Former president Donald Trump speaks to a crowd in Chesapeake on June 28, 2024 as part of his reelection campaign. (Charlotte Rene Woods/Virginia Mercury)
There was an interesting revelation in a recent panel discussion at the University of Richmond about the 2024 election where all of us outsiders learned – to varying levels of astonishment – that Donald Trump’s campaign had no interest in persuading undecideds.
Mike Young, captain of Trump’s campaign in Virginia and North Carolina, came right out and said it: Trump’s campaign deliberately decided not to broaden his base but, rather, to reach every single one of Trump’s voters and make sure each voted for him. It worked in North Carolina, with its 16 electoral votes, but fell short in Virginia, with 13.
That would explain Trump’s actions throughout the campaign which left self-appointed observers like me scratching their heads when he made bizarre and unfounded claims such as Haitian immigrants eating pets in Ohio.
Many at the time — including me — believed he had strategically blundered by doubling down on such clownish tropes that would energize his frothing loyalists but alienate persuadable independents. He was ceding the vital middle ground to Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris who already had an army of soccer moms angry over the reproductive rights issue and the support of minorities indignant at Trump’s ceaseless villainizing of immigrants lacking permanent legal status.
That leaves him with only his base, and that wouldn’t be nearly enough to win the 270 electoral votes required to become president. Right?
Wrong, at least on a national scale. Trump’s All-About-That-Base approach (apologies to Meghan Trainor) prevailed beyond what the aggregated conventional preelection polls and the national media that harped on them breathlessly would have us believe.
Trump significantly improved his Virginia showing over the 10-percentage point beatdown he took four years ago at the hands of President Joe Biden but came up about five percentage points short against Harris.
Virginia – perhaps more synced to official Washington than any other state – has spurned Trump and his proxies every time they appeared on a statewide ballot during his candidacy in 2016 and his presidency through 2020. This time, his base turned out but couldn’t match even an unenthused Democratic coalition.
He won 31 states and a combined 312 electoral votes – 42 more than he needed – en route to a popular vote majority that had eluded him in his two previous elections.
Nationally, he overwhelmingly gained vote share in localities and states he had lost to Biden, most notably seven swing states and the so-called “blue wall” of Midwestern states that were vital to Democrats’ hopes of staying in power.
Some of that happened in Virginia, too, but not to the extent necessary to flip the commonwealth red for the first time in a presidential race since 2004.
Self-preservation may explain some of that. Northern Virginia’s population base has a lot to say about which candidates win statewide elections, and those voters include federal government employees or employees of federal contractors or businesses reliant on trade with federal employees or contractors. When Washington catches a cold, everything north of the Rappahannock sneezes.
Trump has made no secret of his desire to slash the federal workforce. He tried it during his previous White House tenancy but was a novice at dealing with wily agency leaders and the institutional inertia of bureaucracies. This time, he’s returning to office surrounded by a platoon of proven, dutiful minions and has put Elon Musk, arguably the planet’s wealthiest plutocrat, in charge of the demolition.
If he succeeds, it could devastate not just the economy of the Washington suburbs and exurbs but state government revenue by stalling its economic engine.
Even so, Trump gained vote share in all but nine of Virginia’s 133 localities, including some Democratic-aligned D.C. suburbs like Fairfax County, the state’s largest, where he enjoyed a nearly nine percentage point rightward shift, according to the Virginia Public Access Project.
Broken down demographically, Trump made gains among Black men, Hispanic/Latino voters, voters younger than 30 and white voters in key states, according to analyses of election poll data by NPR. Unlike ever-changing issues such as the economy, inflation, immigration and the job-approval ratings of those in power, these are trends with staying power that should send shivers up the spines of Democrats.
That’s not to say that Virginia will become Trump country if only, for no other reason, because he’s about to serve out the second and final term that presidents are allowed under the 22nd Amendment. It’s because this state is fully capable of putting other Republicans in charge of things, notwithstanding national media pundits who consider Virginia reliably Democratic.
Gov. Glenn Youngkin is living proof of that. In 2021, Virginia voters assumed Trump was forever exiled to his luxury oceanfront compound in Palm Beach, Florida, and perhaps a prison cell, and pent-up frustration over the COVID-19 pandemic and wall-to-wall Democratic rule in Virginia manifested itself in a statewide GOP sweep.
Youngkin, a wealthy former hedge fund executive running his first bid for electoral office, defeated a favored Democratic former governor, Terry McAuliffe. On his coattails, fellow Republican Winsome Earle-Sears became the first woman of color to win statewide election with her victory as lieutenant governor and Jason Miyares’ triumph as attorney general made him the first Hispanic American to be elected to a statewide office.
Fresh off this wrenching, worse-than-ugly presidential campaign, we’re about to kick off another gubernatorial campaign in earnest, one that seems destined to at last give Virginia its first woman governor. Earle-Sears and outgoing Democratic U.S. Rep. Abigail Spanberger have both announced their candidacies and are prohibitive favorites to win their respective nominations.
With Trump back in the White House and vowing to slash the federal workforce, it will be much harder for Earle-Sears to avoid his stain than it was for Youngkin. Democrats won’t have to labor under a deeply unpopular president, and Youngkin has maintained a respectable job-approval rating.
Spanberger and the Democrats, however, know – or by now should know – the kind of turnout a motivated GOP can produce in the countryside and eat into the margins in the urban and suburban redoubts. They’ve got to find a way to reconnect with their base on the left while reassuring working people facing a frightening world.
That opportunity is about to present itself. Whether the Democrats or Republicans make the best use of it in an election that will serve as the first barometer of the second Trump White House is the question immediately before us.
And a dozen months from now, we’ll know the answer.
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