Republicans will have to thank Democrats, though, for one thing: The ongoing debate, county-by-county, city-by-city, over transgender policy.
What political genius thought it would be a good idea to have every locality in Virginia debate transgender policy in an election year? OK, this mandate from the Virginia Department of Education may not have been a political mandate in the electoral sense, but any mandate from Richmond is political at some level.
There is no way that Democrats will profit from these debates, and many ways in which they will lose.
Each one of these debates simply serves to energize a conservative base in an off-year election — and might have the effect of helping Republicans win over some voters in the middle who just want to see their kids’ schools focus on readin’, writin’ and ‘rithmetic.
That’s not to say that there shouldn’t be a transgender policy — unless school systems somehow think there are no trans students in their schools, in which case they are simply out of touch with reality.
Our point here is not to debate how many genders there are, but to point out that setting off a debate over transgender policy in every city and county in the state works to the benefit of Republicans and makes it harder for Democrats to retain the governorship or anything else in Richmond. (It also doesn’t seem to be helping the climate for transgender students in some of these counties.)
