It matters a lot to me who wins in Virginia on Tuesday. I live in Virginia. (So my personal stake in my immediate environment is added my usual caring about government serving people well anywhere in the nation, or anywhere in the world, for that matter. I cared a lot about that Brexit vote in the UK in 2016, and I celebrated the Israelis finally getting Netanyahu out of power.)
Elections do indeed have consequences: arguably, it will prove to have been a world-historical disaster that Trump defeated Hillary in 2016 in a race close enough that a shift of something like 70,000 votes in three states would have kept Trump out of the White House.
However, I’m expecting that the political commentators in the media will be injecting a lot of irrationality in the wake of Tuesday’s election in Virginia.
What would be irrational is if they treat a very narrow Youngkin (R) victory very differently from how they’d treat a very narrow McAulliffe (D) victory.
It’s irrational because whether it’s anything like 50.1-49.9 or 49.9-50.1, the national bell-weather meaning is essentially the same.
A narrow Youngkin defeat wouldn’t say anything really different from a narrow Youngkin victory, in terms of providing the Republicans with some template for success (an idea much bandied about). The two results are the same, in that respect, a difference that’s a mere rounding error.
Either close call would have the same implications for that idea, floated around, about whether Youngkin is presenting the Rs with some sort of template on how they can or cannot stay stuck to Trump and win.
(Anyway, the evidence seems clear that Youngkin’s rise in the polls is not about the posture that Youngkin assumes as he tries to please the members of the Trump cult while not scaring away the independents who contributed to Biden’s 10-point victory in Virginia last November. What the recent shift has been about is how Biden has lost ground in recent weeks, and that in turn is about how the effort to get his agenda through Congress has been so messy. And that, in turn — as I argued in my piece two days ago, “If the Dems Lose in Virginia, It Will Be the Doing of Manchin and Sinema” — is due to the absolutely outrageous way two supposedly Democratic Senators have exploited the power the 50-50 Senate split unfortunately put into their hands.)
I’m expecting this irrationality I’m warning about because I’ve seen it before.
In Virginia, in this neck-and-neck race, we will get a result that matters. Nationally, if the result is neck-and-neck, the omens are essentially the same for 2022.