What Went Down During The 2021 Elections

You all make good points, but one thing that stood out to me from Geoffrey and Nathaniel’s election preview was that McAuliffe left office relatively popular. He’s a known commodity in Virginia and yet voters really seem to have soured on him in comparison to Youngkin, at least according to the exit polls so far.

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.