Hеllo, and welcome back to Tomorrow Will Be Worse! 

It appears I’ve returned from my mini book leave just in time. Depending on which political team you’re on—and politics is a team sport more than ever these days—today really is worse than yesterday. Democrat Terry McAuliffe lost the race for governor of Virginia (a job he’s had once before) to Republican Glenn Youngkin. Republicans are also on track to flip Virginia’s House of Delegates, and won the races for lieutenant governor and attorney general. The governor’s race in New Jersey is, as of this writing, too close to call, with Democrat Phil Murphy leading by a whisper. But the fact that it’s this much of a squeaker isn’t great news for Democrats as they get ready for 2022 midterms, when the party in power traditionally gets walloped. 

It’s the day after an important Election Day and everyone has some exceedingly strong opinions. Twitter seems to be an even angrier place than usual today. Since you’re getting this in your inbox, I’m going to assume that you’re electing to hear my opinions, so here are some thoughts—or, well, an excerpt of my thoughts. You can sign up here to become a Puck subscriber read the whole article.

The G.O.P.’s Critical Race Theory Bazooka

It's not taught in K-12 schools, but Glenn Youngkin rode the issue straight to the Virginia governor’s mansion. So much so that by Wednesday morning, the Republican Study Committee put out a memo that the G.O.P. must become the “party of parents” and to fight “racist C.R.T. curricula.”

Culture wars work. That is my first and biggest takeaway from yesterday’s election. 

For the last leg of the campaign, Youngkin vigorously incorporated the topic that’s been conservative media’s culture war du jour: critical race theory. This old, established, and uncontroversial academic concept posits, essentially, that it doesn’t so much matter whether an individual is actively racist or not because the structures of American society were built on racist foundations and continue to function in that way. 

Critical race theory is not taught in K-12 schools, but Youngkin pledged to ban it anyway on his first day as governor. (Interesting that the academic freedom folks—a generally conservative bunch—are cheering this promise. But I digress…) Fox News and conservative culture warriors have turned the concept on its head and have been telling parents that C.R.T. (their abbreviation) is being taught in schools, where white children are segregated by race and told that they are racist oppressors. 

This is not what critical race theory is, but it didn’t matter, because angry white parents, usually moms, showed up at school board meetings spitting fire about C.R.T. Youngkin, the former co-C.E.O. of the Carlyle Group, a private equity giant, cut a race-baiting ad with a white woman saying that she was shocked about the “explicit” material her son was reading in school. She was horrified that she wasn’t allowed to keep him from reading it for class, and only Youngkin understood her struggles. Turned out, this woman was a Republican activist, that her son grew up to intern at the Trump White House, and that the explicit reading material she was trying to ban was Beloved, Toni Morrison’s award-winning novel about a woman trying to outrun slave catchers and the trauma of her enslavement. For his part, McAuliffe just fanned the flames by saying that he didn’t think parents should be involved in shaping school curricula.  

And guess what? It worked. Suddenly, education shot up as a priority among Virginia voters, second only to the economy. For an off-off-year election, there was massive turnout yesterday—and three-quarters of the people who came out were white people. Fifty-one percent of yesterday’s voters were people who felt that parents should have “a lot” of say over what gets taught to their children in schools, and three-quarters of them went for Youngkin. White suburban women (many of them moms, presumably), that elusive electoral group that helped both Trump and Joe Biden secure the White House, swung definitively for Youngkin by eight points. Three-quarters of white women “with some college education or less” voted for Youngkin, a 19-point shift from 2020. Parents of under-18 kids went for Youngkin, too, a seven-point increase from the 2020 election, when the majority of them had voted for Biden. (Click here if you want to see more interesting exit-poll stats.)

I’m not the only one who thinks that the manufactured issue over critical race theory is what won Youngkin the governor’s chair: the Republican party does, too. By Wednesday morning, the Republican Study Committee put out a memo that said that, in future elections, “Republicans can and must become the party of parents” and fight “racist C.R.T. curricula.” They suggest campaigning on the promise that “federal funds are not being used to separate students based on their skin color or assigning assumptions or characteristics of students based on their skin color.” (Read the memo. It’s wild.) 

The fact that no one is teaching critical race theory to children—and no one is proposing separating students by race—is entirely beside the point. As is the ongoing pandemic, growing inequality, our insane healthcare system, etc. The point is that, as an electoral strategy, rage works—even if it’s aimed at a windmill. Some Democrats contend that if the bipartisan infrastructure bill had passed before the election, it would have helped McAuliffe, but I disagree...

FOUR STORIES WE'RE TALKING ABOUT