Back to Trump, in this case, his effect:

Trumpism without Trump: how Republican dog-whistles exploited Democratic divisions

Glenn Youngkin won the Virginia governor’s race by playing dirty over CRT – and the Democrats had no answer [my note: CRT being the non-existent "Critical Race Theory" people are pretending is taught in any K-12 school]

No film director could have choreographed it better. At the very moment Joe Biden emerged from his helicopter into a cold, dark night on the White House south lawn, a new adversary was delivering his victory speech before a hot-blooded crowd in northern Virginia. . . .

The Republican party was back in business, ready to take on a weakened president whose party is racked by infighting. Youngkin showed the way by deploying a formidable new weapon to which Democrats had no answer: a racist culture war fought over children.

The businessman turned politician promised to ban critical race theory (CRT) from Virginia’s schools on his first day in office. It mattered little that CRT, an academic discipline that examines the ways in which racism operates in US laws and society, is not taught in Virginia’s schools.

Moral panic over CRT has been fuelled for more than a year by Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News and other rightwing media, an apparent backlash to racial justice protests that followed the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis last year. In such hands, CRT became a catch-all for any teaching about race and American history.

“It is a very convenient soundbite for encapsulating everything about the reckoning after George Floyd’s death and the Black Lives Matter movement,” said Tanya Hernández, a law professor at Fordham University in New York.

“It is a way censor to gag and suppress any kind of reconsideration of our status quo. . . .

Tara Setmayer, a senior adviser to the Lincoln Project, a group opposed to Donald Trump and Trumpism, said: “Republicans are the masters at finding an issue playing on the racial resentment and grievance within the Republican party base and creating this perception that somehow this is a threat to children, to white America, and some type of invasion of the education system.

“Critical race theory doesn’t even exist here and most people don’t know what it is. But it is a masterclass in how perception is reality and, when propaganda isn’t pushed back on, it can metastasise in ways that become problematic in campaigns. That’s exactly what happened in Virginia.”