Tuesday is what less evolved societies than Virginia still quaintly call "Election Day". The Democrat candidate, the unlovely Clinton bagman Terry McAuliffe, claims that "we are substantially leading on the early vote". In the fullness of time he will also be substantially leading on the late vote, if he isn't already.
That leaves the votes on Voting Day up for grabs. The Republican candidate, Mr Youngkin, is a squish of no fixed beliefs who will govern as Mitt did in Massachusetts or Pataki did in New York. But he has been handed a winning issue that he would probably not have chosen save for public outrage - the state of Virginia schools in an age of "critical race theory" and trans-mania. It's bigger even than an education issue: The left is so boundlessly ambitious that it is abolishing biological sex, and if it gets away with it will leave an awful mountain of human wreckage in its wake, bigger even than its other innovations.
Every Virginian should vote on Tuesday - because Youngkin's campaign is a classic example of Milton Friedman's dictum: in politics you don't wait for the right people to do the right thing, you create the conditions whereby the wrong people are forced to do the right thing. That is what parents at school-board meetings have been doing, and they deserve to be rewarded for it.
Virginia is a state where a rapist gets transferred to another school because he/she belongs to a protected class, rapes again, and, when you protest the anal rape of your daughter by a known rapist, you're the guy who gets thrown to the ground and arrested. Whether one finds the foregoing objectionable shouldn't really be a Republican/Democrat thing, but such is the moral depravity of the cultural heights that Dems are all in on the convicted sodomizer and only squaresville low-status GOP candidates can muster even pro forma objections. So in 21st-century Virginia insouciance about schoolgirl anal rape is now a partisan thing.
Of course, it remains to be seen whether the state's election system is sufficiently honest to reflect fairly that public outrage. If at, say, 10pm on Tuesday night Youngkin is narrowly ahead but you wake up on Wednesday morn to find McAuliffe has been the beneficiary of all the 3am votes, well, Republicans will be forgiven for suspecting that "fortifying" the "two-party system" into something rather more streamlined is here to stay.
I say that as an immigrant who never feels more foreign than on America's hideously chaotic yet oddly purposeful election nights. But then in Northern Virginia a quarter of the population is now foreign-born, and half of those arrived in the last twenty years. That's a remarkable statistic for a so-called "Old Dominion". Demography is destiny, and in an ever more tightly circumscribed public discourse there are decreasing opportunities even to raise the topic.
Nevertheless, the pom-pom girls of American conservatism are very excited about the poll results at top right. Send money now to SendMoneyNow.com, and the GOP will sweep sufficient numbers of the remaining non-gerrymandered Congressional districts to take the house next November! Michael McAdams, the Communications Director of the National Republican Congressional Committee, says:
The brutal @NBCNews poll reinforces findings in the @NRCC 's recent battleground poll.
On the issues that voters care about most, Republicans have a commanding lead.
Don't get too excited. Republicans may have a commanding lead, but it doesn't mean they plan to do any commanding should they win. You have to be in late middle-age to remember the last time House Republicans turned a commanding lead into any command of the political scene.
Stephen Miller, former Trump advisor, comments on the underlying politics of Mr McAdams' giddy delirium:
GOP has nearly 30 point edge on border security, yet Dems are on verge of passing history's largest amnesty during history's worst border crisis (also tax credits for illegals+unlimited green cards for Big Tech) and most voters haven't been informed of this impending catastrophe.
Amazing. Democrats are preparing to ram through an amnesty for the eternal, constant, unchanging-for-decades "eleven million" members of the Undocumented-American community ...even though (per Mr McAdams) the numbers are "brutal".
Gee, it's almost like they think next year's midterms aren't that consequential, and that prioritizing long-term policy goals such as demographic transformation that ends the GOP as a national party by turning Texas and Florida into Virginia writ large makes more sense.
We have been here before, of course. Eleven and a half years ago, the Administration was likewise hammering an unwanted bill down the gullets of the American people. From my column of March 5th 2010:
Why is he doing this? Why let 'health' 'care' 'reform' stagger on like the rotting husk in a low-grade creature feature who refuses to stay dead no matter how many stakes you pound through his chest?
Because it's worth it.
Because, as Joe Biden put it back then, it's "a big f***in' deal". Whereas the very definition of a small f***in' deal is letting the GOP take the House (which is almost inevitable historically, if not quite so much in the era of "fortified" elections). See, inter alia, the glorious speakership of Paul Ryan - who still gets to use @SpeakerRyan as his Twitter handle: how cool is that?
