The Weekly Sift

It was a big relief to me when Ralph Northam won the Virginia governor’s race by a wide margin. His opponent had been making a Trumpish white-identity-politics push, running against sanctuary cities (which Virginia doesn’t have) and Hispanic gangs, and in favor of continuing to celebrate the Confederacy. Some polls indicated that it was working, which said something I didn’t want to believe about Virginia and America and democracy in general. If Ed Gillespie had won, we’d see similarly ugly campaigns across the country in 2018, and maybe they’d work too.

It didn’t work. Northam won by a clear 9%, and Democrats held a similar margin in elections for Virginia’s lower house — though gerrymandering might allow Republicans to maintain control anyway. I’ll do a post mortem of the campaign and the exit polls in the featured post “What Did Virginia Teach Us?” That should be out by 10 EST.

The week’s other big story was Roy Moore. I still haven’t decided whether to leave my Moore observations in the weekly summary or pull them out into their own post. Then there was Senate Republicans’ tax-reform bill, which — even though they plan to pass it by Christmas — still isn’t a serious proposal, because it doesn’t fulfill the reconciliation rules they’ll need to get it through. They’re continuing to set up a replay of ObamaCare repeal, where no one will know what the bill really says until it’s time to vote. Then there were Trump’s comments siding with Putin over the “political hacks” who run the U.S. intelligence services, the sexual abuse scandals that continue to erupt everywhere you look, and some really bad theology. The summary will cover all that before closing with an animoji version of “Bohemian Rhapsody”. That should be out by noon.