Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin has defeated Democratic candidate and former Governor Terry McAuliffe in the Virginia governor’s race.
The gubernatorial race in Virginia was widely expected earlier in the year to serve as a standard-issue referendum on national politics, as Virginia’s odd-year gubernatorial election often does. However, to a large extent, furor over local issues, particularly pertaining to education, took center stage and may have pushed Youngkin over the top.
Parent anger began when many school districts in Virginia were reticent to reopen for in-person learning after the COVID-19 pandemic. School districts, backed by teachers unions, mused aloud that they might not reopen even in the fall of 2021, even though evidence suggests that children in particular are at low risk for serious complications from COVID-19, and there is a dearth of evidence that schools have served as transmission vectors for the pandemic.
