In a primary he won decisively. That was among other career politicians, with primary turnout not as great as if a progressive had been another favored Dem option. Local Dem inner party sorts usually turn out for primaries.
McAuliffe ran as a middle of the road schmuck, not as having any strong identity to share with workers and the poor. He was, with a few different wrinkles, Schumer.
As such, who'd be enthusiastic, to door knock or phone bank?
Now there is great navel gazing, saying progressives who advocate what poll after poll shows to be what people want, were the reason McAuliffe lost. That is a lie.
McAuliffe lost because more special election voters thought a Repubican better. Better than Repubican-lite, the Clinton flavor.
This was not a bellweather contest, and press folks saying otherwise are hyping a lie. Not that press folks doing so is novel. Just that this time it is happening.
In all the coverage, have you seen any strong statement of what issues McAuliffe was running on? Yeah. Me neither. His loss is a so-what thing, so why are no MSM outlets saying so? Jiving a dull story? So?
Republican mainstram outlet Townhall explains what the Republicans said and did and won on, in order to defeat McAuliffe. Nowhere in that explanation do inner party Republican spokespersons accuse McAuliffe of being too much a progressive populist. Instead:
McAuliffe Slammed For Record as a 'Career Politician'
|Posted: Jun 09, 2021 10:25 AM
Yes. Not AOC first time challenging the system; nor Cori Bush doing the same. Instead, big time same old was the mantra. In the story - from June, before voting:
Virginia voters favor “fresh leadership” in GOP nominee Glenn Youngkin over McAuliffe’s “career politician” record, the Republican Governors Association (RGA) argued after the former governor was declared the Democrat nominee.
“The contrast between career politician and establishment insider Terry McAuliffe and successful businessman and political outsider Glenn Youngkin is stark,” RGA Executive Director Dave Rexrode said in a release. “The stench of corruption follows McAuliffe wherever he goes, and voters across the Commonwealth are looking for fresh leadership after nearly a decade of failures from the McAuliffe-Northam regime. The RGA looks forward to exposing Terry McAuliffe’s litany of broken promises and misdeeds between now and November.”
The GOP gubernatorial arm is also painting McAuliffe as “corrupt,” “soft on crime,” and an “ultimate insider,” pointing to his previous tenure as governor.
Youngkin, a political outsider, also criticized McAuliffe’s record as a career politician.
Voters from across the political spectrum agree that we need a new kind of leader to bring a new day to Virginia. Get ready, because Terry McAuliffe will default to the same political games he’s played his entire life.
— Glenn Youngkin (@GlennYoungkin) June 9, 2021I’m confident that voters will not choose a recycled, 40-year political insider and career politician who pretends to be a businessman, who talks big but doesn’t deliver, and who failed Virginians the first time he was governor.
— Glenn Youngkin (@GlennYoungkin) June 9, 2021
McAuliffe lost because all the things Youngkin was saying are true. Not because Bernie has a conscience, but that McAuliffe was vulnerable over the inadequacies of the one he has, regardless of Bernie and progressive policies. Ms Clinton lost the same way. At least McAuliffe is not blaming James Comey. Or Bernie.
McAuliffe is right in there with the Podesta brothers. Lost and greed filled.
MoJo, a while ago has covered McAuliffe's past, chronologically, here and here.
Anybody saying McAuliffe lost by being too much a champion of Medical for All or taxing the wealthy or wanting a living-minimum-wage is blowing smoke. Had he been such a champion, he could have won. But he did not even claim such policies as his. He lost because he stood mainly for Terry McAuliffe's political past and future and the cash flow it offered, had he won. Donor beloved, and donor trusted while the same donors have no trouble living with the victorious Republican; they are pragmatic and adaptable while owning either outcome.
