What Went Down During The 2021 Elections

How should we interpret the vote as it gets counted and reported tonight? As Anna, Nathaniel and I wrote, last year Virginia was one of the states where the ballots that were counted early on looked good for Trump, but ballots counted later in the night revealed Biden’s lead.

This year, as FiveThirtyEight friend (and my brother!) Lenny Bronner from The Washington Post writes, we should expect to see a slightly different pattern: The first ballots counted are likely to be early in-person votes, which will likely favor McAuliffe. They’ll be followed by Election Day vote, which will start out looking redder (since smaller, rural places are likely to finish counting faster) before the bigger, Democratic-leaning counties report. So: expect a blue-red-blue pattern, rather than the red-blue from last November.

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.