Glenn Youngkin won the governor’s race in the Democratic-leaning state of Virginia last year in part by branding himself as a moderate conservative who declined to embrace the Trumpian way.
Now he’s out in Arizona campaigning for gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, a Trump-worshipping, hard-core 2020 election denier who spreads baldly false rumors about her opponent, attacks the media and who made a splash as a staunch skeptic of masking and vaccines.
A big-tent GOP for authoritarians means a small tent for America.
Youngkin justified the decision in an interview with CNN on Sunday, describing it as part of a spirit of inclusiveness within the GOP. “I think that the Republican Party has to be a party where we are not shunning people and excluding them because we don’t agree on everything,” he said.
But of course, by welcoming Trump-backed Lake, he’s cosigning a political agenda seeking to undermine the idea of an inclusive republic where people can coexist despite disagreement. A big-tent GOP for authoritarians means a small tent for America. But Youngkin appears to be fine with this trade-off.
Youngkin’s embrace of Lake is a reminder that he’s never been as moderate as he was commonly perceived by the pundit class. If he’s comfortable lending his increasing star power to mainstream authoritarian white nationalism, he’s making it plain that he is no bulwark against the radicalization of the GOP.
Lake has refused to say whether she would accept her own loss, instead repeating in a recent CNN interview, “I’m going to win the election, and I will accept that result.” If she wins the governorship of the battleground state, she will have a particularly influential perch from which to aggressively undermine trust in future election results in the case of, say, a Trump loss in 2024. A former television news anchor, Lake is adept at smoothly conveying an alarmist message about election integrity. “We know that if we have another election that is stolen from us, we’re going to lose this country forever,” she said at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February.
Lake is also a xenophobic demagogue on issues like immigration, and she has pledged a “declaration of invasion” if she makes it into the governor’s mansion. She has literally repeated Trump’s infamous claim that immigrants coming across the U.S.-Mexican border are “rapists.” Her repetition of Trump’s line signaled her commitment to not only his ideology, but also his trollish style of media provocation and disinformation.
By contrast, Youngkin has acknowledged that Joe Biden won the 2020 election. While he did make a name for himself as an opponent of “critical race theory” — firmly in the Trumpian wheelhouse — his “suburban dad” image and calls for unity instead of division won over independents and suburban voters in an affluent and blue-leaning state. Some political analysts believed Youngkin’s pivot toward the hot button cultural issue of critical race theory was a bit of a put-on to win attention, and that at heart he was a more traditional, free-market focused Republican politician.
It turns out that regardless of what Youngkin may have believed in the past — and whatever ideology he subscribes to now — he’s more than comfortable in Trump territory. He traveled to Tucson on Wednesday to call Lake “awesome.” He didn’t serve up a full plate of MAGA talking points, focusing instead on issues tied to the economy, and he talked about immigration through the prism of the flow of drugs into the U.S. But he endorsed Lake enthusiastically and called Biden and Katie Hobbes, Arizona’s secretary of state and Lake’s opponent, “agents of chaos.”
Youngkin’s role in the GOP shouldn’t fill Democrats with relief. If anything, they should be concerned by his capacity to make extremists look innocuous.
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