What does a gubernatorial election in Virginia tell us about the future of class politics?
is it time for liberals and leftists to revisit their fundamental assumptions about the much-vaunted "global realignment"?
The marquee electoral event in every US president’s first term is the Virginia governor’s race, which is usually scheduled exactly halfway between each general election (last 2020) and midterm (in 2022). Virginia is an important battleground state and right on the doorstep of federal power (and the national media) itself, heightening its salience. Long a GOP stronghold, Republicans have failed to win a single statewide race in Virginia since Obama ended their half-century long winning streak in 2008, since which the state has only been getting bluer. That drought finally came to an end this week, as Glenn Youngkin in an upset successfully defeated Terry McAuliffe to reclaim the Governor’s mansion for the GOP for the first time in over a decade. From voting D+10 a year ago, the state swung to R+2, marking a shift of 12 points rightward.
Here are some GIFs and graphics to visualise what happened in Virginia this week. First off, the changes in county win percentage margin from the 2020 presidential election to the 2021 gubernatorial race. Things look quite straightforward here; Appalachia and the Shenandoah valley stays dark red, eastern and south-central rural areas that were light red darken significantly, while a lot of blue on the Chesapeake/eastern shore area outright flips red. Understated here is the fact that Northern Virginia (hereforth referred to as NoVA), where nearly 40% of the state’s population is concentrated into a handful of counties, stays blue but the outer exurban rings go from dark to light.
And secondly, the shift in net raw vote margins. You can see here how Youngkin’s actual pathway to overturning the solid Democratic advantage in the state went - eating into NoVA, flipping much of the Tidewater region and juicing turnout in the rurals.
One would be forgiven for coming away from these first two maps with the conclusion that the election was a fairly straightforward 12 point statewide swing from Biden (D) to Youngkin (R) in the space of a year, evenly distributed across regions and demographics. However, once you break down which areas swung less than that amount and which areas swung more, it becomes clear where the anti-Democrat backlash was strongest - NoVA, the Eastern Shore/Hampton Roads and rural pockets of the Piedmont region.
Of these, NoVA is by far the most populous and electorally important. What that means is, it was effectively the DC suburbs and exurbs which delivered the GOP this election, despite McAuliffe still winning more votes there. It cannot be overstated just how significant that fact is, which is why some people have a vested interest in obscuring it. For the last two decades, Virginia has been ground zero for a worldwide political phenomenon that goes by different names (such as Thomas Piketty’s “Brahmin Left/Merchant Right” theory, or “Post-materialism”) which for the purposes of this piece I will refer to simply as “the global realignment”. This broadly describes the process by which class divisions in electoral politics have been replaced by attitudinal and value-based divisions stratified by education.
Although this process has arguably been happening for a long time, it’s only really become the centre of political science handwringing in the last half decade or so - as multiple processes such as the election of Trump, Brexit, the collapse of the Labour “red wall” and more have heightened the salience of working class voters abandoning their traditional centre-left allegiances for the right. Virginia itself has been on a relentless journey in the opposite direction - for much of the 20th century it was a Republican stronghold anchored by the firm loyalty of affluent suburban NoVA voters to the GOP, while the state’s Appalachian blue collar backbone stood solidly Democratic. But since the turn of the millennium, rural working class Virginians have abandoned their traditional Democratic allegiances for the GOP, while the far more populous suburbs have ditched team red for team blue, flipping the state with it.
By all accounts, if affluent suburban voters had well and truly abandoned conservatism for good, Youngkin’s victory should never have been possible. And even if he somehow squeaked a win, it should have surely been on the back of outsized rural swings among non-college whites rather than suburban educated ones, right? Yet that’s exactly what happened. Traditionally, it was the norm for Virginia to swing against the party of the incumbent president in gubernatorial elections. That norm broke down in 2013 when Terry McAuliffe won despite Obama being in the White House. Youngkin’s victory is a semblance of that normalcy being restored. A partisan dynamic of voters expressing discontent at whoever is in power may not be class politics, but it’s far healthier than a politics of entrenched demographic determinism where entire sections of the electorate are either written off or taken for granted, resulting in every election either becoming uncompetitive or being won on the margins.
Adherents of this theory broadly view it as an inexorably predetermined and unavoidable process. However, there have been a couple of elections this year which have challenged the notion of the global realignment being inevitable and unstoppable - the SPD’s unexpected victory in Germany was powered by especially outsized swings in the deindustrialised, downwardly mobile and culturally conservative hinterlands of the East - an area which until recently was also trending to the far-right. Likewise, in the Scottish parliamentary elections, several coastal eurosceptic constituencies in the northeast came home to the SNP after trending away from the party in the last few elections, all while the Scottish Tories hold their own in strongly liberal pro-EU suburbs like East Renfrewshire which had previously swung against them. To that now add the Republican party clawing back power in a state that it recently thought to be lost forever.
The great thing about the Global Realignment’s unassailability being disproven in one direction is that it means the other direction is just as reversible. There’s absolutely no reason to believe that right wing parties across the developed world can hold onto the blue collar and rural support they’ve gained while also peeling back affluent educated suburban voters, while the left can’t make a play for regaining the working class. A universe where Republicans can claw back Loudon or Chesterfield county is one where Democrats ought to be able to claw back Luzerne or Mahoning County. If the SNP can win back Banff or Moray, there’s no reason why Labour can’t win back Workington or Bolsover. Spurred by the iconoclastic US data guru David Shor’s controversial polemics, there is fierce debate happening across the political strategy world and professional left-liberal sphere about what it would take to win back these types of voters and places. But if there’s one thing election night affirmed earlier this week, it’s that there’s no reason not to try.