________UPDATE_______
This is why Terry McAuliffe lost - chapter and verse, years earlier than this November - being a career political hack can bite back:
Why Terry McAuliffe Endorsed Joe Biden
The former Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe says Joe Biden’s momentum since the South Carolina primary is like nothing he has ever seen.Source Photograph by Melina Mara / The Washington Post / Getty Joe Biden won the vast majority of states that voted on Super Tuesday, among them Texas, Minnesota, North Carolina, and Virginia, establishing himself as the front-runner for the Democratic nomination for President. In the days before the primaries, Biden had received a remarkable series of endorsements from current and former Democratic elected officials, including his former rivals Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, and Beto O’Rourke, as well as Virginia’s former governor, Terry McAuliffe, who has spent his life in Democratic politics, previously serving as the head of the Democratic National Committee and as a close adviser to Bill and Hillary Clinton.
There's more, an interview with McAuliffe, back then -
Isaac Chotiner: Governor, how are you? [...] You have been in politics for a long time. How do you understand the consolidation around Joe Biden in the last seventy-two hours?
Well, I think tonight is nothing short of shocking. I have never in my life seen anything like what we have seen with the momentum coming out of South Carolina. [...] and, once Joe showed that he would win a majority of the African-American community, and could win in rural and urban parts of South Carolina, people said, “That is who we need to rally behind.” Many people didn’t think Bernie could beat Trump, and they wanted to find the alternative, and they found Joe after South Carolina.
O.K., but why didn’t this consolidation happen earlier? You have been in the back rooms of Democratic politics a long time. And you yourself didn’t endorse until recently.
[...] And then, of course, Super Tuesday, with this giant constellation of states, with a tremendous amount of money, and that was the process that really forced people’s hands because you just plain run out of money.
My process was: I was going to run for President. I spent a lot of time with Joe Biden. I went over in early April and had a three-hour dinner with him. He showed me all of his data, and his path to victory, and I looked at that and they needed help in Virginia, and [...] my wife signed on with Joe immediately. I thought the best role I could play as a former chairman of the national Party, who had worked on many campaigns, was to be a senior statesman on television, [...]
Did you speak to President Obama or other people in the Party before you made your decision?
[...] I have had a forty-year relationship with Joe Biden. It wasn’t ever a question who I was going to go with. [...] I told him right after New Hampshire I would endorse him, and let’s figure out the correct timing for it.
[An aide cuts in.]
McAuliffe aide: Hey, Isaac, one quick point. One of the things the governor was adamant with me for the longest time—and, Governor, just correct me if I am wrong here—is that he wanted African-American voters to have their say, and, once they had their say, considering they have been the backbone of the Party, it was easier for him to say, “This is what I wanted to see, now I have seen it, and they have spoken so demonstrably in Joe Biden’s favor.”
McAuliffe: Well, the point I kept making on television, Isaac, was that I wanted to see who could build a coalition. [...] My whole point was that I want to know who can win the African-American community. Bernie Sanders did well in Iowa and New Hampshire. Can he expand his coalition, and can he expand his base and attract African-American voters, who are the absolute backbone of our party? And, in South Carolina, he couldn’t do that.
So, if Bernie had done well with the African-American vote, you would have endorsed him?
[Laughs.] If Joe had gotten blown out in South Carolina, there would have been no need to do it, because the campaign would have been over, as you know. He put his firewall there.
[...] Representative James Clyburn, whose endorsement made a huge impact in South Carolina—
Huge!
—said he was concerned about the organization of the Biden campaign. You said you had seen some of Biden’s data, but is this something you have any concern about, going forward?
Listen, Isaac, I have said on television that I don’t want to be out criticizing him, but, when the Vice-President came to Norfolk the other day, I rode with him in the car, and [...] he was open to all of this, bringing more people on. Our point is that we need to add on to it. And here is the thing, Isaac, this is why I am really fired up over tonight. He won all these states without any resources. He is now going to have plenty of resources. We now go to Arizona, Florida, Illinois, and Ohio, on March 17th. He was averaging five million dollars a day over the past couple of days. He has the resources now. He is open to bringing in anyone, and we are all making recommendations to get the best organizers to put them on the ground. I am one of the chairs of Organizing Together, where we are really building organizations for the six key swing states. This is something I do all the time. So I think he is in very good shape now.
There has been concern that Hillary Clinton lost because Trump was able to paint her as a figure of the establishment who had been in Washington too long. Is that something you are concerned about here, and how does Joe Biden fight that?
