Glenn Youngkin Is Showing His MAGA Colors

Glenn Youngkin ran a deceptive campaign in 2021 and fooled may suburban voters into voting for him as he posed as a supposed moderate Republican and made good use of a verbal misstep of his opponent.  Since taking office, he has been showing his true colors and seeks to rid school curriculums of "devisive" issues which translates to erasing LGBT students and individuals, waging war against transgender students and whitewashing  history to avoid any accurate discussion of Virginia's - and America's - ugly history of racism and the mistreatment of minorities.    He has also shown that being governor of Virginia and running the state to benefit all of its citizens to him - unlike his predecessor - was never a priority.  It was merely a stepping stone to further his hubris and ambition to eventually occupy the White House.  To accomplish this goal, Youngkin is going fully MAGA to court the national GOP base and will likely continue to push Virginia backwards.  It's all about courting the MAGA base of the GOP and what's good for Virginia is subordinate to furthering Youngkin's national ambitions.   As one friend recently noted:

I hope all those “middle of the road” folks who voted for him because they were annoyed about COVID restrictions (especially in schools) who thought he was a rich guy who didn’t really have extreme views and wouldn’t do any real harm, have woken up and realized he’s actually quite dangerous.

Things will sadly likely get worse here in Virginia as Youngkin pursues his real goal: running for president.  A solumn in the New York Times looks at Youngkin's full embrace of the MAGA base and his display of his true colors.  Here are highlights:

It’s obvious. Glenn Youngkin, the Republican governor of Virginia, wants to be president.

Within months of taking office, Youngkin had already established two political organizations, Spirit of Virginia and America’s Spirit, meant to raise his profile in national Republican politics with donations and assistance to candidates both in his home state and across the country. In July, he met privately with major conservative donors in New York City, underlining the sense that his ambitions run larger than his term in Richmond.

Youngkin, a former private equity executive, is on a tour of the country, speaking and raising money for Republican candidates in key presidential swing states. And as he crisscrosses the United States in support of the Republican Party, Youngkin is neither avoiding Donald Trump nor scorning his acolytes; he’s embracing them.

In Nevada last week, Youngkin stumped for Joe Lombardo, the Trump-backed Republican nominee for governor . . . . In Michigan, Youngkin stumped for Tudor Dixon, the Trump-backed Republican nominee for governor who has repeatedly challenged the integrity of the 2020 presidential election. And later this month, in Arizona, Youngkin will stump for Kari Lake, the Trump-backed Republican nominee for governor who accused Democrats of fraud in the state and says that unlike Gov. Doug Ducey, she “would not have certified” the 2020 election results.

In the 2021 Virginia Republican primary, he flirted with election denialism but never fully committed. What matters, for our purposes, is that Youngkin believes he needs to cater to and actually support election questioners and deniers to have a shot at leading the Republican Party.

The issue is that Republican voters want MAGA candidates, and ambitious Republicans see no path to power that doesn’t treat election deniers and their supporters as partners in arms.

There is an analogy to make here to the midcentury Democratic Party, which was torn between a liberal, Northern, pro-civil rights faction and a reactionary, Southern, segregationist faction. The analogy is useful . . . . because the reason the liberal faction prevailed helps illustrate why anti-MAGA Republicans are fighting a losing battle.

From its inception in the late 1820s as the movement to elect Andrew Jackson president, the Democratic Party relied on the Solid South to win national elections. Now it had a choice. Democrats could reject their new civil rights plank, accommodate the Dixiecrats and fight with a unified front against a hungry and energetic Republican Party, shut out of power since Herbert Hoover’s defeat in 1932. Or they could scorn the so-called States’ Rights Democrats and run as a liberal party committed to equal rights and opportunity for all Americans.

They chose the latter and changed American politics forever. And while much of this choice was born of sincere belief, we also should not ignore the powerful force of demographic change.

There is no equivalent to northern Black voters in the Trumpified Republican Party. Put differently, there is no large and pivotal group of Republicans who can exert cross-pressure on MAGA voters. Instead, the further the Republican Party goes down the rabbit hole of “stop the steal” and other conspiracy theories, the more it loses voters who could serve to apply that pressure.

In a normal, more majoritarian political system, this dynamic would eventually fix the issue of the MAGA Republican Party. . . . . The problem is that the American political system, in its current configuration, gives much of its power to the party with the most supporters in all the right places. Republicans may have lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections, but key features in the system — equal state representation in the Senate, malapportionment in the House of Representatives and winner-take-all distribution of votes in the Electoral College (Nebraska and Maine notwithstanding) — gives them a powerful advantage on the playing field of national politics.

Which is all to say that someone like Glenn Youngkin is only doing what makes sense. To make MAGA politics weak among Republican politicians, you have to make MAGA voters irrelevant in national elections. But that will take a different political system — or a vastly different political landscape — than the one we have now.

Be fearful for what Youngkin will do here in Virginia as he seeks to compete with the likes of Trump and Ron DeSantis on the national stage.