What Went Down During The 2021 Elections

To your point, Nathaniel, I also think it’s harder for Democrats to run a national campaign against Trump because he’s banned from most mainstream social media platforms and he’s not in the White House, so he’s largely out of the public eye.

You could not be more right, Jacob, when describing the aesthetic Youngkin has tried to hone. It’s definitely a throwback in part to the GOP days of old, which is why I don’t understand why McAuliffe didn’t try and go after him for being wealthy and out of touch with voters? That was a very effective line of attack against now-Sen. Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential election and strikes me as something McAuliffe/Democrats could have used more to their advantage?

Youngkin has done a good job of threading the needle between being Trumpy and being “not that Trumpy,” as Sarah said. Some of that is to do with how he looks and talks; he comes off as “suburban dad” much more than he does “hothead real estate tycoon” (even though he’s worth half a billion dollars himself). But he also benefitted from the GOP nominating convention being a month earlier than the Democratic primary, which means he got a month’s head start on the general election. And his personal resources meant he could introduce himself to general election voters immediately and on his own terms (just a regular, fleece-wearing, basketball-playing dude) before McAuliffe started tying him to Trump.