"Just when we needed a sign that his America is not all of America, Virginia came to the rescue and gave us a vivid one. And I guarantee you that the Republicans up for re-election in 2018 saw it, shuddered and will spend the next weeks and months trying to figure out just how much trouble their party is in and precisely how to repair it. Democrats are exceedingly familiar with that feeling.
After special elections in Georgia, Montana and South Carolina failed to provide them with much hope that the anti-Trump forces were welling and that Americans who’d voted for him were seized by buyer’s remorse, the returns in Virginia suggested that Trump antipathy is indeed real and that it is definitely animating.
Does it mean that Democrats can wrest one chamber of Congress from Republican control in 2018? Impossible to say. Politically speaking, there are eons between now and then, and the Virginia governor’s race had facets all its own. But there are reasons for Republicans to be very afraid.
Republicans should also worry that they’ve oversold themselves on the moderate-progressive divide in the Democratic Party and how severely Democrats would be hobbled by it. In the days leading up to Tuesday, a book by Donna Brazile, the former head of the Democratic National Committee, reignited the enmity between Clinton’s backers and supporters of Bernie Sanders, and that became one of several reasons to wonder if progressives would fail to turn out for Northam, a milquetoast moderate. In the end, enough of them did, not just to guarantee his victory but to jeopardize Virginia Republicans’ 66-to-34 majority in the state’s House of Delegates. On Wednesday morning, unofficial returns showed that Democrats would pick up at least 14 seats, and they could, after recounts, even wind up with control of the House.
“If the Virginia results showed anything, it’s that ideological purity isn’t necessary to win in the Age of Trump,” said Lis Smith, a Democratic operative.
