Lame Duck Youngkin Suddenly Wants to Bipartisanship

I have only met Glenn Youngkin once in person when I was invited by his office to a supposedly pro-LGBT event in Virginia Beach due to my role in founding the local LGBT chamber of commerce. Sadly, the event proved to be anything but as advertised and Youngkin cared little about LGBT issues save erasing us from public education.  But, attending the event did, however, allow me to see Youngkin's very slick disingenuousness up close and personal.  Now, after the Republican drubbing in the elections on Tuesday, Youngkin finds himself a lame duck and his presidential ambitions very much tattered - something underscored by the fact that he is the first Virginia governor in the last 30 years whose party lost control of a chamber of the General Assembly during midterm elections.  Youngkin's response?  More pretense that he is a moderate and claims he seeks to work with Democrats, something he arrogantly refused to do during the first two years of his term. The real Youngkin is the one who as his first act signed an executive order seeking to ban accurate history and to make LGBT Virginians invisible in public schools. Only the Democrat controlled Virginia Senate prevented Youngkin and Virginia Republican extremists from turning Virginia into a warmed over version of DeSantis' Florida.   A piece in the Washington Post looks at Youngkin's much deserved lame duck status.  Here are excerpts:

For all the $190 million spent by both parties, for all the talk of national trends, the results of Virginia’s legislative elections this week prove a predictable truth: Virginia is a closely divided state that leans slightly Democratic.

The new redistricting maps made that plain, carving the state into a large number of red districts and a slightly larger number of blue ones, with just a handful of toss-ups in the middle to fight over. And Tuesday’s results bore that out, with Democrats flipping the House of Delegates to at least a 51-49 advantage (though one race is still too close to call) and protecting their majority in the Senate, 21-19.

The challenge now for Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) — whose two-point win in 2021 he routinely casts as a popular mandate — is that he will have to broker deals with newly empowered Democratic lawmakers to get anything done. And he has spent the past two years poking them with a partisan stick as he cultivated a national Republican profile — railing against critical race theory and racial equity and “woke” policies of the “radical left.”

“He’s had this habit of talking in Virginia as if he wants to work with Democrats to do things in common, then he goes on Fox News in the evening and speaks about how he’s beating the lefties. I don’t think that’ll work anymore now,” said Bob Holsworth, a longtime Richmond political analyst.

As if to illustrate that point, Sen. L. Louise Lucas (D-Portsmouth), who is in line to become chairwoman of the Senate’s powerful finance committee, spent Election Day trolling Youngkin on social media with statements like, “Tell Glenn I want him to know it was me” and “If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably [is] our soon to be lame duck Governor Glenn Youngkin!”

What’s more, the Democrat who could become the first Black lawmaker to serve as speaker of the House in the General Assembly’s 404-year history — House Minority Leader Don L. Scott Jr. (D-Portsmouth) — has been one of Youngkin’s top antagonists, once prompting the governor to trek across the Capitol for an impromptu meetup at Scott’s office after he questioned Youngkin’s religious faith in a floor speech.

Youngkin expended so much money and personal political capital this year on races that failed — such as state Sen. Siobhan S. Dunnavant’s loss in the Henrico County suburbs to Democrat Schuyler VanValkenburg by an unexpectedly wide margin — that his status in Richmond could be diminished, Holsworth said.

Still, Youngkin began the work Wednesday of promising bipartisanship and [falsely] emphasizing how close the two sides are.

Youngkin noted that Virginia has a tradition of divided government — which wasn’t true during long periods of the 20th century when Democrats ran the show, but has been true in the past 30 years or so as Republicans rose to power. In that time, Youngkin is the only governor whose party lost control of a chamber during midterm elections.

Youngkin had led Republicans to run on his proposal to ban most abortions after 15 weeks, with exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother. Virginia law allows the procedure through the second trimester (about 26 weeks) and into the third if three doctors say it’s necessary.

The GOP strategy didn’t work. Abortion stood out in polling before the election as a strong motivator for Democrats and for women, and it was cited repeatedly by voters during interviews at polling places around the state Tuesday.

“This is a race about reproductive rights,” voter Clint Cyr, 37, said in Newport News on Tuesday after casting his ballot for Democrats. “I’m a moderate libertarian for the government not telling people what to do with their bodies.”

The issue cut against the polarization that otherwise grips Virginia voters, said Stephen Farnsworth, a political scientist at the University of Mary Washington. “Beyond abortion, there wasn’t a lot that Democrats or Republicans could do to convince somebody on the other side to switch teams for the election,” Farnsworth said.

Yet the decisive districts were not won by razor-thin margins. Democrat Josh Thomas won the western Prince William County House district that put Democrats over the top by three percentage points over Republican John Stirrup. In the Senate, Democrat Danica Roem’s three-point victory in Prince William County and Manassas clinched the blue majority.

Youngkin said Wednesday that he has not yet reached out to Democratic lawmakers, that he is waiting for them to select new leadership in the coming days. But he rattled off a list of priorities — economic development, workforce development, job growth, mental health services and education — where he believes they’ll find common ground.

He did not, however, back down from his stance on abortion or concede that a 15-week ban was rejected by voters.

The 15-week abortion ban “went over like a lump of coal in your sock on Christmas morning,” Swecker said after his remarks. “Voters not only in Virginia but across the country said not only no but hell no.”

With luck, Youngkin's presidential ambitions are now dead and he will be limited in the further harm he can do to Virginians who are not white evangelical/Christofascists.