DON'T CARRY ME BACK TO OLD VIRGINNY – AT 10:49 A.M. ET:  Let the explaining begin.  Let the excuses fly.  And let us change the channel.

We got beat in Virginia.  That's it.  The geniuses, who are only geniuses after the election, will be "analyzing" the statistics for weeks.  Bottom line:  This was a wake-up call to the Republicans, stating bluntly that they can lose the House next year, and possibly the Senate, setting up an almost certain impeachment of the president.  Never mind that there probably won't be any legal grounds for impeachment.  The left-wing bar will invent some.

Many of the analyses seem to fall short.  Virginia really isn't one state.  It's now several, with dramatically different cultures.  If truth be told, the Virginia suburbs around Washington D.C. are far more similar to the suburbs around New York than they are to the towns of the Old South.  Virginia was the only Southern state to go for Clinton last year.  So the Democratic victory wasn't so shocking, although the nine-point margin was not expected.

Doug Schoen, a lifelong Democrat but a critic of the current party, offers some light, noting that the incoming governor, Ralph Northam, is from the moderate wing of the Democratic Party, not the nutbag wing which is rapidly taking over the national organization.  From Fox: 

Most encouragingly, Northam campaigned on a moderate platform and offered the type of alternative agenda that the Democratic party must advance in order to succeed in 2018 and beyond.

To be sure, this victory alone does not change the disorder that was made abundantly clear in Donna Brazile’s recent revelations about the relationship between the DNC and Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Throughout the course of the Virginia campaign, Northam was never beholden to the Democratic party’s loudest, most liberal voices, as evidenced by his shift on sanctuary cities just last week. In fact, he defeated the progressive base’s preferred choice in the June primary.

Northam put forward a well-structured economic plan, involving job training and re-training, as well as advancing the Democratic party’s tradition values in the areas of women’s issues and gun violence prevention.

COMMENT:  I doubt if the national Dems will learn anything from the Virginia race.  They're going headlong into building a hard-left party that will try to remove a president. 

But Republicans must now start building a record that they can take to the people in next year's midterms.  Virginia may be just what the GOP needed to wake it from its slumber.

November 8, 2017