It’s Election Day! Can Youngkin Flip Virginia Red?

BUCK: Let’s get into the Youngkin versus McAuliffe race because tomorrow we’re hopefully gonna have results. I know. I’m concerned too. There are these reports of people being told they have to wear a mask to vote even in places that don’t have mask mandates, counties that don’t have it. So why is that happening? We’ll follow that. We’ll track that down.

By the way, if you have run into that problem or you have an issue with any of the voting going on in Virginia that you’ve experienced personally today, 800-282-2882 is the number to call. We’ll open up those lines for you. Anybody who’s got insights on the ground from Virginia, please let us know what’s happening. Here is Glenn Youngkin this morning on Fox telling everybody with this race, regardless of who wins, is a big deal.

YOUNGKIN: I think what I’ll take away from it is that, first of all, a guy who started 10 months ago with a 2% name ID in a poll that had a 3% margin of error who spends time out listening to voters and meeting with them and holding roundtables and presenting a platform that — that actually… It actually impacts those issues that are most important to Virginians.

BUCK: Clay? Youngkin’s had quite a run so far.

CLAY: I woke up excited, Buck. I woke up this morning excited because I want Virginians to help to lead us back to sanity in this country, and I observed there are many of you voting on a variety of different issues all over the country. Buck, I think Minneapolis has got police on the ballot and how exactly defund the police is going to be applied going forward.

Seattle has got important elections going on. We got a New Jersey governor’s race that could end up way tighter than people anticipated there as well. But most of the eyes of the nation are going to be on Virginia, a state that Joe Biden won by 10 points, and there is a lot of cautious optimism that Glenn Youngkin is going to flip the state of Virginia back into the red column.

And if this happens, I think it’s going to send out shockwaves throughout the country because Democrats are going to be running scared as we get closer to a year from now when 2022 happens and there is a monster red tide that I think is gonna sweep across the entire country, particularly in the House and also in the Senate. And people out there who may say, “Well, why does this matter?”

It matters because there are going to be, I think, congressmen and potential senators — and or Congress candidates and Senate candidates — who are gonna look at this who are Democrats and say, “I don’t know that I want 2022 to be the year that I decide to run.” And I think conversely, there are gonna be top Republicans who are making decisions, let’s say, in New Hampshire where you got Sununu trying to decide whether or not he wants to run for the Senate and potentially take back a seat for Republicans.

I think there are gonna be many people out there who look these results and say, “Okay. The situation is ripe. I need to run in 2022.” So this has shockwave opportunities in the state of Virginia to send a message about fighting against Biden, the authoritarianism, the woke alliance that is driving the Democratic Party. I think it has a big impact potentially in the way that Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema feel standing up against the Build Back Better Bernie bill that is trying to be foisted upon them right now.

 

If the nation shows up and shows that they do not support Democratic policies, I think those senators will be emboldened, I think many moderate Democrats will be emboldened, and we may see some seismic changes in Washington, D.C. That’s why this matters in particular in Virginia. And you know this, Buck. We both have lived in D.C.

If you’re close to the nation’s capital, people pay more attention to what happened. Everybody goes in and out of Northern Virginia. They expect that that is a Democratic stronghold now. If they lose Virginia, it’s going to register in a way that another state might not, right, just based on the geographic proximity.

BUCK: The spillover from Washington, D.C., which is 90% plus Democrat, is what is now turning Virginia effectively into a blue-purple state instead of a red-purple state. So this would be big from electoral perspective, but there’s also the issues that we’re seeing play out here. On the positive side, you’ve got the Youngkin teacher involvement — counterrevolution, as I like to call it — against CRT madness.

They keep insisting, “There is no CRT! We don’t teach CRT,” and then when people say, “Well, hold on. Go on the Virginia Department of Education website and you’ll find CRT training right there in front of you,” they go, “Oh, well, it’s a racist dog whistle to not like CRT.” Parents don’t like their kids being taught divisive crap and they really don’t like being told they’re insurrectionists or domestic terrorists because they don’t like their kids being taught that crap and then they’re lied to about it.

So they get particularly upset about this. There’s been an obvious effort to use the most underhanded, nasty racial insinuations about Youngkin and his supporters at the very end. You may have seen there’s this photo going around, any number of blue check journalists just happened to get kind of the same photo —

CLAY: I saw. I saw.

