What Went Down During The 2021 Elections

Virginia has owned much of the limelight, but New Jersey has a governor’s race of its own on the ballot today. Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy appears to be in line to win a second term, although Republican Jack Ciattarelli might keep the race somewhat closer than many might have expected.

Final polls of the race mostly showed Murphy ahead, but there has been some disagreement on the extent of his lead: In polls that reported results for likely voters, Monmouth University and Stockton University have the incumbent up by margins in the high single digits (Monmouth’s range was 8 to 14 points), while Emerson College put him ahead ahead only by 4 points when including undecided voters who leaned toward a candidate. Other polls from Rutgers University and Fairleigh Dickinson University found Murphy up by 8 to 9 points among registered voters.

That Murphy has a lead over Ciattarelli isn’t exactly surprising, as New Jersey is a bluer state than Virginia — Biden carried the Garden State by 16 points in November — and Murphy is fairly popular, according to polling on his approval rating or favorability rating as governor. However, Biden’s poor approval rating has likely helped Ciattarelli make it a closer contest, as polling in the summer had Murphy up by double digits.

Perhaps the most dominant electoral trend of the Trump presidency was education polarization — voters with a bachelor’s degree or higher have become more Democratic, while those without a college degree have become more Republican.

And Virginia is a highly educated state — about 40 percent of Virginians 25 years or older have a bachelor’s degree or higher compared with 33 percent of the nation as a whole. So as highly educated voters have trended Democratic, so too has the commonwealth. Virginia voted for Obama by 4 points in 2012, Clinton by 5 points in 2016 and Biden by 10 points in 2020.

Virginia will, therefore, be a good first test of whether Democratic gains with highly educated voters will continue now that Trump is no longer president. Three counties in particular to watch are Fairfax, Prince William and Loudoun: They’re among the most-populous localities and have large shares of college-educated voters.

Democrats won Fairfax County by 22 points in the 2013 gubernatorial election but won it by 37 points in the 2017 gubernatorial election. In Prince William County, the Democratic margin increased from 8 points in 2013 to 23 points in 2017. And in Loudoun County, the Democratic margin increased from 4 points in 2013 to 20 points in 2017.

As we watch the returns tonight, these three counties (and others) may give us important clues about the degree to which education polarization is continuing after the Trump presidency.

Yup, agreed, Leah. And yeah, Galen, the “overdue” thought makes sense to me too.

Of course, another way to put all this is, as Leah said: The political winds are likely to blow against Democrats because they have the White House and Congress — the issues may just be secondary to that fact.