NO MORE MIDDLE-OF-THE-ROAD.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: MIDDLE AMERICA

Republican victories in statewide elections on November 2, especially Glenn Youngkin's win over Terry McAuliffe in the Virginia governor's race, prompted a flurry of punditry blaming progressives for Democrats' losses and doubling down on the idea that President Joe Biden, whose approval rating sank to 45 percent in late October, has strayed by taking progressive policy positions. Centrism, we're told, is the only way forward for the Democratic Party.

"Strategists in both parties said that the Virginia race was heavily shaped by Mr. Biden's falling approval rating, and that the downward Democratic trajectory had begun when the President stumbled through the troubled pullout of American troops from Afghanistan," The New York Times reported.

"Democrats' deeper problem," opined New York Times columnist Bret Stephens the morning after the election, is that they have alienated "middle-of-the-road voters--the kind who still decide elections in purplish places like Virginia." He accused Biden of bumbling too far to the left on everything from withdrawing troops from Afghanistan to the massive infrastructure deal that has divided his party.

Mainstream voters, Stephens wrote, now see the Democrats as a party comprised of "fake moderates" like Biden and "dissembling radicals" who won't acknowledge that leftwing ideas like "critical race theory" are anathema to American meritocracy and common sense.

The New York Times' other token conservative columnist, Ross Douthat, seconded this analysis in an election post mortem titled "Republicans Schooled the Left in Virginia." The Democratic Party's future, he wrote, "depends on its leaders separating themselves, to some extent, from academic jargon and progressive zeal."

It's not just conservatives who are interpreting the election results as a dire warning about the excesses of progressivism. Youngkin's victory in Virginia, an upset in a state that went for Biden in 2020 by more than ten points, gives the GOP "a successful template for 2022," according to Newsweek.

That template involves winning back suburban voters with more attacks on "critical race theory" and a "moderate" position on the Big Lie. "He's spoken about election integrity and endorsed audits of voting systems," Newsweek notes of Youngkin, "but stopped short of endorsing Trump's claim that Biden didn't properly win the election."

Never mind that the Big Lie is, well, a lie. Or that the angry parents stirred up about so-called critical race...