BUCK: — of a guy with a big old jean jacket on, and just happens to have — right smack in the middle of the jacket — a newly sewn on, very sort of shiny and new looking Confederate flag, and they’re all going, “Oh, look! It’s just at the Youngkin rally.” Sure. After we had the tiki torch false flag story last week? Sorry, libs, not gonna buy it.

But we have to call it out because they’re hoping that people that don’t spend all day thinking about politics will see this and come to a different conclusion. And that’s also why you’re seeing Terry McAuliffe make these ugly smears and insinuations about Youngkin, about his supporters. But he’s stumbled a lot, Clay. McAuliffe has had some big problems, some big misses here. And this is just, I think, another one where he straight up says: You know what the problem is the Virginia school system, Clay? Too many white teachers.

MCAULIFFE: We’ve gotta diversify our teacher base here in Virginia. Fifty percent of the students in Virginia schools K-12 — 50% — are students of color, and yet 80% of teachers are white. We all know what we have to do in a school to make everybody feel comfortable in school, so let’s diversify. So here’s what I’m gonna do. We’ll be the first state in America, if you’ll teach —

BUCK: Clay, by the way, I love… We all know — no, we don’t all know — that you now have racial quotas for teachers, you lunatic. What is he even talking about? By the way, you know where his kids go to school, right?

CLAY: Private school.

BUCK: The most expensive priceless in the D.C. area, $40,000 a year, the Potomac School in Maryland. But he loves the public school system.

CLAY: Yeah, and as a public-school parent, the idea that you would be upset about what the racial makeup of your teachers is… This is desperation. And the challenge that Terry McAuliffe has is it’s hard to try to be a racist dog whistler — which is what he’s doing to try to motivate turnout — when your governor, Democrat, Northam, is in blackface; when your attorney general also was in blackface when he was in college.

It’s hard to argue that that Glenn Youngkin is unacceptable for race-related reasons when Democrats have already excused extreme racist behavior by their own currently elected officials. I think that falls flat with very many people out there who, to your point, Buck… I mean, there’s a difference between saying, “Hey, we want the best teachers,” and saying, “Hey, we want the best teachers, and they must be this particular color.”

People don’t take the next step. I don’t care what color the teachers are of my kids who go to public school. I want the best possible teacher for them regardless of color or gender or anything else. I just want good teachers, period. That’s where parents are.

BUCK: Clay, 99.99% of American parents would agree with you, and that’s why I think when you see this — when you have this moment of McAuliffe pandering and going into these places that he just thinks are useful for his own political purposes, irrespective of what it does — what it says about parents in his own community, irrespective… I mean, he keeps talking about the “racist dig whistle.”

He’s saying that the parents who are upset about CRT, about the transgender bathroom policy, even about masks are a bunch of racists. This is the game he’s playing in Virginia. Now, that may make his hardcore Democrat supporters feel good ’cause they love to stick a thumb in the eye of the other side in whatever way they can. But for the independents, swing voters, people that live in Loudoun County that may be changing it up after the last election, I think…

Look, I’m hoping it’s a losing formula for McAuliffe, who’s a slimy but cagey fellow, and it’s gonna be a very close race. I do worry that there will be some water main break somewhere. I can’t tell you I’m not concerned. There will be a water main break, all of a sudden, the counting will stop. There will be all these bags of votes for McAuliffe that show up. I’m worrying about it, but who knows.

CLAY: I think… I understand worry and fear certainly. We didn’t think we have to tell every single Virginian do everything you can. I’m big on doing everything that you can, and when it comes to voting, that means show up and make sure that you are there to punch your ballot and that you have done everything you can and let external forces take care of themselves.

Because to me, what we need is an overwhelming victory where it’s not in the margins ’cause we know McAuliffe has already retained an attorney despite the fact the Democrats talk about the importance of sanctity of elections. It’s amazing how Terry McAuliffe knows he’s gonna be in a tight election and he’s already got one of the most aggressive election attorneys out there to try and challenge the results.

We need to kick his ass. We need to not just win. And I mean this seriously for everybody listening to us right now in Virginia. I don’t want this to be the equivalent of a two-point conversion on the final play of the game where it comes down to one play and whether you win or not. I want to kick ass, and that’s what we need people in Virginia to do.

