The overblown importance of the Virginia governor's race

Among the many downsides to the nationalization of politics, there's this: It's exhausting.

Voters in Virginia today will choose their next governor, either Republican Glenn Youngkin or Democrat Terry McAuliffe. But this is not just a Virginia story — the national political media has been consumed in recent weeks by every little development in the race. We've been treated to extended coverage of the controversy over the reading of Toni Morrison in the state's high schools, stories on how the race might be affected by endless congressional dickering over President Biden's agenda, arguments over how much former President Donald Trump matters to the campaign, and the controversy over a stupid anti-Youngkin stunt pulled off by The Lincoln Project. Outside of whatever Sen. Joe Manchin is saying today, it's the biggest story in politics.

If I lived in Virginia, I'd be more than informed enough to cast a vote in today's election. But I don't live in Virginia. Neither do you, most likely. So why should non-Virginians care so much about that state's election?

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

I suspect we shouldn't, and that we probably wouldn't — at least not to this degree reflected in the news coverage — if not for the fact that so much of our political media corps is concentrated in Washington, D.C., which makes the Virginia race a backyard story for so many of the reporters covering it. A similar dynamic exists in New York, where saturation coverage of the June mayoral primary election won by Eric Adams drew an outsized number of think pieces in ostensibly non-New York outlets about What It All Means. Compare that treatment to Boston, another big East Coast city that is electing a mayor today but hasn't received nearly the same level of national scrutiny.

But the political media has also become obsessive in recent years about parsing every off-year race or special election for its national implications, for what it says about Trump or Biden or the Democrats or Republicans or crime or whatever. (Hey, I'm guilty too.) That means the national election cycle never really ends, or even slows. And it can distort the meaning of those campaigns, which often turn on local, parochial concerns like Youngkin's vow to end Virginia's grocery tax.

There's a tendency these days to dismiss the old adage as outdated that "all politics is local." Maybe it is. But ultimately the Virginia election will necessarily mean more to Virginia voters than it does to the rest of us, and that's OK. The rest of us don't have to care quite this much.