Democrats are crowing over last night's results of the special elections in Kentucky and Virginia as some kind of wave election, but it's only partially true.

Kentucky was an anomaly, given that the Republicans ran a weak candidate.  Virginia, on the other hand, probably is reason for Republicans to change course — not by changing their ideas, but by getting busy with the true Republican agenda of cutting the size of the government.

Here's what Virginia looks like right now, according to the gleeful New York Times:

Democrats won complete control of the Virginia government for the first time in a generation on Tuesday and claimed a narrow victory in the Kentucky governor's race, as Republicans struggled in suburbs where President Trump is increasingly unpopular.

In capturing both chambers of the legislature in Virginia, Democrats have cleared the way for Gov. Ralph S. Northam, who was nearly driven from office earlier this year, to press for measures tightening access to guns and raising the minimum wage that have been stymied by legislative Republicans.

Ah, those suburbs.  The places where bureaucrats with six-figure salaries from government jobs buy those pricey homes deeper and deeper into Virginia.  Expand the government, expand the real estate spread — which, as it happens, has moved into the Virginia and Maryland suburbs.  Former IRS Tea Party persecutor Lois Lerner retired a few years ago to this $2.3-million suburban beaut here.

Virginia can now look forward to a solid-blue state with a Democratic governor, the one who still hasn't told us if he was the man in the Klan robes or the man in blackface in his school picture, along with a two-house, one-party Democratic state Legislature.  And with that, it can look forward to a California model of governance — with soaring crime, soaring fecal matter on the streets, abundant needles, crooks out of jail, gun restrictions for the law-abiding, tax hikes, greenie boondoggles, corruption, soaring homelessness, drug addiction, and illegal immigration.  They might even get the blackouts going if they act fast enough — and sure enough, they claim they do want to act fast.

Lucky Virginia.

As any from California can tell you, it's very hard to get a blue state to switch course, no matter how bad things get.  Did having a blackface Democrat governor bother any of these blue-state voters?  Not in the least.  And with the bureaucratic class impervious to ideas, ignorant of economics, ignorant of investment, ignorant of risk, ignorant of adding value, and utterly ignorant of the private sector, it doesn't take long for this class to become convinced that money comes from government, since that's how they get it.

Bureaucrats, and the administrative state that they amount to, are made, not born, and Virginia now stands as the end product of the whole thing.  President Trump wasn't the author of this — it took President Obama to really get the ball rolling, which was right about when Virginia started turning blue — but government spending is up under President Trump, the result of assorted compromises with Democrats, whose true agenda is to hire more bureaucrats.  The New York Times reported just a few weeks ago that the budget deficit had swollen to a record $1 trillion, and that's in spite of President Trump's stellar economy.

So that's the real wake-up call to Republicans from this election: every time they say "yes" to Democrats and vote to expand the size of government, they get more bureaucrats.  Hire a lot of them; get a critical mass.  Get a critical mass; get a blue state.

That's the takeaway from Virginia.

Image credit: Ali Zifan, via Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0.