What Went Down During The 2021 Elections
How Much Can Virginia Tell Us About The 2022 Midterms?
No matter what happens in Virginia, the outcome will be oversold as evidence that the 2022 midterms will go a certain way. A Youngkin win will be described as a doomsday for Democrats, whereas some will be point to a McAuliffe win as a sign that Democrats will avoid crushing losses next year.
The truth is more complicated, of course, as one election can never tell us everything about future electoral conditions. But just how predictive is Virginia’s gubernatorial race of the next midterm election?
CNN analyst and former FiveThirtyEighter Harry Enten looked at this question back in 2017 and found that Virginia hasn’t been a terribly strong predictor of the next midterm since the early 1990s. Updating his analysis, I found this largely remains true. From 1993 to 2018, the average difference between the swing in Virginia’s gubernatorial election from the state’s partisan lean and the margin in the midterm national popular vote for the House of Representatives has been just shy of 7 percentage points.
Virginia’s gubernatorial race isn’t a great midterm predictor
Difference between the swing in Virginia’s gubernatorial race from FiveThirtyEight’s partisan lean and the national popular vote in the subsequent midterm election for the U.S. House of Representatives
| Cycle | VIRGINIA GOVERNOR SWING FROM PARTISAN LEAN | MIDTERM National House Vote Margin | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1993-1994 | R+7.7 | R+6.8 | 0.9 |
| 1997-1998 | R+3.3 | R+0.9 | 2.4 |
| 2001-2002 | D+15.0 | R+4.6 | 19.6 |
| 2005-2006 | D+15.2 | D+7.9 | 7.3 |
| 2009-2010 | R+10.3 | R+6.6 | 3.6 |
| 2013-2014 | D+7.2 | R+5.8 | 13.0 |
| 2017-2018 | D+8.9 | D+8.6 | 0.2 |
| Average | 6.7 |
However, that doesn’t mean Virginia gubernatorial contests haven’t told us anything. The correlation between the swing in Virginia’s governor race and the House vote margin during that timespan is .56, which suggests there’s a moderately positive relationship between them (although we’re operating off a small sample size).
Simply put, when the Virginia result has swung more Republican, the national House vote has tended to go for the GOP, too, and vice versa for Democrats.
More broadly, then, the Virginia election can’t predict the national House vote a year from now, but it can potentially signal the direction of that vote. Heading into tonight, the polls suggest Virginia has a very close race despite being 5 points more Democratic than the country as a whole, according to FiveThirtyEight’s partisan lean metric. And perhaps more importantly, the factors that have created this GOP-leaning environment, such as Biden’s poor approval rating, could push voters across the country in a similar direction next year.
And, Ryan, obviously that helps play into that “political outsider” everyman persona he’s tried to hone, similar to Trump’s branding among his supporters. Part of what they’ve always loved about Trump is that he is explicitly not a lifelong politician.
Amelia, I think a lot of that comes down to Biden being president. With a Democrat in the White House and all else being equal, the average Republican is more likely to show up than the average Democrat. This “differential turnout” helps explain why the out party tends to do better in non-presidential years, as does having an unpopular president, which may heighten the presidential penalty for the White House party. These factors help Youngkin unify and energize the base, just as Democrats were unified and motivated to turn out when Trump was in office.