Politicians, Take Note: Virginians Still Want Liberty
The headlines coming out of Richmond could easily cause readers to confuse Virginia with New York or California. In the past few months alone, the Democrat-controlled General Assembly has repealed Virginia’s state voter ID law, Governor Ralph Northam has been caught parsing words over liberal activists’ calls to defund the police, and he’s provided cover for federal unemployment bonuses that are wreaking havoc on the Commonwealth’s economic recovery.
Big government, lax security, and more red tape — this is what you expect to find in places like New York City or Oakland, not the great Old Dominion.
New polling confirms that Virginians don’t want to live in a mirror image of these progressive havens. Rather, they want reforms that will restore our economy, secure our elections, and put Virginia back on the map as a bulwark of freedom.
A new survey from the Center for Excellence in Polling found that 55 percent of all likely voters agree that federal unemployment bonuses have made it more difficult for businesses to recover after the COVID-19 shutdowns.
Yet, Gov. Northam continued the job killing program despite the empirical evidence from the more than two dozen opt out states showing that employment increases when bonuses are ended. Individuals in Virginia were able to receive upwards of $3,600 per month in cash or cash-equivalent benefits simply by remaining unemployed. And small towns across the state suffered because of it.
Many businesses have struggled to reopen at full capacity — and it’s not hard to understand why. For businesses to compete with the federal unemployment bonus, Virginia employers must offer wages greater than $21 per hour.
Virginia’s unemployment rate is still hovering at 4.2 percent — an increase of 51 percent compared to July 2019. But instead of joining the surge of other states that opted to protect their Main Street businesses and encourage able-bodied individuals to break out of government dependency, Gov. Northam promised to keep the unemployment bonus intact until its federal expiration date of September 6.
Richmond may be moving in lockstep with President Biden and national Democrats to advance a progressive agenda, but Virginians are headed in the opposite direction.
Sixty-one percent of Virginia voters support reforms to make our state elections more transparent and secure. And a stunning 73 percent of Virginians support requiring voters to present a valid government-issued photo ID when casting a ballot and making those IDs freely available to those who need one. Even 59 percent of Democrats support this commonsense election integrity policy yet, somehow, Gov. Northam and Democrats in the Virginia House and Senate managed to repeal Virginia’s voter ID law, seemingly without the support of nearly three-quarters of the state.
Virginia politicians should also take note that 71 percent of all voters have concerns about the potential for students to fall behind because of lockdowns and the loss of in-person learning. And 74 percent of all voters, including 64 percent of Democrats and 72 percent of Independents, oppose efforts to defund the police. Leaders in the state should refuse to waste time on radical calls to close schools again or decrease public safety, because Virginians aren’t interested.
Virginians want to get back to the “Virginia Way” — the way of liberty. Leaders must first listen to their constituents, and then reach across party lines to find common ground on issues of critical importance to Virginians — and as new polling shows, there’s substantial common ground on reforms that will restore the Commonwealth as a leader in education, public safety, and economic freedom.
Katie Rodgers is the Vice President of Outreach and Government Affairs at the Foundation for Government Accountability.
