In this year’s midterms, the rest of the country learned what Virginia has known for a while

Maybe the rest of America finally caught on to what Virginia has known for 10 years.

Voters handed Democrats a historic, sweeping victory not only in swing-state contests but in the most reliably Republican states Tuesday. And the reason is unambiguous: President Donald Trump.

Welcome aboard. We in the Old Dominion have been waiting for you.

Democrats won Congress. Now they have to figure out how to deal with Trump.

I can hear the dissent now. Oh, you’re just a blue state filled with heathen liberals, and that’s why y’all voted against President Trump each of the three times he’s been on your ballot. Y’all wouldn’t know how to vote any other way than Democrat.

Well, Trump’s winless record in Virginia would be correct, but the rest doesn’t hold water. Look no farther than 2021 when Republican Glenn Youngkin led a resounding red-wave election that swept Democrats out of all three statewide offices and control of the House of Delegates.

That Republican rebound came one year after Democrat Joe Biden won Virginia by 10 percentage points en route to denying Trump reelection. That’s how quickly things changed here, and that doesn’t happen in indelibly blue states like California and Illinois.

Last year, with Trump back in office, the process reversed itself. A majority of Virginia voters recoiled at Trump’s presidency after just a few months, and Democrats roared back in a preview of this year’s nationwide blue tsunami.

Democrat Abigail Spanberger trounced her GOP opponent to become the first woman governor in Virginia’s 400-plus years either as a state or a British colony. Two other Democrats easily won the offices of lieutenant governor and attorney general, and Democrats took a sizable House of Delegates majority.

It’s not that Virginia won’t elect Republicans. The state had a good record of that from the 1990s right into the mid-2010s.

For 20 consecutive years, through 2019, Republicans had a lock on the House of Delegates.

Over a 32-year span beginning in 1994 and running through 2025, Republicans and Democrats each held the governor’s office for 16 of those years.

Doesn’t get much more balanced than that.

The trouble for Republicans in Virginia has a direct nexus to Trump’s ascent from reality-TV celebrity to the world’s most powerful office in 2016. To voting majorities in Virginia, he came across as a ridiculous, mean-spirited carnival barker with orange face paint who used empty promises and dog whistles to exploit voters’ fears and biases.

Virginians didn’t need Jan. 6, 2021, to know the depth of his contempt for the Constitution. We had watched it up close for four years.

To understand his appreciation for gratuitous cruelty, Virginia didn’t need to see him outfit thugs with federal badges and guns and give them carte blanche to attack and abduct undocumented immigrants and sometimes citizens without due process of law.

We weren’t surprised when he threatened allies abroad and drove up costs at home with tariffs he imposed on a whim while a Republican Congress sat mute.

Virginians suffered disproportionately as he outsourced the dismantling of whole federal departments and mass firings of government employees to the world’s richest person, but no one doubted his carefree capacity for such harm.

When he launched a surprise war overnight against Iran more than eight months ago, the world was mortified, including Virginia. But we knew that his lack of impulse control made such a thing possible if not likely. 

Nor was it a shock to see that he either hadn’t considered that Iran’s closure of the primary shipping artery for a fifth of the planet’s oil supply would trigger prohibitive fuel price increases, or he didn’t care.

All of which led us to Tuesday, and a historic reckoning that Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis called “as close to an extinction-level event for Republicans in many parts of the country as we have seen probably in the last hundred years.”

There’s more than a little hyperbole in that statement. Political waves ebb and flow for both parties. But with Trump, this phenomenon is not new. It has played out before in microcosm in Virginia.

When Trump began his first term, Republicans controlled both chambers of Virginia’s General Assembly and had a 7-4 majority in the state’s 11-seat U.S. House delegation. By the time Trump grudgingly left the White House in January of 2021, Democrats regained every elective office or institution of state or federal government in Virginia for the first time since 1968.

Now, the pain starts anew — and at a national scale — for the GOP.

Warner wins fourth term, Luria ousts Kiggans in VA-02, Taylor triumphs in VA-01

Democrats will hold eight of the state’s 11 House seats when the 120th Congress convenes in January. Democrats Shannon Taylor and Elaine Luria unseated GOP incumbents Rob Wittman and Jen Kiggans in the 1st and 2nd U.S. House districts, respectively, helping their party win a robust majority of at least 259 — perhaps more — of the 435 seats.

But this week, the whole country — including states where the Democratic label has been an instant disqualifier — joined Virginia in shifting away from Trump’s party.

In Texas, whose GOP leaders had been so obsequiously loyal to Trump that they started a round of preemptive gerrymandering last year in a vain bid to contain this fall’s blue tsunami, Democrats won the governorship and a Senate seat.

A United Methodist pastor became the first Democrat elected to the Senate from Kansas since 1932.

In South Carolina, Republican Darlene Graham, sister of the late Sen. Lindsey Graham, lost her bid to keep the seat in her family and her party to pediatrician Annie Andrews, a Democrat.

And in Mississippi, Democrat Scott Colom held a thin but shocking lead over GOP incumbent Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith. The last Democrat to represent Mississippi in the Senate was John C. Stennis, a one-time Dixiecrat who was more conservative than most of his GOP colleagues when he was last elected in 1982.

We are a nation exhausted from a temperamental man-toddler vested with immense power and a Republican Congress  lacking the spine to protect Americans from his more destructive proclivities.

Frustration gathered steam for two years and made landfall Tuesday as a category 5 political disaster, splintering Trump’s Republican support system and promising some measure of restraint on him during his two remaining lame-duck years in office.

Finally, working-class Americans in parts of the nation that have been unstintingly loyal to Trump realized that, for all his bluster, braggadocio and nonsense, their lives were getting harder. So, for the first time in generations, they gave Democrats a chance.

As has been Virginia’s experience, that doesn’t mean they will still favor Democrats in the next election. But it was a statement that had to be made, and it was made at the ballot box.