The GOP was crushed in the recent Virginia elections because Donald Trump is terribly unpopular in Virginia. Before Trump was president, the GOP easily controlled the Virginia state legislature, and held 66 of the 100 seats in the Virginia House of Delegates. After Tuesday’s election, it will hold only 34 seats in the House and control neither house of the state legislature.
Former Richmond mayor Levar Stoney pointed this out:
Trump fans claimed the GOP lost Tuesday’s election because Virginia is a staunchly Democratic state. But it has long been a purple state where Republicans used to control the legislature handily, because suburban voters leaned Republican. Now, the suburbanites in Virginia heavily lean Democratic, and every single legislator representing northern Virginia is a Democrat.
Virginia isn’t a deep blue state by nature. It is only Trump who makes it so. If a respectable Republican like Mitt Romney were president, Republicans would control the Virginia legislature (leaving the GOP largely in charge of the state, because the legislature picks judges in Virginia and is the dominant branch of Virginia’s government). Mitt Romney lost a close election to the popular president Barack Obama in 2012, and could have beaten the unpopular Hillary Clinton handily in 2016 had be been nominated again. Even Bernie Sanders polled well ahead of Donald Trump in 2016 election match-ups, but Trump had the good fortune to run against Hillary Clinton instead.
Before Trump, Virginia was politically balanced, with a GOP-controlled legislature (that picked the state’s judges) and a Democratic governor. Virginia had a GOP tilt in legislative and congressional elections (because the suburban districts that elect the most legislators leaned toward to the GOP). But it had a Democratic tilt in presidential and gubernatorial elections (because most of Virginia’s urban areas and inner suburbs are so lopsidedly Democratic that that usually offset the GOP tilt of the remainder of the state.)
Virginia was a centrist, purple state overall. Trump has enraged Virginia centrists to the point where they will vote even for a left-wing Democrat in Virginia, such as Jay Jones. Jones easily unseated the Republican Attorney General even though Jones had a high disapproval rating among voters. Jones offended many voters by sending text messages yearning for the killing of Virginia’s former House Speaker. The Speaker had angered Jones by nice things about a deceased moderate Democratic legislator who Jones, a staunch progressive, disliked.
Trump antagonized many voters in Virginia by firing many federal employees in the state — even employees who did useful things, like catching tax cheats, including employees who later turned out to be essential and had to be rehired.
Trump also did deeply unpopular things like imposing tariffs on our close ally and neighbor, Canada, which most Americans oppose.
Trump’s tariffs increased the cost of building a home in America by thousands of dollars. That largely offset the benefits of Governor Youngkin’s very successful regulatory reforms, which reduced the cost of building a home in Virginia by thousands of dollars. Voters never saw any net reduction in housing costs, because the cost-savings due to Youngkin’s reforms were masked by the countervailing cost increases due to Trump’s trade policies.
As a result, Republicans could not campaign on having delivered lower housing costs, because what Youngkin gave, Trump took away.
