How a Personal Moment of Frustration in Ireland Explains what Happened in Virginia
Many on the left are sick of excessive COVID restrictions… and it showed in Virginia
On August 6th 2021, I was at my favorite pub in Bundoran, Ireland celebrating the second to last night of my four week gap year program with my friends. We were sitting outdoors in the beer garden listening to country music, trying a strawberry shot that looked like Pepto Bismol and taking photos. In the aftermath of an amazing four weeks, I was looking forward to returning to college after a year off. It was a happy and vibrant mood.
My mood would soon change when I was sent an email from my college. Despite the fact that we would have a vaccine mandate for students (with limited exceptions for religious and medical reasons), my college would be mandating indoor masking anyway.
My initial mood was shock and frustration. What was the point in getting vaccinated if we were going to have to continue to wear masks indoors? The worst thing that would happen is that a few of us would get mildly ill for a few days. I was scared that this mask mandate would get in the way of having any sense of normality at college.
I soon became angry. Why was the administration trying to ruin my college experience? Were we going to have to mask forever? Would we eventually be forced back to remote learning? In that moment, I felt like the administration of my college was buying into “COVID hysteria.”
COVID hysteria is a term usually used some people on right to describe some people on the left who do not want COVID restrictions to end. But as my feelings showed, plenty of people on the left can buy into labeling others as COVID hysterics, who want nothing more than to keep us locked down and masked based on something that is extremely unlikely to happen, in this case dying from COVID while vaccinated. In a sense, I viewed these people in that light.
My thoughts might have been irrational. But that was truly how I felt.
Eventually, I went back to campus. I learned to live with the mask mandate even when I didn’t like it, especially in the gym. But overall it didn’t get that much in the way of my academic and social life.
Fast forward a few months later, I watched with dismay as Glenn Youngkin pulled a two point victory in Virginia over Terry McAuliffe.
My initial mood was also shock and frustration. How could a state that voted for Biden by 10 points and hadn’t elected a Republican statewide since 2009 (even during the 2014 red wave) elect a Republican who barely tried to distance himself from Trump, even in the aftermath of January 6th. And why would those people who voted for Biden be swayed this easily by a lie propagated by right wing media outlets; that children are being taught Critical Race Theory in classrooms.
But as I scrolled down through Twitter, one tweet stuck out to me.
Initially, my feelings were that this line of thinking was irrational. Schools in Virginia had been open since September. And Youngkin seemed to talk about Democrats over bringing Critical Race Theory into the classroom far more than Democrats shutting down schools (at least according the the media). School closures did not seem to be a central issue for either campaign.
But a few days later, when I was reminiscing on my times in Ireland, I finally realized it. Those feelings those voters had were the same ones I had all those months ago. That the people who had control over the way we lived our lives wanted to keep restricting them, even after we had done everything we could to protect ourselves and others from COVID.
While the data right now suggests that the main reason Youngkin won was due to strong turnout in staunchly Republican areas and lower turnout in Democratic strongholds, there were almost certainly small subset of Biden voters that voted for him, which likely pushed him over the edge.
I am not justifying a vote for Youngkin, but rather trying understand the feelings that might have caused some Democrats to vote for him.
When McAuliffe said that parents should not be in charge of what children learn in school, it made suburban parents who might have voted for Biden fearful. Not that their child would be taught Critical Race Theory in the classroom. But that their children’s schools would be shut down and there’d be nothing they could do to stop them from doing so. It was the same fear I had when I learned that my college would be reimplementing masking.
With all that said, here is what Democrats should take from this election.
Because of vaccines, any suggestion of shutting down schools once again due to COVID should be considered an immediate third rail for any candidate.
Had McAuliffe ran ads committing to keeping schools open with a vaccine mandate for teachers (which, unlike remote learning, still polls well among voters), implementing “test and stay” to keep children in the classroom, and threats to cut funding for schools that go remote (which would pretty much be empty threats), he might not have lost those voters.
Because the fact is, as contagious as the Delta variant might be, many on the left want a return to normality. And many people don’t vote based on rationality, but rather emotion. If Democrats want to win, they need to run a message of reassurance; that they will never reimplement restrictive COVID measures, particularly for the vaccinated.
Because no matter how much Ben Shapiro says otherwise, feelings can be more powerful than facts.