The networks haven’t called it. But the numbers crunchers I watch have. What do we make of this result? My main reaction is that we should not be surprised that Youngkin won. By this I do not mean that this morning I would have told you this was going to be the result. In fact, I had an inkling in the last day or so that McAuliffe might pull it out. I mean on the larger canvass: this shouldn’t surprise us.

Why? Let me explain.

Nearly all of the Democratic members of the North Carolina state House staged a walk-out on Monday evening to protest the seating of a new Republican state lawmaker who has not only dabbled in COVID-19 conspiracy theories, but who was present at the Jan. 6 Trump rally that became the insurrection.

The new state House member Rep. Donnie Loftis (R) has drawn the ire of North Carolina Democrats since his appointment. Loftis is a former county commissioner in the state and resigned his position on a local hospital board last year after he was criticized for posting coronavirus conspiracy theories on Facebook. In some of the posts, he referred to stay-at-home orders, enacted in the deadliest days of the pandemic to slow the spread, as a form of tyranny, according to The Charlotte Observer.

But it was Loftis’ presence near the Capitol while the attack unfolded that drove Democrats to walk out during his swearing-in this week, the state Democratic Party said in a statement.

I just saw this comment from my friend Chris Hayes …

My unified theory of American social and political life is that we’ve lived through and are living through a once-in-a-century trauma/disruption and the results of that are going to revereberate throughout almost every facet of politics for a while.

I agree with this, with this additional and I believe critical fact: the pandemic hit during a period of intense social and political turbulence and instability in the United States. Not only Trump’s presidency, the escalation of destabilizing actions during his presidency but remember that the pandemic struck within days of the end of the President’s impeachment trial.