Liberals Uncover Glenn Youngkin’s Super-Secret Plan to Keep His Promises

R epublicans never win elections. Not really. They benefit from “gerrymandering” or Russian gremlins, or those pesky “structural” advantages of the Constitution. Voters may be too dumb to know what’s good for them, or maybe they’ve been duped by big-monied interests and “misinformation.” And so it goes with Glenn Youngkin, the first Republican to win a statewide race in Virginia in more than a decade.

Youngkin, like any successful politician, focused predominantly on what was bothering voters. And foremost in the minds of many voters in purple-state Virginia in 2021 was the authoritarian-inclined technocrats who had exploited the pandemic to run the state by diktat. Enough voters were angered by the irrational closing of schools, the immoral masking of children, and the teaching of transgender ideology and divisive, racist pseudohistory and theories, that Youngkin narrowly won, and the GOP took back the state legislature. Once-cheery moms and dads were fed up with anti-choice ideologues who run the teachers’ unions and with candidates who believe that parents should not be telling schools what to teach.

But none of the proposed legislation listed in the tweet above will be especially surprising to anyone who paid even minimal attention. Numerous activists, including Greg Sargent, who works for one of the largest and most influential newspapers in the nation, incessantly repeated Terry McAuliffe’s false contention that Youngkin’s platform was radical.

Take voter-ID laws, widely popular among Americans — including African Americans. Despite all the histrionics about “voting rights,” the idea that a citizen should identify himself before casting a ballot is getting more popular, not less. It was only last year, incidentally, that Virginia Democrats degraded the vote by allowing anyone without identification to cast a ballot. Youngkin surreptitiously opposed the law by creating a public “election integrity task force” and talking about it to anyone who would listen. The task force was mentioned in at least 18 separate Washington Post pieces. The paper strongly editorialized against it. One piece covering Youngkin’s participation in an “election integrity” rally at Liberty University helpfully informed us that the candidate had made the issue “the centerpiece of his campaign.”

Virginia’s 45 days of early voting was one of the most chaotic and expansive elections in the nation. The GOP proposal to offer two weeks of early voting would merely put the state in the middle of the pack. Agree or not, this is hardly an extremist position.

Younkin also openly opposed minimum-wage hikes. If not stopped by Youngkin, Virginia is set to become home to the highest wage floor in the country: $15 per hour by 2026. An $11 minimum wage (the real minimum wage, it must always be pointed out, is zero) is as high or higher than those found in Delaware, Hawaii, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Ohio, Texas, Wisconsin, and another 24 states. Agree with the number or not, $11 is far from radical. And Youngkin’s opposition to it was pointed out about a bazillion times in attack ads on the Virginia airwaves.

And why would any sentient voter be under the impression that Youngkin wouldn’t support a bill freeing local school districts from edicts regarding transgender kids in locker rooms? After the assault on two girls in Loudoun County, Politico noted that Youngkin had “seized” (at least he hadn’t pounced) “on a politically explosive school sexual assault case.” Youngkin was, according to an MSNBC columnist, “poised to cripple trans rights in America.” McAuliffe claimed that Youngkin was the “most homophobic” candidate in Virginia history. And Biden-administration favorite Jennifer Rubin informed us that Youngkin had “voiced hostility toward transgender youth participation in sports” when he argued that “biological males should not be allowed to play sports in girls’ sports.” The issue was at the center of the campaign for weeks. Anyone who was paying attention in Virginia knew where the Republicans stood.

We must concede that Youngkin avoided stressing gun or abortion policy, the same way that Terry McAuliffe, aiming to appeal to moderate voters, didn’t accentuate his party’s most progressive issues. But when asked which gun restrictions he would support if elected governor, Youngkin responded: “I think we need to be fully clear: none.” Not in any debate or interview I’ve been able to find did the candidate step back from that position — and it came up quite a bit. Then again, the constitutional right of law-abiding citizens to arm themselves in public probably isn’t quite as controversial in Virginia, where there are high levels of gun ownership, as left-wing pundits might think. In the final weeks of the campaign, in fact, one progressive PAC tried to hurt Youngkin by running spots casting doubt on his commitment to the Second Amendment because he hadn’t filled out the NRA’s election questionnaire.

We have no idea whether Youngkin will follow through. We have no idea how many of these prospective bills will even make it to his desk, much less be signed by him. Like most politicians, Youngkin will probably disappoint his base. But you have to be a cocooned partisan to believe he’s some kind of stealth radical.