Over in Virginia, they’re having a governor’s race.  According to most experts, it was supposed to be an easy one for the Democrats, in large part because the northern portion of the state looks more like Vermont than Virginia.  (Maybe it’s time to split Virginia again, i.e. North and South.)

Anyway, the Democrat running is Representative Abigail Spanberger, and she is learning the hard way that “woke” is a problem.  This is from Ben Domenech:

The off-year governor’s election in purple Virginia is almost always a win for the party that doesn’t hold the White House, but this year the race is showing how much Democrats have refused to learn their lessons from their massive culture-war losses of 2024.

The battle in the Old Dominion has all the hallmarks of Democrats’ White House defeat in November.

An uninspiring political-insider candidate, hand-picked by the party establishment, is running a campaign that relies on hype from friendly media.

She’s dodging questions about hot-button cultural issues — including trans athletes in school sports and men in girls’ dressing rooms — and betting she can coast to victory on resistance-fueled backlash to President Donald Trump.

A month ago, Democrat and ex-CIA spy Abigail Spanberger’s lackluster basement campaign was chugging along, spending big money on a plethora of ads slamming her opponent, Republican Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, as too conservative for the state.

Earle-Sears, a Marine Corps veteran, rode strong support from the Republican grassroots to become Virginia’s first female lieutenant governor and first woman of color elected statewide.

Thanks in part to a massive spending gap, Spanberger built up a double-digit polling lead over the summer; many in the GOP wrote off the race as lost.

But then woke showed up, and the GOP began to rise.  All of a sudden Abigail has a Kamala problem.  She can’t handle the bathroom or parental rights issues.  She can’t speak clearly on whether or not a man should use a ladies’ room.  And she can’t address the issue of parental rights or the idea that mom and dad should be able to object to LGBTQ lesson plans.

Once again, a Democrat gets confused on 80-20 issues and takes positions that appeal in San Francisco rather than Virginia.

Last, but not least, the Democrat running for attorney general is now defending something about fantasizing killing a GOP candidate and the man’s family.  The defense is that it was a private conversation, but most people find that a bit weird from a guy running for a major state office.

Where is Abigail?  Like Kamala, she is nowhere, or dancing around the issues.

My guess is that the Democrats have the numbers in northern Virginia to pull this out, but it will be a lot closer than most experts predicted.  The moral of the story is that woke is a problem and most still Democrats don’t get it.

P.S.  Check out my blog for posts, podcasts, and videos.

Image from Grok.