John McAuliff, a 33-year-old small business owner and former civil servant, was one of the more unlikely Democrats to win election to Virginia’s legislature this month, after a campaign in which he could, at times, come off a bit like a Republican.
McAuliff was among the 13 Democrats elected to the legislature in Virginia’s elections earlier this month, as part of a blowout victory for the party that gives it firm control of the southern state’s government. Along with wins in New Jersey, California and elsewhere, the results put some wind back into Democrats’ sails nationwide, a year after their drubbing at the hands of Donald Trump and the Republicans.
The northern Virginia district of subdivisions, farmland and quaint little towns that he sought to represent had not elected a Democrat to the house of delegates in decades, so McAuliff would go door to door on an electric scooter, informing those who answered his knocks that he was running “to preserve their way of life”. He repudiated the term “woke” and decried the “chaos” coming out of Washington DC, an hour-plus drive away.
What he talked most about was a specific grievance in line with the focus on affordability many Democrats are taking these days, but with a unique twist: the deleterious effects of datacenters and their impact on electricity bills.
“Most of the year I spent knocking on the doors of folks we didn’t think were Democrats – either independents or Republicans, and once in a while, a Democrat. And so they would start to shut the door in my face,” McAuliff said.
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