For months, Republican Glenn Youngkin has made parental discontent over schools the heart of his campaign for Virginia governor.
Now, in the final days of an election that has emerged as a proving ground in the culture wars, Youngkin has seized on a politically explosive school sexual assault case in exurban Loudoun County to underscore his argument against progressive criminal justice and education policies.
With polls showing that the Virginia Republican has pulled even with Democrat Terry McAuliffe — including on the question of who’s more trusted to handle education — Youngkin’s efforts to tap into roiling parent anger are being closely watched for their implications for next year’s midterm elections.
“It’s no longer about keeping kids safe from the pandemic. It’s about keeping kids safe from the culture wars,” said Monmouth University pollster Patrick Murray, whose survey last week showed Youngkin tied with McAuliffe.
“McAuliffe has allowed Youngkin to change the terms of the debate about education,” Murray said. “Now we have an issue that’s about school safety tied to the culture war and sexual identity issue, and it’s enough to be explosive.”
In his most-recent standard stump speeches and a new ad, Youngkin is elevating the case of a high school student who sexually assaulted a girl in a school restroom in late May. The student was transferred to another school and allegedly assaulted another girl earlier this month.
The case drew national headlines after the father of the first victim was arrested for causing a disturbance in June when he confronted officials about the assault at a chaotic Loudoun County School Board meeting. The father’s reference to the teen suspect as ‘gender-fluid’ immediately thrust the assault into the ongoing debate about transgender access to school bathrooms.
The suspect’s lawyer said it was inaccurate to describe his client as ‘gender-fluid’ or transgender.
The arrest and the raucous school board meeting — which had been called to discuss trans-inclusive policies — became a flashpoint in the national debate about aggressive parents confronting, and in some cases harassing, school board members across the nation over gender, race and Covid-related policies.
After a fuller accounting of the sexual assaults and the schools’ handling of the situation surfaced, Loudoun County students held a Tuesday walkout protest at a number of local high schools chanting “Loudoun County protects rapists.” The conservative Daily Wire first broke the story of the sexual assault cases.
Against that backdrop, Youngkin has increasingly focused on the felony sexual assault cases.
“For months, we’ve seen chaos seep into our schools, escalating into violence. Violence in our schools that lack security,” he said at a recent Northern Virginia event. “A new instance each week until the unthinkable happened: Virginia — and America — awoke to the news that a young teenage girl had been sexually assaulted in her Loudoun County school and worse, the school administrators covered it up, and Loudoun’s commonwealth attorney targeted the victim’s family.”
In addition, Youngkin released a new 30-second digital ad that serves more as an attempted indictment of progressivism than an attack on McAuliffe. The ad weaves the sexual assaults with two other school controversies in the state: school policing and sex-assault reporting. It features video from a school brawl in Alexandria, where the city council reinstated school resource officers after initially pulling the cops out of the institutions amid a nationwide effort by progressives to de-emphasize law enforcement in education. The spot closes with a reference to a 2020 law passed by Democratic legislators that allowed schools to refrain from reporting misdemeanor sexual batteries.
“McAuliffe’s allies even voted to cover up crimes,” a narrator intones in the 30-second spot, which was released Monday.
The ad release occurred on the same day a judge determined that the suspect assaulted the teen girl in the case in May. A hearing on the second assault is pending.
Republican pollster John McLaughlin, who is polling in a local legislative race, said the sexual assault issue cuts across party lines. While he didn’t survey the specific sexual assault cases in Loudoun County schools, McLaughlin’s poll showed his client and Youngkin within striking distance of their opponents, even though the district is Democrat-heavy, and schools and sexual assault are big issues.
When asked about a politician who “voted to remove mandatory reporting of sexual assaults on children in schools,” 59 percent of poll respondents they would be less likely to support them — including 44 percent who said they were much less likely. Only 8 percent said more likely, according to McLaughlin’s poll taken earlier this month.
“It’s a big deal. It really matters,” said McLaughlin, calling Loudoun “ground zero” for the governor’s race.
McAuliffe and his campaign have largely avoided commenting on the sexual assault cases.
To the degree McAuliffe’s campaign has discussed the sexual assault controversy, it’s described it as a “transphobic dog whistle” because of a complicating issue in the case: the suspect wore a skirt during the first sexual assault.
The McAuliffe campaign has instead zeroed in on a Youngkin TV ad, also released this week and airing statewide, that features a mom complaining that McAuliffe, as governor, vetoed a bill designed to notify parents about sexually explicit reading materials used in schools.
Democrats used the statewide ad to brand Youngkin as a book-banner, and pointed out that the ad lacked context because it failed to mention the book mentioned in the ad was the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Beloved" by Toni Morrison, or that the child of the mom, a Republican, was a senior in high school and in an advanced college-level English course.
“What the Youngkin campaign is doing is talking to is white Republican parents. They’re not talking to swing voters or so many voters in our state,” said Ben Tribbett, a Virginia Democratic consultant and commentator
Youngkin’s new digital ad, according to a campaign adviser, is designed to pop up in Facebook feeds and internet searches in suburban Northern Virginia and statewide for Republican base voters and disaffected Republicans who sat out 2020 when Donald Trump lost Virginia by double digits.
That plays into Youngkin’s strategy of attempting to maximize the votes of already energized Republicans while peeling off a few independents, all the while counting on relatively low turnout from Democratic base voters, who appear dispirited with President Joe Biden and their party’s control of Congress.
On the Democratic side, McAuliffe’s decision to portray Youngkin as an extremist “Trumpkin” and bring in Biden, former President Barack Obama and other party luminaries as campaign surrogates is designed to juice up their own more-sizable base.
As for the salience of the sexual assault debate that has galvanized state and national Republicans, Tribbett said, “I don’t think there’s any voters out there who believe Terry McAuliffe is for sex assault in schools.”
