On October 3rd, Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin won the gubernatorial race in Virginia against Democrat Terry McAuliffe. Elections all across the United States have resulted in a “red wave,” where Republicans have radically outperformed what they were expected to gain. Since Democrat Joe Biden had won the presidential elections in 2020, it’s been expected that there will be a Republican takeover of the Senate and House of Representatives during the midterms.
This has happened before with both red and blue presidents, where the election of a political party into the presidential office will lead to people voting for the opposite party for the House of Representatives and the Senate—but this round of elections wasn’t the midterms, which made this Republican victory surprising. Virginia, a blue state, was expected to have elected Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe, but the tides began to change only a few weeks before it was time for people to vote.
The main focus of each campaign was on schooling—which was because of many recent headlines. In the past few years schools have begun to teach young children Critical Race Theory, LGBTQ ideology, and sexually explicit material—an example of this being that in one school’s library there were books that displayed children performing sexual acts on eachother. When parents asked these schools what their kids were being taught, the schools denied the parents’ claims regardless of evidence that showed that the schools were in fact teaching and showing children this material. Nevertheless, parents began to find out what was being taught to their children without their knowing, which infuriated many. Agitated parents would attend school board meetings in order to voice their complaints, but continued to be shot down by people on the boards who didn’t want to disclose the propaganda that they were teaching to children. This continued to anger the parents who only wanted for their children to be educated without indoctrination—as a result, school board meetings became more intense, and people still tried to act as if nothing was occurring.
People in the mainstream media tried to downplay what the schools were teaching, claiming that things such as CRT didn’t exist, or that parents who made their voices heard were “domestic terrorists.” The FBI also joined in, where they began to investigate some of the parents who were supposedly being domestic terrorists. This all came down to one moment in Loudoun county VA, where a father was arrested for being disorderly at a school board meeting in June. This was the man who was painted by the media as the “face of domestic terrorism,” only to later on find out that he had reason to be angry.
A month before the meeting, his 9th grade daughter had been raped in the girl’s bathroom by a bisexual boy who was known for wearing skirts around the school. This happened during the time when schools in the area were implementing transgender bathroom policy that allowed for boys to enter girl’s bathrooms on the basis of them being transgender—thus the boy was able to take advantage of these new rules. When the school board informed the father of what happened, they said that he shouldn’t take matters into his own hands, saying that they had it under control. The father was furious, and he voiced his anger at the school board meeting in July. When arrested, he and his daughter were taken to a nearby hospital where a rape kit was conducted on the daughter—the results proved that she had been raped. Nevertheless, this boy wasn’t put in jail; he was only transferred to another school, where he sexually assaulted another girl.
So how does this tie into the gubernatorial race? Glenn Youngkin’s campaign had him advocating for parents being able to choose what their children were taught and how it was to be done. On the other hand, Terry McAuliffe would state—and double-down on even after all the outrage—that he didn’t want parents to have a say in what their children were taught, that instead, schooling should be up to the government. This was the last straw for the parents of Virginia, who then voted for Glenn Youngkin en masse. This election in VA, and in states all across the U.S., shows how the American people aren’t up for big government intervening in their everyday lives, whether Democrat or Republican.
