School Battles May Help Explain Why Democrats Declined in Some Suburbs

As the election results rolled in on the evening of Nov. 5, the state of Virginia offered an early, alarming portent for Democrats.

Vice President Kamala Harris won the affluent, diverse Northern Virginia suburbs outside Washington, as the Democratic nominee was expected to do. But she won there by notably smaller margins than President Biden had in 2020, suggesting a flaw in the assumption that highly educated suburban America would tilt ever more decisively in the party’s favor.

Harris supporters in Virginia, as in many places across the country, said they felt grief and some confusion after her defeat. Trump voters expressed a mix of giddiness and grievance. And across party lines, voters wondered whether, in an education-obsessed region, a series of combustible debates over schools had helped diminish Ms. Harris’s vote totals.

In Loudoun County, Austin Levine, 54, voted for Mr. Trump. Mr. Levine works in sales and generally leans Republican, he said, though he voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016.

This year, he explained, he felt that the stack of lawsuits against Mr. Trump was “just ridiculous.” As a Jewish person, he said, he was offended by critics of Mr. Trump who linked him to Naziism. “He’s not Hitler,” Mr. Levine said. “Don’t preach that he is, and don’t preach the world is ending.”

Beyond that, though, Mr. Levine said he remains disappointed by what he sees as a lack of accountability for Democratic-majority institutions, like the school system, that failed his family during the pandemic. He said his two sons learned “nothing” while Loudoun schools were largely shut down for more than year, and the academic effects were still being felt by his younger child, now a high school junior.