What Went Down During The 2021 Elections

Micah, I do buy that COVID-19 can bring Trump and his pandemic policies front-and-center. In California’s recall election, Gov. Gavin Newsom focused heavily on COVID-19 policies like vaccine and mask mandates, and it appeared to work well for him. At the end of his presidency, Trump’s national approval rating on handling the pandemic was at just 39 percent, with 57 percent disapproving, per the polling average. In Virginia, McAuliffe has tried to hammer home the point about Youngkin opposing vaccine mandates, but other policy issues like education have definitely taken up a lot of space.

One hypothesis I have is that Trump became less of a looming figure in Virginia (and so less of a factor in vote choice) as COVID-19 slid down on voters’ list of priorities, as Mackenzie wrote earlier.

My thinking is that Youngkin is aligned and associated with Trump on several issues/dimensions, but the one that packs the biggest this-will-have-an-immediate-effect-on-me-and-mine wallop is COVID-19, vaccine mandates, etc. So, as the delta variant was surging across the country, the prospect of Youngkin/Trump’s more hands-off approach to combatting the pandemic didn’t play well in bluish Virginia. As case numbers have improved, though, that issue is less front-and-center in voters’ minds. And the Youngkin-Trump connection/alignment is maybe less explicit on other issues.

Again, that’s just a half-baked theory, though.

That’s a really good point, Amelia. But if that Washington Post poll is to be believed, the answer seems to be … yes.

I mentioned this on the podcast earlier this week, but one quote that really stood out to me in the write up of the Washington Post poll was a quote from Jane Sellers, an independent voter who backed Biden in 2020 but planned to now support Youngkin. She said, on the question of election fraud and how Youngkin has flirted with it, “I don’t see him as being as crazy and out there. He is being supported by the Republican Party, so he’s got to spout some of that stuff that the Republican Party feeds him. And I understand that.”

It makes me wonder how many other voters are going through that same calculation in Virginia — Youngkin is Trumpy, but he’s not that Trumpy — and so maybe some people who were on the fence about Trump in 2020 won’t have the same reservations about someone like Youngkin.