What Went Down During The 2021 Elections

That’s so interesting, Kaleigh. Do you have a sense for how Youngkin has managed to keep Trump supporters on his team without fully embracing Trump’s ideas?

For Trump voters, Youngkin has done a good job of not alienating them, even if he hasn’t fully embraced a lot of their ideas. Trump’s pro-Youngkin statements yesterday carried a lot of weight. One of them is currently pinned to the top of Patriots.win, a pro-Trump message board with the message “Go vote Youngkin.”

Simple math points to why Youngkin’s Trump and Not Trump balancing act might be enough to win. As The Washington Post’s David Byler pointed out earlier today, if you give Youngkin the best Republican margin in each city or county from either 2020, when the party was led by Trump, or in 2012, when it was led by Mitt Romney, Virginia works out to be about tied if each place casts the share of the statewide vote it cast in the 2020 presidential election.