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Governor Glenn Youngkin can’t say it, of course, but if he wants to be president someday, his best chance is if Donald Trump loses next week.
I have no idea who will win next Tuesday (or however long it takes to count all the ballots). I can, though, see pretty clearly one thing: Somebody will win and somebody will lose.
I realize it shouldn’t take a Nostradamus to figure out but we’re somehow living in times where even election results are now questioned. But somebody will win and somebody will lose. Whichever way that goes, that means one party is going to be left wondering what just happened. Or, as the great philosopher Pete Townshend sang on one of his solo albums: “Recriminations fester and the past can never change.”
Those recriminations may be particularly bitter, too. Whatever happens, the popular vote is likely to be close, and there’s nothing like a close loss to make one side stew about what might have been. Sometimes a blow-out loss is easier to take because there’s less second-guessing about what could have changed the outcome.
The historical reality is that we’re in a period of exceptionally close elections. Since 2000, five of our six presidential elections have been decided by five percentage points or less (the exception was Barack Obama over John McCain in 2008). The only comparable period in American history is the late 19th-century stretch of elections from 1876 to 1896. For the first four of those, the biggest winning margin was three percentage points (Grover Cleveland over Benjamin Harrison in 1892). In 1896, William McKinley won by 4.3 percentage points to open a new era of Republican dominance. Interestingly, many of the things that divided the nation then divide it still: Then, it was immigration and tariffs as the nation transitioned from the agricultural age to an industrial age. Today, we’re shifting from the industrial age to an information age, again raising polarizing debates about immigration and how to protect or create American jobs in a global economy. Of course, those high-minded academic discussions won’t matter much to partisans who feel they should have won the election but didn’t.
Here’s how I see that playing out in both parties and how it affects Virginia.
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If Harris loses . . .
If Kamala Harris loses, I think there will be a pretty simple explanation: The economy.
There will be lots of other reasons, of course, but poll after poll after poll shows voters’ top concern is the economy. That never bodes well for the party in power. Democrats can complain that voters didn’t understand the economy is improving; Republicans made those same complaints after George H.W. Bush lost in 1992. True but irrelevant. It always takes a while for voters’ impressions to catch up with reality, and people have been stung by the inflation of the past few years — politically, the Joe Biden years. Maybe that’s because Democrats pushed measures that overstimulated the economy. Maybe inflation was always going to happen as we came out of the pandemic and the shutdowns fouled supply chains. Democrats have a solid argument there: Great Britain, until recently, was under a Conservative Party government, and inflation there in 2022 and 2023 was higher than it was in the U.S.
Voters, though, rarely pay attention to the argument that inflation is a global phenomenon. British voters tossed out the Conservatives and installed a Labor Party government. American voters could well do the same with a Democratic government. If this is the outcome, the question is what lessons Democrats will learn from this. Parties sometimes learn the wrong lesson from a defeat. Case in point: If one of the lessons of Walter Mondale’s defeat in 1984 was that Democrats were seen as too liberal, they didn’t learn the lesson in 1988 because they nominated Michael Dukakis and lost again. Finally, in 1992, they adopted a candidate with a more centrist profile, Bill Clinton, and won.
The thing I notice in reading the polls here in Virginia, be they from Roanoke College or Christopher Newport University or Virginia Commonwealth University or the Washington Post-Schar School at George Mason University, is that independents consistently rank the economy as their top concern while Democrats rank it lower. Republicans also rank the economy first. That means Trump has had the easier time campaign-wise: When he talks about the economy, he’s speaking to both his base and to independents. When Harris talks about the economy, she may be reaching independents but she’s not enthusing her base. That raises a question Democrats will want to ponder if they lose (and even if they win): Why have they been so unconcerned about something that is the top concern for independents? How did they get, dare I say it, so out of touch?
I’d suggest that one reason has been the realignment of the two parties, something that’s been underway for a long time but a phenomenon that Trump has accelerated: Democrats have become more educated, more affluent, more suburban. That may have left them insulated from the economic concerns of working-class Americans who they once counted as their base. If that’s so, nominating a candidate from San Francisco, one of the wealthiest cities in the country, might have been a very bad idea. Democrats have been more concerned about the threat that Trump poses to democracy than the economy, but that’s an abstract concept competing against something people feel every time they go to the grocery store. That’s not really a fair fight.
