Thread by @jbouie

Getting real tired of the pure wishcasting that is passing for analysis of this race. washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…

Take this paragraph, which I read as dismissive. “Of course the city of Virginia Beach voted this down.” Except, VB — the largest single city in Virginia — is a vital swing area in the state, nearly evenly divided between Republican and Democratic voters, with lots of indies.

far from an “of course,” if the Virginia Beach school board is voting down a CRT resolution, that actually says something important about its potency as an election issue.

read a story which described Winchester — deep in the heart of the Shenandoah Valley, where there is a straight up museum to Stonewall Jackson — as an “exuburb of Northern Virginia” in order to present an ordinary Republican voter as something more exotic. It’s ridiculous.

I’m not saying Youngkin can’t win. But there’s so much of analysis of this race that feels untethered from the political realities of the state.

Virginia is not NOVA and you shouldn’t really anchor the state’s politics in relation to NOVA. If you really want to know how CRT is playing, you need to look to the Richmond suburbs, the greater Hampton Roads area, the southside and the western edge.

If Democratic voters in like, Emporia are big mad about CRT, then that’s a story, because it says something about the party’s weakness in the small and medium-sized towns that anchor its showing in everything east of I-95 and I-81.

But like, so much of the analysis I’ve seen amounts to “I drove an hour outside of Washington and this is what I found.”

still can’t get over that virginia beach paragraph, and not just because that’s my hometown. to steal from a reply to this thread, VB is like the staten island of the state. it’s mostly represented by republicans in the general assembly. if CRT isn’t a big issue here….