What Went Down During The 2021 Elections

With only a few straggler mail ballots left to count in the Democratic primary for Florida’s 20th District, the race between establishment-aligned Holness and progressive outsider Cherfilus-McCormick is too close to call:

Ryan mentioned earlier how high turnout will be in the Virginia governor’s race — likely more than 3 million votes when this is all said and done, which surpasses turnout in recent gubernatorial elections — and how a high turnout election hasn’t really worked in Democrats’ favor.

I wanted to build on that latter point by putting some numbers on it from on our third wave of exit polls. Voters in this election report having split evenly between Biden and Trump in 2020, 46-46 percent. That says a lot about who turned out to vote tonight, with many Biden supporters sitting this contest out, as the president won the state by a 10-point margin.

Nathaniel mentioned that Republicans may well be on their way to taking control of Virginia’s House of Delegates, but remember that the elections for that chamber were held under the same lines as before the 2020 census, as the delay in census data negated the possibility of drawing new ones in time for the 2021 election. Once the new lines are drawn by the state Supreme Court — the state’s bipartisan redistricting commission failed to come up with a plan — it’s possible there’ll be court-ordered elections in all 100 seats in 2022 at the time of the regular federal midterm election, followed by regular elections in 2023. There’s precedent for back-to-back-to-back election years in Virginia’s legislature due to court decisions, too, as it happened from 1981 to 1983.