What Went Down During The 2021 Elections

I think a lot of Youngkin’s enduring popularity has to do him being a clean slate at the start of the election, and his early success at defining himself. He had never run for office before and wasn’t a public figure. Then he had a month-long head start between the GOP nominating convention and the Democratic primary, and there was another month after that when McAuliffe went dark on TV. So Youngkin was able to spend over $7 million on TV, according to analytics firm Kantar, before McAuliffe started running general election ads. It looks like that early branding (very little of which mentioned he was a Republican) paid off.

I should also add that the down-ballot races in Virginia will give us some benchmark against which to judge how much the result in the governor’s race has to do with feelings about specific candidates vs. macro trends.

Again worth repeating that these are preliminary, but some of the reasons McAuliffe might not be so popular is: 1) Democrats are in power and Biden isn’t popular, giving all Democrats an unappealing air; 2) McAuliffe already served as governor and feels unappealing in comparison to a newcomer with no political track record (there is a rich history of the latter being more appealing than the former); and 3) McAuliffe doesn’t poll particularly well on the issues most important to voters. But there’s always a matryoshka doll of reasons people feel the way they do about parties and politicians. The biggest doll is probably … thermostatic public opinion against the party in power.