#Glenn Youngkin just showed how Republicans can win

The Republican victory in Virginia — a state Democrat Joe Biden won last year by 10 points — is such a colossal political story it’s hard to take it all in. The key: Donald Trump was not on the ballot.

And this key fact works in two directions.

First, it screws up the Democratic playbook going forward.

How so? Well, losing Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe spent his entire campaign working to tie Glenn Youngkin to Trump.

This was an understandable impulse, since Trump’s dominating presence from 2016 onward did cause a surge in Democratic voting that won the House in 2018 and the presidency in 2020.

But if you look at the strategy with cold eyes, you have to say that, at best, it’s a bank shot — and you only take a bank shot in pool when you don’t have a better one.

As a matter of existential fact, Glenn Youngkin is not Donald Trump. Only Donald Trump is Donald Trump. You could run against Trump when he was the one running, or when your vote could be cast to stymie or thwart his presidential agenda.

Here, in the first major election of the post-Trump presidency, in a solidly blue state, Democrats were unable to run the anti-Trump playbook again to a satisfactory conclusion.

Glenn Youngkin kept his distance from Trump and ran on his own messages. He thus subtly reduced Trump’s shadow, his influence — and his effect on the race. As a result, with the exception of races in which a 2022 Republican candidate openly embraces or attempts to emulate Trump, that playbook will have to be shredded.

And the 2022 Republican candidates with a chance to flip House, Senate, and gubernatorial seats from blue to red will now have reason to follow the Youngkin example rather than the Trump example.

So that’s one major takeaway. The other  — and possibly even more telling —  comes when you attempt to answer this question: Why did McAuliffe adopt the bank-shot strategy? The answer is clear: because the Democratic policy and governing agendas in 2021 are proving toxic.

The Biden presidency is unpopular — the president has an average approval rating of 43 percent — because people don’t like the results of his governance.

Meanwhile, McAuliffe followed the national Democratic Party in its determination to side with teachers unions over parents, its progressive embrace of fashionable race-obsessed educational practices — and its uncritical adoption of the extreme restrictions designed and overseen by unelected public-health bureaucrats.

But he knew enough not to run on these matters. McAuliffe is an old-time political hack and he knows when the issues aren’t testing well in his direction. So he tried to gin up Democratic turnout through the Trump boogeyman approach and through startlingly condescending racial appeals to African-American voters.

And that’s where Youngkin’s effectiveness as a candidate came in. He made it clear he stood in opposition to the self-satisfied status quo of the Democratic Party. The airy dismissal of parental concerns both on the content of schooling and the handling of schoolchildren during COVID showed McAuliffe to be spectacularly out of touch.

And don’t think Biden’s ghastly handling of the Afghanistan pullout didn’t play a factor in a state that is home to 127,000 active-duty members of the military (and, in the case of many, their spouses).

What this means is that Democrats now face a crisis when it comes to what exactly they will run on in 2022 when it comes to a positive message — and how they will cope in a world in which the Trump bank shot is likely to fail, as bank shots usually do.

Someone go give Joe Biden an ice-cream cone. He probably feels pretty bad right now.

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