“There’s no doubt about it, if you slice Northern Virginia as thinly as they have done in these district maps, you’re going to create a lot of favorable environments for Democrats,” said Steve Farnsworth, director of the Center for Leadership and Media Studies at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg.
Professor Stephen Farnsworth with the University of Mary Washington said Youngkin may have miscalculated when he overturned the largely red and rural-backed effort. “The governor will face more severe threats of an overridden veto because of the way that he ignored Republican concerns,” Farnsworth told Radio IQ.
While there may not be very many policy differences between the two candidates, walking away from Trump may not have been the best strategy for Good, said Stephen Farnsworth, a political scientist at the University of Mary Washington.
“What you see here, though, is that the Republican Party has put itself in a very difficult spot on the abortion question,” said Stephen Farnsworth, a political science professor at the University of Mary Washington. “It is much better to be a Republican running against abortion when abortion is legal than to be asking voters how to react once abortion is under the kind of threat that it’s under right now.”
“The big question in this election was whether Virginians feared the specter of Donald Trump more than the specter of critical race theory,” said Stephen Farnsworth, a political science professor at the University of Mary Washington. Youngkin had vowed to ban critical race theory, which is not being taught at Virginia schools, on his first day in office. “Based on results so far it looks like voters feared the idea of critical race theory more than Trump,” Farnsworth said.
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“The Youngkin campaign had a strategy of talking about Virginia’s economy being in a ditch,” says Stephen Farnsworth, a political science professor at the University of Mary Washington. “That strategy disappeared when Virginia was named the No. 1 state for business.”