On the flip side, if Harris loses, that probably immediately improves Democratic prospects in Virginia next year. When Trump won in 2016, he prompted a voter backlash the following year that saw Democrats pick up 15 seats in the House of Delegates and win the governorship. Two years later, they picked up six more seats — and a majority. As soon as Trump left the presidency, Democrats lost the House — and the governorship. Trump has been demonstrably bad for Republican prospects in Virginia.
The district lines have changed since then, but if a second Trump term produces the same political trauma that his first one did, Democrats will enter the 2025 governor’s race and House races with an advantage. American politics tend to be self-correcting.
If Trump loses . . .
If Donald Trump loses, first of all, we may have to endure the same kind of denial of election results that we saw last time. In all of American history, Trump has been a uniquely sore loser. Politically speaking, if Trump loses, it will be because of Trump, most of it directly, some of it indirectly because of the Dobbs decision. The fundamentals of this year’s election favor Republicans — that concern about the economy I addressed above. If Republicans had nominated a more conventional candidate — Nikki Haley, for instance — this race might not even be particularly close.
Republicans have gambled on nominating their least-electable candidate. They may well win, but if they don’t, the fault will be their own. The question then will be: What next?
In Virginia, the immediate impact of a Trump loss and Harris victory might be a more favorable environment for Republicans in next year’s election. Since 1977, Virginia has elected governors from the party out of office in Washington every year since one (2013, when Terry McAuliffe won). Maybe that’s just a long-running coincidence, but even if it is, Republican candidates in Virginia next year won’t have to worry about getting tied to everything Trump says or does.
The longer-range question is what happens to the Republican Party nationally if Trump loses. What sort of self-examination will the party go through and what lessons might it draw from that? After Mitt Romney lost in 2012, the party conducted its famous “autopsy” — and then promptly did the exact opposite of what that report recommended. Will the party conclude it needs to pull back from the MAGA movement and take on a more traditional form? Or will it conclude that the message was right but the messenger was wrong? Or will it conclude that the message was right and the party was somehow cheated out of a rightful victory by (insert whichever culprits seem in vogue)? Ideally, it won’t be that last one because the nature of politics is that somebody always loses.
This is where we come around to Youngkin. Trump has said this is his last campaign. If he wins, then come 2028 there will be a new Republican nominee. In that case, the leading contender would seem to be Vice President JD Vance. Whenever a sitting vice president wants a party’s nomination he or she gets it — Richard Nixon in 1960, Hubert Humphrey in 1968, George H.W. Bush in 1988, Al Gore in 2000, Kamala Harris in 2024. They usually don’t win the general election (Bush was an exception; we’ll see if Harris is). The difficulty for other candidates for the party’s nomination is that the vice president always gets to claim to be the logical heir; to unseat the logical heir, you’re coming close to saying the incumbent of your own party made a mistake.
On the other hand, if Trump loses, then the 2028 Republican nomination would seem to be wide open. Vance might well be an appealing candidate to some Republicans, but the vice presidential candidate on a losing ticket has rarely won the presidency — Walter Mondale and Bob Dole won nominations but lost general election (in Dole’s case two decades later); Ed Muskie, Dan Quayle, Joe Lieberman, John Edwards and Mike Pence couldn’t even win their party’s nominations. We have to go back to Franklin Roosevelt to find a losing VP candidate (1920) who went on to win the presidency (and he did that 12 years later). Maybe Vance will be different, but all we have to go on is history.
In the event of a Trump loss, some Republicans may be looking for someone different — someone who could win the places Trump couldn’t. That’s where Youngkin comes in. Lots of others probably will, too, but that’s beside the point. Youngkin’s clearest shot is if Trump loses and Republicans are looking for new leadership. If that happens, he’ll get to spend his final year in office in Virginia making whatever national news he can to impress and console a grieving Republican Party.
Early voting trends have changed
I’ll look at how they’ve changed over the past two weeks in this week’s edition of West of the Capital, our weekly political newsletter. I’ll also look at Virginia’s bellwether localities and some key moments from this week’s Rural Summit in Wytheville.
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