US First Lady Jill Biden hits campaign trail in Virginia

WASHINGTON: US First Lady Jill Biden is set to campaign on Friday in Virginia, the battleground in a nailbiting governor’s race seen as a bellwether for next year’s crucial midterm elections.

She will head to Richmond, the state’s capital city, to stump for Democratic former governor Terry McAuliffe, who faces a tight contest with Republican nominee Glenn Youngkin on November 2 to replace the outgoing Ralph Northam.

The majority party usually incurs losses during a president’s first term, but defeat for McAuliffe would send shockwaves through the Democrats.

Desperate to hang on to the state, the party is sending a number of big hitters, with former president Barack Obama set to follow as part of an effort to boost turnout among all-important Black voters.

President Joe Biden, who carried Virginia by 10 points in 2020 but has seen his poll ratings slide since, is also expected.

"Last year, the people voted and democracy prevailed. We have to do it again and elect @TerryMcAuliffe as governor," he tweeted earlier this week.

Traditionally a tight battleground, Virginia has swung left over the last 15 years -- especially among the kind of suburban women likely to warm to the first lady, who still teaches in the state.

But the gubernatorial race has been tightening for weeks, with the five polls in October showing a dead heat or McAuliffe leading by just five points or less.

The White House, however, has been playing down Virginia’s significance as a harbinger for the 2022 midterm elections, which could see Democrats losing both chambers of Congress.

"I will leave it to other outside analysis to convey that off-year elections are often not a bellwether," White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, who lives in Virginia, told reporters on Thursday.

Youngkin has been walking a tightrope, as the vast majority of Republicans support Donald Trump’s fraudulent campaign to relitigate the 2020 presidential election, which he falsely says was stolen from him.

Desperate to stir the Republican base by aligning with Trumpism, Youngkin has refused to say whether he would have been among the lawmakers who certified the election after the January 6 assault on the Capitol.

But he has disavowed a flag carried during the insurrection to which Republican supporters pledged allegiance at a recent Virginia campaign event.

The Democratic National Committee has tried to make the race a referendum on the previous president, arguing that Youngkin’s top priority is "to bring Donald Trump’s dangerous, divisive agenda to Virginia."

"He’s not just flirting with extremist conspiracies anymore. Instead, he is embracing Donald Trump and the violent attack on our government as his closing message," DNC chairman Jaime Harrison said Thursday.