CLAY: The biggest election that is going to happen in 2021 is going to be what’s going on in Virginia gubernatorial race, and what is happening is the most recent Monmouth poll that came out shows now a dead heat, 46% for Youngkin, 46% for Terry McAuliffe, and McAuliffe is feeling the heat. He stormed out of an interview because he was unhappy with the questions that he was being asked there.

Now he is arguing that Glenn Youngkin is Donald Trump 2.0 which is the sort of desperate ploy that is brought to bear now anytime we’ve got potentially a tight race. And I think this is gonna end up being significant. Richmond schools have just decided that their teachers are too stressed, so they’re going to take a week off out of nowhere. Buck, this is crazy and certainly is working against McAuliffe because the whole race seems to be boiling down to public education.

BUCK: Loudoun County became the front line in the battle between parents and critical race theory indoctrination, which has now turned Virginia into a front-line state in that fight. And the government’s race is mirroring that battle in many ways. There are certain things at the state level that really matter. If you’re the governor of Virginia the federal tax rate, you could say I don’t want them to raise taxes the federal, but you’re not gonna be able to do anything about that, right?

Terry McAuliffe says Glenn Youngkin is taking him out of context. Well, let’s roll the tape and play Terry his own words. pic.twitter.com/6ceQSa0yCo

— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) October 19, 2021

State level, schools matter a lot to people, matter a lot to counties and localities and the governor plays a huge role in all this, and that’s why Glenn Youngkin is talking about a whole range of issues that affect schools including safety issues, school resource officers. There we go.

YOUNGKIN: We are going to take immediate action in regards to the our kids’ safety. Our kids can’t wait. First, when I’m your governor working for you, every school will be required to have school resource officers on its campus. And let me be clear. They will be on every campus or that school will lose its funding. If you are a school board and you refuse to equip your schools with school resource officers to keep our children safe, you will need to find your funding for your school on your own.

BUCK: This is powerful stuff, Clay. And it goes to an argument that came up in the aftermath of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas shooting when there were conversations about should there be armed resource officers at schools. Why was there such opposition to that in some schools, in some distracts and places? And there’s this whole notion on the left of the school-to-prison pipeline. And that even when kids commit violent crimes in school, they shouldn’t necessarily be reported to police if they commit a real offense. So this is a pushback on it to say, we actually do need to have kids kept safe in school. The law still applies in school. It’s not all handled in house. And because of what happened with that transgender student allegedly assaulting the teen girl and then that being covered up, this has a lot of resonance in the state of Virginia.

CLAY: No doubt. And I’m glad you brought that up because Merrick Garland is testifying today, the attorney general would have been a Supreme Court justified potentially. He said he didn’t know anything about that case. So this is Merrick Garland who basically said the school board parents are domestic terrorists and we need to make sure that we are investigating this on behalf of the FBI and the Department of Justice, and he then goes in front of Congress — this is the thing that was written about in the Washington Post — this is certainly a topic of major discussion. And, Buck, this is a lie.

He said he didn’t know anything about this case? I mean, come on. You don’t think that he reads the Washington Post? You don’t think that somebody would tell him, “Hey, just so, you know, there’s a big pushback against your idea of classifying parents as domestic terrorists investigating school board meetings. And, by the way, one of the guys that has most virally been a, quote, wrongdoer, his daughter may have gotten sexually assaulted by a transgender student in Loudoun County bathroom.” You don’t think the attorney general has been briefed on that case? I mean, he is lying, Buck, unless they came in to talk to him and he just started waving his arms and screaming, “Don’t tell me a word about this so I can say that I don’t know anything about it.”

BUCK: I mean, he knew he was gonna go on Capitol Hill and so you don’t want to have to be answering questions because when you start to add all this together in Virginia, what do you have? You have slimy Terry McAuliffe running around talking about how parents shouldn’t have a say in what their kids are being taught in schools. Let’s leave that to the teachers unions who decide things like we need a week long nap time, you know, we needed to take off some time ’cause we’re so stressed and also has the backing of a Soros-backed defund the police and mass incarceration prosecutor who doesn’t want to go after real crime but wants to put the dad of an assaulted teen girl in prison because he’s upset about the transgender student attacking his daughter in the bathroom. All this looks really bad for Terry McAuliffe, I gotta say. Glenn Youngkin’s got some momentum.

CLAY: And you need, if you are listening to us in Virginia, to get out and vote, because it’s a massive message you can send.