What Went Down During The 2021 Elections

To Sarah’s point, I do think Virginia provides more evidence that maybe increased political engagement (turnout) is here to stay — at least for the short term. That’s relatively speaking, of course: As Sarah said, turnout in Virginia is down from 2020, which is how Youngkin was able to win in a blue-ish state. But that’s very normal for an off-year, non-presidential election. Turnout in Virginia is up relative to more comparable contests.

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.