(Republicans ran ads suggesting that the suburbs of Washington, D.C., had become dangerous because of gang activity and blamed Democrats.)Ī Fox News poll released Thursday, which showed McAuliffe leading by 51 percent to 46 percent overall, found voters statistically evenly split over which candidate they trust more to handle education, at 45 percent to 43 percent.Īnd while a majority of parents sided with Youngkin's message that they should be able to tell schools what to teach, McAuliffe still had a 9 percentage-point lead among parents who are likely to vote.The United States remains in a heightened threat environment, as noted in the previous Bulletin, and several recent attacks have highlighted the dynamic and complex nature of the threat environment. McAuliffe's campaign says it's not seeing much movement among swing voters over such issues in its internal data, likening it to a surge of concern about the MS-13 gang in the closing days of the 2017 gubernatorial race, which outgoing Democratic Gov. Still, debates over race and history have roiled school districts across the country, with a particular hot spot in the exurbs of Northern Virginia, where one can't venture far in any direction without encountering a street named after a Confederate general.
#VIRGINIA GOVERNOR NATIONAL ISSUES AD WARS FREE#
McAuliffe vetoed the bill on free speech grounds, arguing that it could chill the teaching of classics that are deemed to be offensive. McAuliffe was referring to a 2017 bill he vetoed during his first term as governor (Virginia is the only state that doesn't allow governors to serve consecutive term) that would have allowed parents to prevent their children from studying literature deemed to be sexually explicit, such as Toni Morrison's "Beloved," which provoked the push for the so-called "Beloved" Bill. With just over two weeks to go and both sides spending heavily, the most played political ads in Virginia right now are Youngkin spots featuring a gaffe by McAuliffe at the last debate, when he said, "I don't think parents should be telling schools what they should teach."
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Martin Luther King's famous, famous comments that we are not going to judge one another by the color of their skin but rather the content of our character." The curriculum has gone haywire," he said to cheers in Warrenton on a sunny fall afternoon, claiming parents from across the ideological spectrum were joining in him a nonpartisan "movement." (Proponents say they are simply advocating for schools to be honest about the country's complicated racial past and ongoing systemic racism.)īut, emblematic of his approach to the entire campaign, Youngkin is careful to speak in a way that is unlikely to turn off voters who see themselves as the good guys in the fight against racism as he vows to "ban critical race theory on Day One" if he is elected. "If Youngkin is able to improve his margins in suburbs that have gone from red to blue over the past decade in Virginia, we could see this used as a blueprint in the midterms in certain place," Taylor said.įor Youngkin, who has been holding "Parents Matter" rallies across Virginia, schooling has become a stand-in for a host of contentious issues that galvanize the conservative base, from mask mandates to charter schools to critical race theory - an until-recently obscure academic field that conservatives say liberals are using to indoctrinate children to think white people are inherently racist. "Virginia offers a first test as to whether or not education issues like these could be effective at wooing back suburban voters that Republicans hemorrhaged during the Trump administration," said Jessica Taylor, an analyst who tracks governor's races for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. And education has frequently been the battlefield of American culture wars, from war protests to classroom prayer.īut thanks to frustration over pandemic school closings, a national push by conservatives to resist a wave of race-focused curriculum changes and an unforced error by McAuliffe, Virginia Republicans have found an issue that unites their fractious base without turning off the suburban moderates they need to win statewide on Nov. Schools have long been a top issue in gubernatorial campaigns.
"Parents around the country need us to say we are standing up for our children, because the same thing is happening in their school districts and their school boards, and they need us to give them hope." "I'm getting texts and emails and phone calls from parents all over America, and they need us to stand up for them," Youngkin told supporters Thursday at an outdoor rally.
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