As the election results rolled in on the evening of Nov. 5, the state of Virginia offered an early, alarming portent for Democrats.
Vice President Kamala Harris won the affluent, diverse Northern Virginia suburbs outside Washington, as the Democratic nominee was expected to do. But she won there by notably smaller margins than President Biden had in 2020, suggesting a flaw in the assumption that highly educated suburban America would tilt ever more decisively in the party’s favor.
Harris supporters in Virginia, as in many places across the country, said they felt grief and some confusion after her defeat. Trump voters expressed a mix of giddiness and grievance. And across party lines, voters wondered whether, in an education-obsessed region, a series of combustible debates over schools had helped diminish Ms. Harris’s vote totals.
In Loudoun County, Austin Levine, 54, voted for Mr. Trump. Mr. Levine works in sales and generally leans Republican, he said, though he voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016.
This year, he explained, he felt that the stack of lawsuits against Mr. Trump was “just ridiculous.” As a Jewish person, he said, he was offended by critics of Mr. Trump who linked him to Naziism. “He’s not Hitler,” Mr. Levine said. “Don’t preach that he is, and don’t preach the world is ending.”
Beyond that, though, Mr. Levine said he remains disappointed by what he sees as a lack of accountability for Democratic-majority institutions, like the school system, that failed his family during the pandemic. He said his two sons learned “nothing” while Loudoun schools were largely shut down for more than year, and the academic effects were still being felt by his younger child, now a high school junior.
“Math is like a curse word in our house,” he said. “He struggles all the time.”
Other issues, like immigration and the economy, also mattered in the Virginia suburbs, as they had nationally. But Virginia’s Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin, won in 2021 by campaigning on school-related issues, and many voters who switched political allegiances in recent years said that education was an important factor.
In addition to frustration over pandemic school closures, some voters had strong views about a series of virulent school-board battles over transgender students’ access to bathrooms and sports participation, how schools handled testing and what they taught about race and the nation’s history.
“I think of the taxes I am paying, and the education that is not being delivered,” Mr. Levine said.
In Fairfax County, Zia Tompkins, who voted for Barack Obama twice, said issues surrounding his family life were key to his political shift toward Mr. Trump. He voted for the former president this year even though, he said, he had “never been a big Trump fan.” “I wouldn’t let him date my daughter,” he added.
Mr. Tompkins, 44, is an engineer who has worked for the federal government. He got involved in local politics because he opposed an effort to redistrict neighborhood schools. He ran unsuccessfully for his local school board, and then joined a parents’ group that pushed to have schools reopen during the pandemic.
He said that virtual learning in 2020 had made his smart, curious daughter say, “I hate school.”
Alarmed, he and his wife enrolled all three of their children in a private school so they would benefit from in-person instruction. But the couple could not comfortably afford that expense, and have since returned their children to the public schools.
More recently, Mr. Tompkins said, he has come to believe that new immigrants were taxing the county’s education and health systems, and that Democrats were wrong to argue for years that immigration was not a problem.
All of this, he said, made him feel that local Democratic groups had let his family down.
“Institutions that people here took for granted as being trustworthy — it was my perception that they failed,” he said.
Some Democrats are wondering what went wrong in a part of the state that they had increasingly relied on, and whether the recent shift rightward in the suburbs signals a realignment or is just a short-term blip.
“We’re devastated,” said Liz Carter, chair of the Democratic Committee in Loudoun County, where Ms. Harris won 57 percent of votes, compared to Mr. Biden’s 62 percent four years ago. “Now there is a lot of introspection.”
She noted that turnout was down this year. “We lost to the couch,” she said.
Ms. Carter attributed some of the party’s problems in the suburbs to media “echo chambers” that “whipped people into a frenzy” about divisive cultural issues.
Dominic Thompson, executive director of the Fairfax County Democratic Committee, noted that Democrats swept county school board elections last year, suggesting that there was no vast voter dissastifcation with the party on education.
“We were given the trust of voters,” he said. “They allowed us to continue serving our community.”
David Walrod is the president of the Fairfax County Federation of Teachers, which supported school closures. He said there was “a lot of validity” to concerns over how those closures — and the pandemic more broadly — affected schoolchildren.
Asked if the union might reconsider its stance on closures in the event of a future pandemic, he said: “The C.D.C. are the experts and know the medical side. If they are recommending we do this, that’s what we should do.”
He said that anger over gender and race in schools had been driven by conservative groups and media figures, and did not reflect the daily concerns of teachers and students.
“They are fake issues, manufactured — they don’t exist,” Mr. Walrod said.
Still, those issues were very real for some Virginians, according to Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, who lives in Fairfax County.
A notable minority of Arab and Muslim voters backed Mr. Trump this year, not just to protest the Biden-Harris administration’s support for Israel, he said, but also because “their concern about the too-progressive liberal agenda of sexualization of young people and the curriculum.”
He said he was not especially surprised that Mr. Trump had gained ground. Some Arab and Muslim voters, he said, “found a common denominator with the Republican platform, especially around people concerned about family values.”
Asian American parents are another group in Northern Virginia that appeared to shift toward the Republican Party over =education issues, said Asra Nomani, a writer in Fairfax County.
Ms. Nomani helped lead a parents’ group that pushed back against the school board’s effort to minimize the role of testing in admitting students to a selective school, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. The change was meant, in part, to address the relatively low enrollment at Jefferson for groups like Black and Hispanic students.
Before that fight, which began in 2020, many parents did not know that the school board was dominated by Democrats, Ms. Nomani said. When parents were exposed to education ideas from the left — like the concept that preparing a child for admissions tests is a form of “resource hoarding,” or that Asian Americans are “white-adjacent” — they were deeply turned off, she said.
“Far-left politics in the Democratic Party turned the centrist voter Republican,” Ms. Nomani said, “and that has continued through the 2024 election.”
Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, the Democratic Party’s vice-presidential nominee in 2016, disagreed that the election returns in his state pointed to doom and gloom for Democrats.
He noted that while Ms. Harris significantly underperformed Mr. Biden in the state, her margins were similar to those that he and Hillary Clinton posted in 2016, and not very different from those that Barack Obama achieved in 2008 and 2012.
In recent decades, he said, “the story in the Virginia suburbs has been a dramatic transformation from rock solid Republican to now extremely competitive for Democrats.”
On the national level, Mr. Kaine acknowledged that Mr. Trump’s anti-transgender advertisements may have been effective. But he rejected the idea that Democrats should rethink their positions on transgender issues. Instead, he said, they should put forward a stronger economic message.
“Democrats should get on board the hate train?” he asked. “We ain’t gonna do it.”
He said his team would conduct a poll soon to try to better understand low voter turnout in some Democratic areas.
“I don’t completely get it,” he said, “and I am reluctant to speculate.”
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