Summary
- Former Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin barnstormed the commonwealth with Rep. John McGuire.
- He tells the Daily Signal McGuire helped him bring billions in investment and thousands of jobs to the state.
- Youngkin says the entire Democratic Party is “bending the knee” to radical socialists like Zohran Mamdani.
Former Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin finished his term this year, but he hasn’t finished working. The Republican is hitting the campaign trail across the commonwealth to make the case for several candidates who are running in the midterms. Over the weekend, for example, he made a swing through the 5th Congressional District along with incumbent Rep. John McGuire.
“I’m campaigning all over the place because these are my friends, and we’ve been working together for a long time. John has gotten so much done in cooperation with President Trump and in cooperation with me when I was governor,” Youngkin told the Daily Signal ahead of an appearance in Charlottesville.
He noted that the men have worked together to bring billions of dollars of investment and thousands of jobs to the district. “I think the most important thing right now is that voters know he does the work. They’ve seen him do the work, and they need to rehire him to keep doing the work.”
Their tour took the two men from Lynchburg to Danville, Powhatan, and finally Charlottesville. At the final stop, Youngkin told the crowd that it had been an eventful day, one in which he almost got a new job. “We stopped for gas and a guy walked up to me and said, ‘I think I know you. You’re a football coach. Aren’t you?’”
Youngkin quickly set the man straight and then ran his own play: He asked the man to vote for McGuire. “The goal here is we’ve got to get everybody out to vote, and some people just need some encouragement,” he told the gathering.
The former governor remains focused on improving educational policies, especially at the K-12 level. When he took office in 2022, “we needed to make sure that our schools were educating our children by teaching them how to think. Not what to think, but how to think. We put kids back in their parents’ lives. We put parents at the head of the table.”
He is still working to shape education policy. Over the summer, Youngkin launched Empowering America’s Parents, an advocacy group that encourages states to opt in to the Education Freedom Tax Credit. That program, which launches in January, will allow parents to donate as much as $1,700 to scholarship-granting organizations and earn a credit on their federal tax return.
He is also dipping his toe into politics in other states.
“I’ve said many times in many places that America was made in Virginia, and in Virginia, it goes over great. In South Carolina, not so much,” he quipped. But he thinks it is important to tout the virtues of the Old Dominion and the Founders.
“Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Patrick Henry. I mean, we wouldn’t have a Bill of Rights today without Patrick Henry. And I tell you what an honor it is to be the 74th governor when he was our first. But more than the people were the philosophies, the principles in the Declaration of Independence and our Constitution.”
It isn’t clear what Youngkin’s next political move, if any, might be. Virginia will not have a U.S. Senate seat up for grabs until 2030. His name has been floated as a presidential candidate in 2028, or he might try to return to the governor’s mansion in 2029. Only one man in the modern era has successfully pulled that off: Mills Godwin, who was elected as a Democrat in 1965 and as a Republican in 1973.
Youngkin seems unlikely to follow Godwin’s lead when it comes to switching parties, though. “There is no such thing as a moderate Democrat anymore, there just isn’t,” he said in Charlottesville. “They can’t do it, they’re all bending the knee, they’re all going to Mayor Mamdani in New York to bend the knee.”
Youngkin did admit that, as of the weekend, his vote is still—technically—up for grabs. “I haven’t voted yet. I’ve been traveling, doing a ton of campaigning for a lot of people, so I haven’t voted,” he said. However, he has a plan. “I’m voting on Monday,” he told the crowd.
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[ H/T The Daily Signal ]