Me again in 2010:
Republicans seem to have difficulty grasping this basic dynamic. Less than three months ago, they were stunned at the way the Democrats managed to get sixty senators to vote for the health bill. Then Scott Brown took them back down to fifty-nine (this was a popular topic among political cartoonists), and Republicans were again stunned to find the Dems talking about ramming this thing into law through the parliamentary device of 'reconciliation.' And, when polls showed an ever larger number of Americans ever more opposed to Obamacare (by margins approaching three-to-one), Republicans were further stunned to discover that, in order to advance 'reconciliation,' Democrat reconsiglieres had apparently been offering (illegally) various cosy Big Government sinecures to swing-state congressmen in order to induce them to climb into the cockpit for the kamikaze raid to push the bill through. The Democrats understand that politics is not just about Tuesday evenings every other November, but about everything else, too.
And again:
Republicans are good at keeping the seat warm. A bigtime GOP consultant was on TV, crowing that Republicans wanted the Dems to pass Obamacare because it's so unpopular it will guarantee a GOP sweep in November.
OK, then what? You'll roll it back – like you've rolled back all those other unsustainable entitlements premised on cobwebbed actuarial tables from 80 years ago? Like you've undone the federal Department of Education and of Energy and all the other nickel'n'dime novelties of even a universally reviled one-term loser like Jimmy Carter? Andrew McCarthy concluded a shrewd analysis of the political realities thus:
'Health care is a loser for the Left only if the Right has the steel to undo it. The Left is banking on an absence of steel. Why is that a bad bet?'
Indeed. Look at it from the Dems' point of view. You pass Obamacare. You lose the 2010 election, which gives the GOP co-ownership of an awkward couple of years. And you come back in 2012 to find your health care apparatus is still in place, a fetid behemoth of toxic pustules oozing all over the basement, and, simply through the natural processes of government, already bigger and more expensive and more bureaucratic than it was when you passed it two years earlier. That's a huge prize, and well worth a midterm timeout.
There's probably software I can get just to automatically re-generate the above paragraph:
Indeed. Look at it from the Dems' point of view. You pass universal amnesty for the Undocumented. You lose the 2022 election, which gives the GOP co-ownership of an awkward couple of years. And you come back in 2024 to find your amnesty is still in place, a fetid behemoth of toxic pustules oozing all over the basement, and, simply through the natural processes of government, already bigger than it was when you passed it two years earlier and thus applicable not merely to the eternally static "eleven million" Undocumented but mysteriously to some forty-seven million. That's a huge prize, and well worth a midterm timeout.
One more from that 2011 column:
The result is a kind of two-party one-party state: Right-of-center parties will once in a while be in office, but never in power, merely presiding over vast left-wing bureaucracies that cruise on regardless.
You could ask Donald J Trump about that, vis-à-vis his Department of Justice, his FBI, his Joint Chiefs of Staff, diversity-crazed Navy, National Institutes for Health and Centers for Disease Control, National Parks Service, Lawrence Livermore nuclear lab, etc.
If government is the Super Bowl or the World Series, then Michael McAdams happy talk will suffice: The struggle ends on Election Day. You root-root-root for your team, and victory is recorded in the roll of champions, and that's that.
Yet Election Day is not the end but the beginning, of government. Trump had the most explicit program of any GOP candidate in two generations, and Paul Ryan had no interest in it. So it was all done by executive order, and mostly undone by twenty past noon on January 20th 2020.
Vote Youngkin, and, God and the 3am ballot boxes willing, drag him across the finish line as a rebuke to an almost parodic reductio of a Democrat hack (McAuliffe) and a third-rate mammy singer of an incumbent (Northam). But remember Milton Friedman's dictum: this guy is just a wrong man who happened to find himself in the right place, and he will have to be forced hard to do the right thing every day of his term. What matters is what you do on all the non-Election Days.
~It was a very busy weekend at SteynOnline, beginning with the conclusion of our latest Tale for Our Time - Northanger Abbey. To hear the final episode, click here - or go here for a good old binge-listen. The weekend edition The Mark Steyn Show found me catching up with some of the headlines I've missed in recent days, from the US Navy, the White House motorcade, the southern border and the dirty stinking rotten corrupt federal justice system. There was also a poem for Halloween in the swamp, the pilot program for the flatulence harness, and some truly in-your-face pop music Halloween prompted Rick McGinnis to a terrifying movie pick, and yours truly to an horrific song selection. Our marquee presentation was the October anthology of The Hundred Years Ago Show.
If you were too busy joining the paedo enablers of the "Lincoln Project" in their Klansman-for-a-Day party, we hope you'll want to check out one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.
Tales for Our Time and Steyn's Song of the Week are special presentations of The Mark Steyn Club. You can find more details about our Club here - and we also have a great gift membership.
