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NOVEMBER 4, 2021

Meyerson on TAP

Youngkin Owes Manchin His Thanks

Low turnout among the young suggests they were disenchanted by the
do-nothing congressional Democrats.

Some self-proclaimed moderates in both politics and the media have
radically misdiagnosed the causes of the Great Democratic Nosedive of
2021. According to Mark Warner, one of Virginia's two Democratic
senators, and CNN's Gloria Borger, House Democrats should have steamed
ahead by passing the infrastructure bill-thereby leaving most of
Biden's agenda up in the air-and, in Borger's view, should also
have greatly pared back Biden's Build Back Better bill because it was
way too left.

That's not what the exit polls show to be what the Democrats did
wrong, however. The Edison exit poll of Virginia
,
for instance, shows that voters age 45 and older supported Joe Biden in
2020 and Terry McAuliffe in 2021 at roughly the same rate: McAuliffe's
share of the vote among these voters was only about two percentage
points lower than Biden's. It was among voters under 45 that McAuliffe
cataclysmically underperformed Biden, by roughly nine points at least.

Add these data points to my colleague Gabrielle Gurley's reporting

on Virginia outcomes-in which Black Democratic members of the
legislature lost their seats to white Republicans-and what you see is
a falling off in the turnout of Virginians who vote Democratic when they
vote, but have to be especially motivated to turn out. Younger voters,
that is, and sometime minority voters, as well.

Now, do you think those sometime voters decided to stay home because the
Democrats were too radical? Or did they stay home because the party that
had promised them tangible improvements in their lives failed to
deliver, and because McAuliffe's campaign declined to focus on the
kind of tangible improvements he'd make as governor?

My take is that it was the failure to enact, and the months of dithering
on, a bill that would have established universal pre-K, affordable child
care, drug price reductions, paid sick leave, and climate change
mitigation that led otherwise Democratic voters to stay home. As well as
the Democrats' failure to protect voter rights by declining to abolish
the filibuster. The real authors of the Democratic debacle, then, were
Democrats (or, if you prefer, DINOs-Democrats in name only, also with
a pre-and-maybe-sub-mammalian grasp of reality) Manchin, Sinema,
Gottheimer, Peters, and their ilk, not to mention McAuliffe himself, who
proved himself incapable of waging a progressive populist campaign
against the private equity billionaire who defeated him this week.

Which is why Youngkin owes Manchin a note of thanks.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter

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The First Casualty of 2022 Is Terry McAuliffe

Virginia Democrats can blame themselves for Tuesday's debacle. BY
GABRIELLE GURLEY

The Media Got the Billionaires Income Tax Wrong

Despite the media framing, a tax on billionaires' investment income is
not novel, unworkable, unconstitutional, or divisive. BY JOHN R. BROOKS,
DAVID GAMAGE & ARI GLOGOWER

China Reckons With Its Gilded Age

Xi Jinping's 'Common Prosperity' program is a rebuke to an
economic model that prioritized growth over personal welfare. BY CHANG
CHE

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