What Went Down During The 2021 Elections

In case you needed further proof that targeting “wokeness” is still political catnip for the GOP, look no further than the Virginia governor’s race, where Youngkin is pledging to ban critical race theory on his first day of office if elected the commonwealth’s next governor.

Indeed, education battles — like the aforementioned culture war to debates over mask mandates in schools — have been the focus of each candidate’s final push to capture the governor’s office, with Youngkin hoping to tap into conservative voters’ fears around what their children are being taught. In recent weeks, Youngkin has run a number of advertisements hitting his opponent on education: one attacking a comment McAuliffe made in a debate when he said that parents should not decide what schools teach, and another featuring a woman who sought to have the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “Beloved” — which is about slavery in America — banned from Virginia’s school curriculum.

As governor, McAuliffe twice vetoed a bill that would have given parents the choice to opt their children out of sexually-explicit reading assignments. But McAuliffe has so far discounted much of the talk about critical race theory — which is not part of Virginia’s public school K-12 curriculum. During an interview with CNN, he accused Youngkin of just trying to “divide” voters.

Still, there’s evidence that education issues are especially animating Virginia voters. A recent poll from the Washington Post-Schar School found that education is a top issue for likely voters, with 24 percent saying this is the most important issue to them. And a Monmouth University survey found that 41 percent of likely voters ranked schools and education as one of the two most important issues in deciding their vote — second only to jobs and the economy (45 percent). Furthermore, according to a separate Suffolk University poll, a majority of likely voters (50 percent to 39 percent) said parents should have more of an influence on a school’s curriculum than school boards.

Since targeting critical race theory has energized Republicans nationally, it makes sense that this has been a focus of Youngkin’s campaign. He’s already received some outside support, too, so it’ll be interesting to see if Youngkin’s investment in the charged debates engulfing some of Virginia’s public schools pays off tonight.

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.