And if they all show up, I really do think we’re gonna kick ass tonight, and I think we’re gonna have a result where Glenn Youngkin is your next governor of Virginia and everybody all over the country in Democratic politics gulps because they say, “Uh-oh. This is gonna work. ” This mom revolution that we started talking about months ago…

We were ahead of this, Buck. We talked about it spreading across the country. It’s not just Loudoun County. It’s not just Williamson County where I am. It is spreading across the whole country. The mom revolution is real. It’s coming out of the suburbs, and moms are gonna be leading the ass kicking, I think, of what’s gonna happen in Virginia.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

YOUNGKIN: Let me be clear what we won’t do. What we won’t do is teacher our children to view everything through a lens of race, where we divide them into buckets and one group’s an oppressor and the other group’s a victim and we pit ’em against each other and we steal their dreams. We will not be a Commonwealth of dream stealers!

BUCK: Welcome back to the Clay and Buck show. There you had Glenn Youngkin. He’s making his final appeal to the voters of the great state of Virginia which is gonna decide in the hours ahead today who the next governor will be. YOUNGKIN: It has to be education. My opponent clearly stated that he doesn’t think that parents should have a role in their children’s education and that government should be put between parents and your children. And of course in Virginia, part of our law is that parents have a fundamental right to make decisions with regard to their kids’ education.

And I’m on the side of parents and children and teachers, and I think this is — this has become the big issue in this race. But it also just gets back to kitchen table issues, low taxes, communities that have less crime. We need — we need a job market that’s growing and not stalled out.

And of course, we need our kids to have great schools and it’s these local issues, it’s these issues that every evening around the kitchen table families are talking about — or even around that kitchen table after a midnight shift that have Virginians’ hearts — and that’s why we’re surging in the polls, and that’s why we expect to win today.

CLAY: You’ve been waiting for a year to be able to throw some punches back, to be able to send a message, to be able to once more storm the beaches of absurdity in the Democratic Party, this is your opportunity. If you’re listening to us right now in Virginia, if you’re listening to us right now in New Jersey, you need to get out and vote. And the message, Buck, that could be sent in Virginia in particular, a state that was won by 10 points by Joe Biden in 2020.

We’re talking about a 12- or a 13-point swing in the space of a year from the Democratic side to the Republican side. We are close sending shockwaves all throughout the American body politic and letting so many different states and communities out there know that you too can find a way to fight back for your country and take back and fight back against this absurdity.

BUCK: It may be interesting how… Well, obviously we have to see if this actually happens.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: I believe… Clay was asking in the commercial, where we’re both —

CLAY: You’re nervous to make a prediction. Yeah.

BUCK: You know Clay. He likes to bet. He likes to put it down. I have had to, in recent years, take more than my fair share of my conservative media colleagues out for expensive steak dinners here in New York because I would say, “So, that’s not gonna happen! I’ll make the on-air bet.” So I’ll just say this right now.

I do believe it’s going to be very close. I do not think this is gonna be a big swing for Younkin — and, of course, it’s all relative, right? A four-point victory would be seismic. It’d be a big victory given what we’ve seen in the polling here, four or five points. I think it’s gonna be like a 52-48 situation. I’m sure… No, that would be four points. It will be a two-point margin.

CLAY: So 51-49 is what you’re saying.

BUCK: Thank you. Yes.

CLAY: I’m going 52-48 Youngkin wins.

BUCK: Wow, look at you! You’re calling the shot, upper deck, Travis. You’re a madman.

CLAY: I’m saying he’s gonna win by four points which would be a 14-point swing and let me just be clear about this because people are gonna clip it if he loses and it’s like 51-49 the other way. we want to win, right? In the immortal words of… Who was the coach? He played with… (interruption) Who was it? Jim Mora. “You play to win the game,” right? I think was “you play to win the game.” We want to win, right? But in the grand scheme of things, this being as tight as it is, right, an eight- or nine-point swing —

BUCK: We win even if we don’t win at some level.

CLAY: I don’t like moral victories, but an eight- or nine-point swing even if McAuliffe were to barely fight his way to this victory, that would be a incredible swing, what it represent across the nation.

