What Went Down On Election Night 2017

Control of Virginia’s House of Delegates is likely to be decided by absentee and provisional ballots. Right now, by my math, Democrats have won 47 districts to Republicans’ 46. There are seven races left uncalled: Democrats lead in four and Republicans in three. Amazingly, the margins in five of the seven districts are less than 150 votes. For example, in Newport News’s 94th District, Delegate David Yancey, a Republican, currently leads Shelly Simonds, a Democrat, 11,587 to 11,575, with all precincts reporting. But provisional votes won’t be processed for days. Altogether, that means it may take days instead of hours to find out which party will be in control come January.

There are still some precincts whose votes haven’t come in yet in the New York City mayoral election, but Democrats’ dreams that de Blasio would have a record performance in a New York City mayoral race seem to be falling short. So far, with 72 percent of precincts reporting, de Blasio has 64 percent of the vote. He’s falling short of his 2013 performance in every borough except Manhattan, where he is basically running even.

I noted some demographic trends from the Virginia exit polls earlier tonight, but I just wanted to point out something that’s going on with the women’s vote in the state, and more specifically the white women’s vote. Northam is outpacing Clinton with women in a way that’s pretty striking to me: He’s winning 60 percent of women overall, compared to Clinton’s 56 percent, according to the exit polls. He’s winning white women with 48 percent compared to Clinton’s 41 percent, white women without a college education 32 percent to Clinton’s 29 percent and white women with a college degree 57 percent to Clinton’s 50 percent. He isn’t, however, winning black women at the same rate that Clinton did. Hm!