Somehow and incredibly, there’s still a tiny segment of the population willing to go on the air with Rachel Maddow and take her seriously.

Political analyst and author Larry Sabato appeared on MSNBC Live on Tuesday to portend that things were looking down for the Democratic Party in the gubernatorial race in Virginia.

The UVA professor did his best to find the chase scene and cut to it:

“The story is — I’m not going to call it a blowout because we don’t have the final numbers. But I will tell you somebody high up in McAuliffe’s camp, who was there with McAuliffe put it this way to me about an hour ago. ‘It’s a bloodbath,’” said Sabato, relating the words of the McAuliffe operative.

“So far, everything we’ve seen pretty much falls along that line,” Sabato said. “And while we don’t have complete figures, anything close to complete figures for the House of Delegates, you can guess based on what I’ve just said.”

Maddow, seemingly resolved to the fact that Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin was in the process of handing Terry McAuliffe his well-deserved hat, turned to the legislative aspects of governing the state of Virginia.

She noted that it has been 12 years since a Republican won a statewide race in Virginia, all the while trying not to appear too forlorn as she admitted what a feat it was for Republicans to have flipped the script in a state that is normally a Democratic Party stronghold.

When asked about what changed the political landscape in the state, Sabato remarked that former President Trump not being on the ballot leveled the playing field, as so many people have voted Democrat purely in opposition to Trump, rather than for a candidate they truly supported.

He did, however, qualify that by saying that Democrats started winning in 2008 with former President Obama’s first term. Of the previous surge in votes for Democrats in the state, Trump , he said, merely “supercharged it.”

Sabato said also that President Biden’s approval numbers, being in the low 40’s in the state and elsewhere- were “not good news” for any Democratic nominee in Virginia, though in apparent desperation, Terry McAuliffe relied upon Biden to stump for him just a week before the election.

The analyst also pointed to infighting in the Democratic Party, namely the stalled spending bills that, if passed, could have given McAuliffe something of which to champion in the Biden agenda.

“He had nothing,” said Sabato of McAuliffe.

Naturally, Sabato doubled down on the “phony issue” of Critical Race Theory, saying that “at least in Virginia” it isn’t taught in schools – a non-statement that will probably be one of many forthcoming as Democrats try to make sense of their ongoing losses in the battle of ideas.

Unlike most states, the 100 members of the Virginia House of Delegates – being one of the two parts of the Virginia General Assembly, the other the Senate – are elected for two-year terms during odd-numbered years.

Likely to Maddow’s dismay, Sabato said that a Youngkin win could also pull in the Republican nominee for lieutenant governor as well.

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Frank Webster

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Frank (Chip) Webster is a musician and composer, former teacher of percussion and U.S. Army Infantry veteran. He holds a degree in English from Arizona State University.

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