BUCK: What would be interesting, again, is if the Democrats take a lesson from this that will perhaps be — and this makes me sad to say, but — perhaps to their benefit going into the midterm election which is, “You really do have to run on issues and not just on narrative,” right? When I say narrative, it’s “Trump, January 6, and everything is racist.” That’s the lazy, basic Democrat narrative for winning elections in their minds.

And that’s a lot of what Terry McAuliffe has been doing. That may, after this — depending on how this shakes out — no longer be viewed as the path. Let’s remember, it actually was Democrats in the first midterm against Trump, they went very heavy on health care, and they did pretty well, all things considered, in that midterm election.

Now, we could talk about the things they said about health care not being true and everything else. But the point is they went on issues. This time around, this could be almost a warning for Democrats that makes them a little bit savvier at the top-down strategy level for how they approach the midterms because Donald Trump is the bogeyman and January 6 could happen again any day?

That works for the CNN audience. I think what we going to see in Virginia, I hope — I’d even say I predict — is that what we see is it’s not working, that people come out to cast their votes because they want things be to happen or not happen that affect them, that matter to them. Remember, when we’re talking about Virginia, they’re right next door to D.C.

So the January 6 thing looms large in Northern Virginia. A lot of other places in that state, though, people are gonna say, “What? I care about schools! I care about the economy. I care about the stuff that matters to me and my family every day,” and Youngkin has been speaking… That’s why I brought up the DMV point. He’s been speaking to that stuff that actually affects people.

CLAY: By the way, Herm Edwards said, “You play to win the game.” So swing and a miss by me there — and also by Dub who fed me the line. So 0-for-2. Both of us got the sports analogy wrong there. Only thing better, Buck, would have been if you’d said, “Hey, I think it was actually Herm Edwards who said that,” and you’d blown us both up with getting the sports analogy wrong.

What we need to make sure we have tomorrow? Here’s what I want. I want Democrat excuses, a mashup that we can play if Youngkin wins, right? The spin zone that the Democrats are going to put out there, it’s gonna be so glorious to hear them on CNN and MSNBC. The first thing they’re gonna say is, “Well, people are gonna forget about this. The Virginia election a year from now is no big deal. People will forget about it.” That will be number one at the top. What’s your favorite spin zone, Buck? Second one will be they will throw Terry McAuliffe to the wolves as soon as these numbers come in.

BUCK: Oh, yeah.

CLAY: “He ran an awful campaign. This is about him; it’s not before Republicans versus Democrats. It’s Youngkin versus McAuliffe, and he was awful, and he was out of touch.” They’ll throw him to the wolves.

BUCK: They’ll also say that this is a white backlash, that racism won here. You know all the ugly things that they will say, because otherwise they’d have to deal with the fact that having Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers speaking to a lot of people right now, it’s like you’re elevating the problem as the solution. It’s not even like you don’t have the right answer.

You’re elevating the actual thing that’s causing the issues — which are teachers unions here — and the way that education has become so dominated by the left and all you have to do is poke on the that just a little bit. If you poke at that political and indoctrination stranglehold that the left has on education, they get very upset, Clay. Why is that? Well, it’s because they need this to win elections. They know that.

CLAY: Also, we will hear Trump still owns the Republican Party. They’ll try to argue — even though McAuliffe has tried to make this a Trump election. You know, they get lazy with their analogies and so they need to hit the Trump button to basically rile up the masses. And the more substance impact that I’m actually curious to see, what does this do for infrastructure and for the Build Back Better bill on Capitol Hill?

‘Cause I think this… If Youngkin wins, I think it enables Joe Manchin to hit the pause button on here for a long time on the idea that we need a major, massive expansion of the federal government ’cause he’ll argue the masses in the country are with him, and this will give him some cover. I really do think that’s the most significant national outcome.

BUCK: It’ll deal quite a blow to the crazy left in the process. It’s getting to be a rough time out there for the American Bolsheviks. I gotta say, they’re having sad days. Well, we’ll see.

CLAY: Hopefully.

BUCK: We don’t want to get ahead of ourselves.

CLAY: Fingers crossed.

BUCK: We gotta win.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: Come on, Big Glenn. Glenn’s gotta come through. Cast your votes and dunk for freedom.

CLAY: Get out there, Virginia. Get your votes in. You matter. You can send a massive message.