[...] Now, listen, we gotta have a message that appeals to everyone. We are probably going to go through a pretty tough cycle for the next couple weeks, to be honest with you, between Bernie and Joe, [...] and Biden’s message has to be a compelling message. Build unity, but also bring those young voters in. I think it is absolutely critical. In 2016, Isaac, we had ninety-two million people who did not vote, and in those three states that we lost by seventy-seven thousand, three hundred and sixty thousand people voted for a third-party candidate. We are not going to have that this time. [...] Biden is putting out a compelling message about bringing us together, bringing the world back together, empathy, patriotism. And we are going to win this thing. But it is going to be a grind.
What’s your relationship with Bernie?
I don’t really have a relationship. I was a governor, and I don’t ever spend time with senators or House members.
Really? You don’t spend time with senators or House members?
[...] Chuck Schumer is a friend. You know, I see a lot of them. But Bernie is not someone I have socialized with. But if he is the nominee, Isaac, I am all in.
Playing ball with Clyburn is what it is. If people really thought about whose money is behind Clyburn, and how he serves that money, he might have a lesser voice than now. But McAuliffe, Clyburn, Biden, Manchin - their money bosses are the same people, and if Virginia voters have had enough, they had little choice, but they exercised it. Biden was not Trump, which was enough, but his lack of coattails proved his lack of any real strong popularity with regular working people, who Biden historically screwed the way the bankers told him they wanted it (e.g., barring student loans from bankruptcy rights business debtors such as Enron fully enjoy).
-------------------
And "Chuck Schumer is a friend." Of McAuliffe, and with that friendship - he lost.
An entrenched career politician liking Biden and Schumer. Great resume? Or something else?
Who will primary Schumer next chance to do so? Good question. The bet here is it will not be AOC. We'll see. She seems to be growing into liking the House. It's fit.
Identity politics is divide and conquer, and unfortunately it is currently at play, both parties, and that is very bad for the nation.
_________FURTHER UPDATE________
Expanding on that last sentence. At the heart of things identity politics is racism.
With McAuliffe's and the aide's comments quoted above, black voters [a/k/a African-Americans, per the McAuliffe terminology] are singled out as a block with special mojo, according to McAuliffe and his aide; and according to Biden agreeing to name a female woman of color as VP. With all the fine choices, he instead picked Harris, and has appointed multiple "identity" people to his cabinet and staff.
It is racism, going unchallenged, while Trump's counter, appeal to white racism, gets doom, gloom and shame. Two sides of the same coin do not differ greatly except that Jim Crow was real and black people, as a group, have suffered from white dominance. The answer? Move the Democratic party back to a workers' party, emphasizing the need to protect the poor, independent of race, from the avarice of the monied politically dominant privileged few. But end identity politics based on any measure beyond economic exploitation. In effect, join into and on the other side of the class warfare the wealthy have over the history of the nation waged against the rest of the people of the nation. Fight back. And that means sidetracking Clyburn because he, Pelosi, and Hoyer are each an old tool of the wealthy. Replace the power Clyburn holds with power shared among progressive party people, independent of race but focused upon fair policy reform. Anything short of that will have racism remaining rampant and strengthening, as Trump and his Party remain who they are, while digging in their heels for the fight.
When both parties bow to Mammon, as Clyburn seems inclined to do, the situation is what it is today, and McAluiffes in the party do the hustle, without any real bustle behind their emptiness and tactics - tactics with no strategy differing from the other Party. In contests between real Republicans and Republican-lite, the real ones will win and they are meaner than the owned Dem poseurs that follow Clinton footsteps.
Some may be upset that McAuliffe lost. Count me out of that grouping. The Democratic Party needs cleansing. Divide and conquer needs to be opposed.
"Stronger Together" the song was not something that helped Ms. Clinton. Notice how the identity politics terminology (and its singer) were absent from the Clyburn-Biden-Bloomberg followup to the Clinton debacle. They lied about "Build Back Better" as within their intent, and Manchin was then later used as the puppet with the knife. Biden never wanted to empower the weak. He knew his place. He knows his actual base. He serves concentrated capital. Bankers and other manipulators.