is currently paid $60,660 per year. Thus, this mandate could increase child care worker pay by 138 percent. If we increase the salary cost from the CAP estimate above by 138 percent, the unsubsidized price of child care goes from $15,888 per year to $28,970, an increase of $13,082 per year. And this is not the only thing the bill does that will increase the cost of care. . . .
Under this scenario, there will be many dual-earning couples who cannot afford child care if both of them continue to work, but could afford child care if one of them quit their job and thereby brought their family income below the eligibility cutoff. Normally people who quit jobs to take care of their kids do so in order to save the money they’d have to spend on child care. Under this plan, they have to quit their job in order to afford child care!
For all the talk of child care benefits being a boon to women’s labor force participation, this design clearly pushes against it by making it virtually impossible for a dual-earning middle class couple to afford child care in the first three years of the program.
If we didn’t have to live under it, it would be hilariously ironic; Democrats who set out to make preschool and after-school child care more affordable are going to make both completely unaffordable, and likely spur more women to choose to be stay-at-home moms.
This — plus the potential recession ahead — point to an electorate that will be livid by the time the midterm elections roll around in November 2022. And there will be only one party for voters to blame for this.
ADDENDUM: Facebook thinks it can get me to start calling it “Meta”? Good luck. Fellas, I still call them the “San Diego Chargers” and they moved to Los Angeles after the 2016 season.