I think a lot of Youngkin’s enduring popularity has to do him being a clean slate at the start of the election, and his early success at defining himself. He had never run for office before and wasn’t a public figure. Then he had a month-long head start between the GOP nominating convention and the Democratic primary, and there was another month after that when McAuliffe went dark on TV. So Youngkin was able to spend over $7 million on TV, according to analytics firm Kantar, before McAuliffe started running general election ads. It looks like that early branding (very little of which mentioned he was a Republican) paid off.
