Glenn Youngkin’s victory is just the latest iteration of an age-old campaign tactic.
© AFP via Getty Images AFP via Getty Images In the run-up to Glenn Youngkin’s election as governor of Virginia on Tuesday, I saw a post describing “critical race theory” as “the next caravan.” Those terms would’ve been gibberish to the average voter four years ago. Today, they’re part of our miserable lingua franca for talking about politics not only in Virginia, but across the United States. For most of the campaign, Democrat Terry MacAuliffe seemed to be in the driver’s seat, until Youngkin, the Republican, started ranting about CRT in schools. The polling gap closed. CRT panic had recently gripped parts of Virginia, which Joe Biden won by 10 points in 2020. It was part of an electoral strategy cooked up last year by conservative activists, who started using CRT as a catch-all term for the supposed excesses of the left — anything “crazy in the newspaper,” according to Christopher Rufo, the Manhattan Institute fellow who pioneered its usage. Since then, CRT has been astroturfed into a local cause celébrè, applied most often as a criticism of school curricula — including historically accurate lessons about Black enslavement — that might make white children feel bad. The “caravan” comparison seemed apt: In recent elections, GOP politicians and conservative media have spent a lot of time and energy casting Central American migrants as invading hordes, only to abandon the issue once votes were tallied. Like CRT, caravan panic was an electoral ruse — a buzzy non-threat evoked to frighten voters. But if the link between the caravan and CRT neatly summarized the GOP’s cynicism, it also suggested a common misapprehension. The idea that the outcome in Virginia would dictate the Republicans’ CRT strategy moving forward misses how long it’s already been happening, and how much more of it we were going to see regardless of Tuesday’s outcome. The bulk of reporting and analysis of the Virginia race has described Youngkin’s decision to embrace CRT as a compromise — a way to unite two constituencies, Trumpists and moderates, that were seen as being at odds.
