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Maddow Sits In Silence Looking Sad As Sabato Says Dems Got Crushed In VA

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OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.


MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow did not handle the news well on Tuesday night that Republicans dominated elections across Virginia.

Republican Glenn Youngkin — a Republican endorsed by President Donald Trump — has been declared the winner of Virginia’s gubernatorial race over Democrat Terry McAuliffe.

During a segment on her MSNBC program, Maddow and UVA Center of Politics pollster Larry Sabato analyzed the election results, with Sabato calling it a “bloodbath” for Democrats.

Maddow asked Sabato for “the story” on the Virginia gubernatorial race and seconds later she no longer had a smirk on her face after realizing just how badly Democrats had lost.

“The story is — I’m not going to call it a blowout because we don’t have the final numbers. But I will tell you somebody high up in McAuliffe’s camp, who was there with McAuliffe put it this way to me about an hour ago. ‘It’s a bloodbath,’” Sabato said.

“So far, everything we’ve seen pretty much falls along that line,” he added. “And while we don’t have complete figures, anything close to complete figures for the House of Delegates, you can guess based on what I’ve just said.”

“The operative word is…race. That is what matters,” Sabato claimed. “There’s a lot of…white backlash, white resistance, whatever you want to call it…We live in a post-factual era.”

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Later on Tuesday night, Maddow was joined on a panel with network host Roy Reid, where they made another round of absurd comments.

“He’s found a way to launder a pretty racist trope. This idea that we cannot talk about America’s history, because it hurts my feelings. He’s turned that into a campaign,” Reid said of Youngkin.

“And I think what Democrats have to worry about is if he succeeds, and he wins, that is going to be the campaign model for every single Republican that’s running in 2022,” Reid added.

Maddow took that sentiment one step further.

“To have the Fox News channel, our friends at the Fox News channel, building their programming, particularly the primetime programming, around this for months. They’re building a campaign platform for conservative candidates to run on it everywhere. Even though it’s not actually taught anywhere. Even though it’s not a real thing,” Maddow said of critical race theory.

“There’s nothing you could pay for in any campaign that would equal the kind of free help you’d get from that kind of conservative media, just fire hose on the issue,” Maddow added.

MSNBC failed to mention that Republican Winsome Sears will become the first black female Lieutenant Governor, in the Commonwealth of Virginia.

Polling was leaning towards Youngkin all week.

Democrat candidate Terry McAuliffe, the former governor of the state, is behind significantly in a brand new Fox News poll.

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No Republican has won a statewide race in Virginia since 2009 and Joe Biden won the state in the 2020 presidential election.

Despite Biden campaigning for McAuliffe, Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin burst ahead in a recent poll just days before the election.

Youngkin was polling at 53 percent among likely voters, to McAuliffe’s measly 45 percent.

Democratic pollster Chris Anderson had been sounding the alarm prior to the election on Tuesday night.

“With the race essentially tied among the full registered voter universe, McAuliffe could still pull this off,” says Anderson, who conducts the Fox News survey along with Republican Daron Shaw. “But it would take something big to ignite enthusiasm for McAuliffe’s candidacy and a massively effective get out the vote effort.”

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“Education is a top issue, which is usually good news for the Democrats since they are typically seen as more capable in that domain,” says Shaw. “But Youngkin has turned the issue on its head so it’s about curriculum and parent involvement rather than spending. The result is the GOP is currently preferred on perhaps the critical issue for this election.”

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