Virginia and New Jersey Voters Like Their Trumpism Without Trump

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Surprise! Trumpism doesn’t need Donald Trump as its ambassador in order to thrive. Voters in in Virginia and New Jersey have just made that abundantly clear.

Republican gubernatorial candidates in both states kept the former president at a distance, while making use of his political playbook to score a victory in blue-ish Virginia and engineer a nail-biter in deep blue New Jersey. By giving Trumpism a gentler guise, they’ve taught Republicans everywhere powerful, divisive strategies to road-test in next year’s midterm elections — and to perfect in time for the 2024 presidential race.

I’m defining Trumpism in the same terms the former president himself first outlined when he rode down that Trump Tower escalator in 2015: anti-institutional, anti-elite backlash wedded to cold-blooded, us-versus-them identity politics, often shrouded in bigotry and racism.

It’s always been easy to write off Trump as an aberration, when in fact he is a reflection of his country and his party. His presidency demonstrated Trumpism’s traction — even as it exposed certain grotesque truths about America. Trump handily shredded a number of myths some Americans have told themselves about who we are and what we value. Trump was also incompetent and reveled in overtly loony antics, so he wasn’t able to either push his agenda as far as he wanted or secure a second term.

But Jack Ciattarelli, the Republican gubernatorial candidate in New Jersey, and Glenn Youngkin, the Republican candidate in Virginia, have learned from his example. They stoked concerns about government overreach and Covid mandates, while largely avoiding Trumpian histrionics.

To be sure, bipartisan anger over public education policies in both New Jersey and Virginia during the Covid-19 pandemic drew voters to Ciatarelli and Youngkin. Parents especially were angry that school lockdowns had left children and families adrift, and both Republicans tapped into that anger. They also appealed to culture wars and to racism. “Schools” and “education” became proxies for "government overreach" and “racism/racial identity.” Messages focused on those specters solidified the GOP’s rural and exurban base and swayed suburban independents.

Ciattarelli, an entrepreneur and former state assemblyman who years ago labeled Trump a “charlatan,” had become a Trump supporter. Last December, he spoke at a “Stop the Steal” rally, a public show of support for Trump’s babble about the 2020 presidential election being stolen. Once Ciattarelli began campaigning for governor, however, he kept Trump at bay.

At the same time, he hammered his opponent, Governor Phil Murphy, for what he described as unnecessarily strict mask and vaccine mandates and for locking students out of their schools for too long. Ciattarelli also targeted Murphy for signing a law that incorporated diversity and inclusion studies into New Jersey’s K-12 public school curriculum. As a parent who has a child in New Jersey’s public school system, and have had two others graduate from it, I see this as “education” and am grateful that my children have access to it. But Ciattarelli claimed New Jersey has been instructing young students in critical race theory (it doesn’t) and warned that schools might be “teaching our children that white people perpetuate systemic racism.”

I’m a white guy with white kids in a predominantly white town, and I accept the fact that white folks play a pivotal role in perpetuating racism. But, as Ciattarelli’s campaign showed, lots of my fellow New Jerseyans do not. Ciattarelli’s voters hate seeing mandates and masks trample their liberties — and they are uncomfortable exposing their little ones to robust and provocative discussions of racism.

In Virginia, Youngkin put many Trump themes in play, but not Trump himself. “Candidates matter,” Youngkin’s chief strategist, Jeff Roe, said of his boss’s path to victory. “We weren’t defined by Obama, we weren’t defined by Trump, we were defined by Glenn.” Youngkin “triangulated the Trump dilemma with skill,” noted the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, by being “so un-Trump-like” while campaigning on “some of the same cultural issues.”

Youngkin, a former financier and an evangelical Christian, railed against Virginia schools that didn’t take parents’ concerns seriously. He also complained about critical race theory being part of Virginia’s public school curriculum (it isn’t), and promised to ban it if elected. “What we won’t do is teach our children to view everything through the lens of race,” he said.

One of Youngkin’s campaign ads featured a white suburban mother distraught that the late Toni Morrison’s novel “Beloved,” which explores the ravages of slavery, was taught in Fairfax County’s public schools. Morrison, who won both a Nobel Prize and a Pulitzer Prize for her work, was black. She also was apparently more threatening to kids than provocative white counterparts such as Cormac McCarthy and Nevil Shute, whose harrowing books are on Fairfax County’s recommended list but didn’t make it into Youngkin’s ads.

Virginia voters said the economy, critical race theory and education were decisive factors in their choice for governor (though some of them had no idea what critical race theory is). Polls are unreliable, and there’s more to learn about what Virginia’s voters were thinking, but how could they not have had race on their minds? Youngkin immersed them in the subject.

Other Republicans are modeling Trumpism without Trump, too, and some undoubtedly are thinking about presidential runs in 2024. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Texas Senator Ted Cruz and Missouri Senator Josh Hawley come to mind.

Seemingly seismic political events, open to multiple interpretations, sometimes fade quickly. Hollywood savant William Goldman’s observation that “nobody knows anything” applies to explanations of the Virginia and New Jersey elections, too.

But Trump has shown that we don’t live in an entirely rational, fact-friendly country, that racism remains a central facet of the American experience, and that Republicans will continue doing Trump’s dirty work if it gets them elected. They’ll just do it more politely.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Timothy L. O'Brien is a senior columnist for Bloomberg Opinion.

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