Virginia Republicans Pick a Trumpist to Run for Governor, Though Not the Trumpiest

 

Glenn Youngkin.
Photo by Bill O'Leary, WashPost

Last Saturday, at their disassembled state convention, Virginia Republicans nominated Glenn Youngkin as their candidate for governor in this year's state elections. Youngkin is the former co-chief executive of the Carlyle Group, a global private equity giant, and he had emphatically embraced the politics of Donald Trump. Worth an estimated $254  million, the political newcomer highlights his up-by-the-bootstraps biography, including a stint in his teens washing dishes at a Virginia Beach diner to help support his family. Youngkin claimed that he had raised $1 million from supporters in the first 10 days of his campaign.

Youngkin is a Trumpist running in a state that has turned decidedly bluer during the last several elections, but he wasn't the most dangerously Trumpist of the candidates running last Saturday. That would be Amanda Chase, currently the pistol-packing "Trump in high heels" who occupies a seat in the state senate (a seat recently encased in a plastic shield -- no, really -- because Chase refuses to wear a mask) who earned herself a bipartisan censure from her fellow senators for praising the Capitol insurrectionists as "patriots." She's the principal reason Republican Party leaders were desperate to keep this race out of a primary. They were terrified she could win a primary and go on to crash the whole party in November. 

Now that'll be Glenn Youngkin's job.

Footnote: The most qualified Republican candidate for the job, Kirk Cox, was eliminated from contention in an early round of ranked-choice voting. He's been in the Virginia House of Delegates for three decades, and in his party's salad days, he served as majority leader and then as Speaker of the House. His voting record is not that different from Amanda Chase's, but Cox tries to project a non-Trumpist and "sane conservative" image. His one striking departure from Republican orthodoxy: He swerved on the issue of expanding Medicaid in the state under the Affordable Care Act, so to the Trumpists he's a traitor.

"Bad Moon Rising"

Mark Binker recently pointed out that over 100 of the 170 men and women about to take their seats in the new North Carolina General Assembly were not in office three years ago. They are more ideologically homogeneous, too, and considerably more conservative.

Kirk Ross speculates on what this is likely to mean for the University of North Carolina system (and he didn't even mention the likely role of McCrory's chief budget officer, Art Pope):

...it is hard to see how the new legislature, more ideologically driven and less experienced than any in recent memory, will be able to resist a test or two of the boundaries of intellectual freedom in state-funded academia. 

You may recall last year’s notorious sea-level rise bill, which essentially put a moratorium on the use of climate-change science in public policy. An early version of the bill imposed restrictions on the use of scientific research that would have applied to all state agencies and institutions including its universities. 

While ultimately UNC’s lobbyists were able to get that language stripped from the bill, it likely won’t be the last time the university will see rules on research rewritten, budgets shifted or programs zeroed out for ideological reasons.