New Jersey and Virginia both are 3,000 miles away from Oakland, but we all exist in the same political culture, so the shocking successes yesterday of two Republican candidates for Governor, Jack Cittarelli (NJ) and Glenn Youngkin (VA) hold vast implications for our city.
Youngkin won by a razor’s edge over Terry McCauliffe, in a state that just two years ago was held to be reliably blue. In New Jersey, where incumbent Governor Phil Murphy was widely expected to easily be re-elected, the result as I write is still unclear; it’s too close to call. Cittarelli eventually may lose, but his electoral strength was unforeseen and impressive.
Both of these races force us to consider the question: Why did these Republicans do so well?
This represents a backlash to the Democratic Party. One can argue that such reversals are common in off-year elections following a Democratic Presidential victory, such as Joe Biden won in 2020. But that’s not the answer; backlashes don’t happen automatically, like chemical reactions; they’re fostered by underlying causes. And in my mind, lots of Independents and moderate Democrats abandoned the Democratic Party this year, because the Democratic Party has allowed a cancerous “Progressive” wing to develop within it—a wing that has alienated and turned off millions and millions of voters, who sincerely believe in Democratic values and programs, but who have been totally turned off by the “cancel culture” they see on the party’s extreme left flank.
Analysts will have a field day analyzing yesterday’s results, but one factor they’ll seize upon is education and schooling. Republicans did a good job focusing on so-called “critical race theory” but the truth is that Democrats let them get away with it. No voter really knows what critical race theory is, but that’s beside the point. The phrase became a symbol of progressive, race-obsessed social just warriors, a class of people we know well here in Oakland and the Bay Area. With them, everything is about race. Like the Communist witch-hunters of the 1950s, they find racists under every bed. This is why the progressives on San Francisco’s school board tried (and failed) to rename all those public schools that were named after alleged “racists” like Abraham Lincoln and George Washington. The public recoiled from such a stupendously stupid move. If you keep in mind that similar situations must have happened in hundreds of other U.S. cities—including in Virginia and New Jersey—that helps to explain yesterday’s Republican successes. Ordinary people just got sick and tired of being virtue-lectured by the elite.
COVID, too, played an important role yesterday. While a majority of Americans believe that the disease is real and dangerous, and that steps to combat it (such as masking, social distancing and getting vaccinated) were necessary, the restrictions have now gone on for so long that they’re beginning to seem irrational, even to lifelong Democrats like me. For example, here in Alameda County, health officials announced that, starting last Monday, indoor businesses, including gyms, could drop mask requirements—but only if their premises held fewer than 100 persons at a time. Have you heard one word of explanation for such a seemingly random parameter? For that matter, have you heard anything concerning when the rest of our businesses will be allowed to drop mask requirements? As one person on nextdoor wrote to me yesterday, Alameda County health officials have been secretive and untransparent about their process. This, too, feeds into public mistrust of public officials, who are most often identified with Democrats. They are seen as overweening, addicted to control, driven by an ideology of “equity,” out of touch, and overly dependent on requiring compliance from a public they see as too dumb to make proper decisions. And then, as in the case of public education, if you apply the COVID situation in Alameda County to hundreds or thousands of counties across America—including in Virginia and New Jersey—once again we see a reason for the Republican success. People are not interested in being lectured to by an unelected class of “experts” who seem to lack common sense and transparency.
The exact same holds true of policing and the whole “defund” movement. The American people absolutely loathe and fear this anti-police crusade. They like and respect cops, and they know that police are “the thin blue line” that protects them from an increasingly criminalized subculture. When they hear all that propaganda from the far left, they’re shocked. Republicans were all too willing to allow their own rightwing thugs to attack cops on Jan. 6, but in general they’ve maintained their law-and-order reputation and have been able to gain voter sympathy because of it. All those suburban voters in Virginia and New Jersey, who once reliably backed Democrats, had their own local versions of Cat Brooks and Carroll Fife. They hated those people, whom they identified as Democrats, and in disgust and rejection, they voted Republican. This has got to be a major issue going into the 2022 midterms.
I could go on and on, but suffice it to say that Democrats, in refusing to hold their extreme left wing accountable, have brought this upon themselves. As a lifelong Democrat, this causes me great pain. The top Democratic leaders—Biden, Obama, Pelosi, Clinton, etc.—understand how damaging the progressives have been, and continue to be, to the party. But, in thrall to the left wing in the same manner that Republican politicians are in thrall to Trump, they’ve been unable to forcibly criticize it. They dance around the issue, hinting at their discomfort with “The Squad,” politely “distancing” themselves from it, but never actually confronting and denouncing it. The public sees this cowardly behavior and wonders why these leaders can’t stand up to their own extremists. It makes the Democratic Party look weak—a perception Republicans are happy to foster. Republicans have always presented themselves as the party of “strength,” and what America needs now is strength, not the kind of embarrassing dithering we’re seeing with regard to Biden’s Build Back Better initiatives. While the moderates and leftists bicker, their mutual party burns.
I remain a Democrat, proud of the heritage of this great party that gave us FDR, Truman and JFK. Even minor Democratic presidents, like Clinton, preserved the flame of liberalism when the Republican religious right tried to snuff it out. That flame may not have glowed strongly in the 1990s, but it would have been extinguished completely had not Bill Clinton protected it in the cup of his hand.
It’s not too late for the Democratic Party to reject its extremists. If the party gets the message from Virginia and New Jersey, it will act quickly and decisively to reclaim the middle ground. If it fails to, I fear for 2022 and 2024. And meanwhile, here in Oakland, we have a microcosm of this national battleground. As we head into our own 2022 elections, voters are going to have to make a choice: not between Democrats and Republicans, but between centrist, rational Democrats and leftwing radicals. The choice is obvious.
Steve Heimoff