Is the Virginia governor's race an indicator of whether the GOP is still in the grip of Trumpism?

 There's an editorial at the Washington Examiner today that raises that question. 

By the time the Very Stable Genius had clinched the Republican presidential nomination in that terrible May of 2016, I was harboring trepidation about how the Left had its low-hanging fruit for the foreseeable future: conflating actual conservatism with this new cult of personality. If Trump happened to sign on to some position that was actual conservatism - say, countering identity-politics indoctrination in schools - it was a walk in the park to make that look like the position of drool-besotted MAGA types. That conflation is exactly what happened, and it's been a bear to sort things back out and apply proper labels to them in the intervening years. 

This Examiner editorial says that that ploy is not working in the Yungkin-McAuliffe race:

In 2012, sitting Vice President Joe Biden, the current president and leader of the Democratic Party, told a crowd that Mitt Romney wanted to restore slavery and enslave black people. 

If Biden could say something that completely deranged and defamatory about such an inoffensive politician as Romney, then whom will Democrats not attack unfairly? On whom will they fail to turn the dial of smear and slander up to 11?

Many Republicans asked themselves exactly that question in 2016. During the primaries, whenever their party comrades appealed to decency as an argument against Donald Trump and his intemperate behavior, they pointed out that it doesn't matter. Democrats, they explicitly argued on many occasions, have shown that they would cancel their own mothers as racists during Mother's Day dinner if they thought it would somehow benefit them politically. All that mattered was to shock and shut them up — nominate Trump and let him offend the hell out of them until they go out of their minds. 

Democrats, with their vicious lies, thus helped Republicans talk themselves into the Trump era. And the party of Trump retaliated, actively working to irritate Democrats as much as possible. Those are not judgments but observations. Can anyone argue that such behavior, on both sides, has not widened the cultural divide and sharpened the political polarization that besets the country today? Is it any surprise that debates are now so much less policy focused?

We have no idea whether Republicans will have the stomach to nominate Trump once again. We hope not . But Democrats have certainly not changed their spots. Terry McAuliffe's campaign for governor of Virginia, desperate in the final stretch, is attempting to turn the milquetoast Republican nominee, Glenn Youngkin, into George Wallace. Democrats are even claiming that Youngkin's talk about parental involvement in education is tantamount to book banning (it isn't) and even just a racist dog whistle — yes, the latter has literally become a Democratic talking point in the last 48 hours . That tells you more than any poll ever could about the state of the Virginia governor's race. 

But most of the time, McAuliffe satisfies himself trying to frame Youngkin as the second coming of Donald Trump. When Biden was in Virginia campaigning with McAuliffe last week, he invoked Trump's name two dozen times in his speech, apparently forgetting that he himself has been president for the last nine months. In an odd nod to C.S. Lewis, McAuliffe himself even calls Youngkin "Trumpkin." They falsely accuse him of racism, of Trumpism.

So far, a convincing argument, but methinks the editors are a bit too confident in their assessment of the degree to which the GOP is recovering from its Kool-Aid overdose:

Most voters have completely moved on from Trump, but Democrats remain as obsessed with him as they ever have been.

Youngkin may well win tonight, and that will indeed be a good thing if it happens, given, as the editorial says, that he embodies a recognizable conservatism rather than what has permeated the GOP at all levels over the last six years. But 78 percent of Republicans still want to see the VSG run in 2024, and even a victorious Youngkin who governs effectively will have to deal with that.

He'd have to scrupulously staff his entire administration with folks from the Kinzinger-Cheney-Meijer-Herrera-Beutler-Hogan-Sasse axis in order to keep it free from contamination. A tall order in these cacophonous times.