What Went Down During The 2021 Elections

Youngkin is currently ahead by 2.7 points (though this margin may decrease a bit with remaining absentee votes). The final polling average had Youngkin ahead by 1 point, so it seems like the polling average will be within 2 points, maybe even within 1.5 points, of the final result. The polls were pretty accurate in this race!

Nate, let me point you to “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” to answer that question. Remember when the Muggle prime minister’s political opponent can “barely conceal his own broad grin” as he declares that a “grim mood has gripped the country?” Right now, that’ “grim mood” is the omnipresence of the pandemic. And it’s just a political reality that whoever has power during a particularly difficult time is going to face political consequences. Of course, there are things Democrats are doing that aren’t helping, like feuding publicly. But it all starts with this “grim mood.”

Right, the 2013 Virginia gubernatorial election had a few wrinkles in it that tempered the national environment. First, a third-party candidate, Libertarian Robert Sarvis, received 7 percent of the vote. Then, Republicans got at least some of the blame for a government shutdown. I think the important point here is that there’s only so much any candidate can do to fight the national environment and unfavorable historical trends, but that doesn’t mean wild card factors —sometimes within a candidate’s control, sometimes outside of it — can’t influence the outcome.

This is slightly cranky. But I find the “bad national environment” explanation sort of incomplete, in that it doesn’t resolve the question of why the environment is bad for Democrats, even if we acknowledge that there are some thermostatic effects that often put a party in this situation at this point in their terms.

The president’s party hasn’t won a Virginia gubernatorial race in a president’s first term since Linwood Holton became the first Republican to ever win a Virginia election for governor in 1969 early on in Richard Nixon’s presidency (Holton died last week at the age of 98). McAuliffe was the first candidate from the president’s party to win a Virginia governor’s race in 40 years when he won in 2013, but that was in Obama’s second term (Democrat-turned-Republican Mills Godwin won in Nixon’s second term in 1973).

I don’t know if we can lay these difficulties for the president’s party all at the feet of low presidential approval, as there have been a lot of moving parts in that time period, such as Southern white voters realigning with the GOP and less nationalization of elections than we have today. But Biden’s approval rating nationally is at about 43 percent, and his approval among Virginia voters today was 45 percent, according to the exit polls. In an era of sharp polarization and straight-ticket voting, McAuliffe needed a fair number of Biden disapprovers to vote for him, and that doesn’t look to have quite happened enough for him to win.

Let’s not forget that in 2009, when Obama’s approval was +9, Democrats got absolutely demolished in the Virginia gubernatorial election. Bob McDonnell wiped the floor with Creigh Deeds, 58.6 percent to 41.3 percent, just a year after Obama carried the state by 6.3 percentage points. That’s a swing of about 24 points, twice as big as what we’re seeing tonight, which will probably be around 12 points. Virginia is bluer now than it was then, but Biden is far more unpopular than Obama was in 2009.

Expounding on that a little, I think it’s pretty clear that we’re not in a D+2.6 environment — which maybe raises questions about how accurate national polls are. As you’ve observed, Ryan, some of these state-level polls in Virginia and New Jersey imply that Biden is a lot more unpopular than the national polls say. Maybe this is an argument for trusting the state polls over the national ones.

Yeah, Ryan, I’ve been surprised that the generic-ballot polling hasn’t moved. On the eve of the midterms, it’s actually a more reliable indicator than presidential approval polls.

Tonight is a good data point in favor of presidential approval ratings being the more important indicator at this point than the generic ballot. As Nathaniel noted, Biden’s approval rating is 8 points underwater, but the generic ballot polling average still has Democrats up by 2.6 points. As we’ve noted before, generic ballot polls often move against the party in power as the cycle progresses.

Based on analysis of the vote, ABC News projects that the Republican Youngkin will win the Virginia governor’s race.

That’s interesting, Nathaniel, as previously Biden’s rating had been the worst except for Trump and Ford, right?

We’ve talked a lot tonight about the role Biden’s approval rating has played in both Virginia and New Jersey. But other Democratic presidents, like Obama, have been in pretty unpopular positions come these two governor’s races, so what’s going on with Biden’s approval rating? How much does it matter that it’s this low in first term? (Remember, McAuliffe won in Virginia during Obama’s second term.)

So going back to what we debated this afternoon, it really shouldn’t be a surprise that Republicans had a good night. It’s a bad national environment for Democrats right now.

It’s worth noting re: Biden’s approval rating that the only president with a worse net approval rating (approval minus disapproval) than Biden (-8.0 points) at this point in his first term was Trump (-18.8 points).

Ciattarelli’s margin in New Jersey has narrowed to about half a percentage point. Per MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki, this was because of votes counted in Democratic Camden County, right outside of Philadelphia. We still have a lot of absentee ballots yet to be reported, which should continue to help Murphy gain ground.

Galen mentioned earlier that three ballot measures in New York (on redistricting and voting expansions) are failing. While they might very well lose, it’s worth remembering that New York doesn’t even start counting absentee ballots (which skew toward Democrats) for days after Election Day, so I certainly wouldn’t write those ballot measures’ obituaries yet.

It looks like earlier tonight, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul spoke at New York City Mayor-elect Eric Adams’ victory party. It’s worth watching that relationship as Hochul faces what’s recently become a crowded and competitive primary, particularly against state Attorney General Letitia James. As an incumbent, Hochul should enjoy some institutional support — including an endorsement from EMILY’s List — but as a newly appointed governor, she’s in a much different position than she was in her lieutenant governor race. Now in the spotlight, Hochul can use all the local and national support she can get.

Plus, if BBB had passed, isn’t it entirely likely that Republicans would’ve used the cost of the bill as leverage against Democrats? I realize this is hypothetical, but given that the economy (and I assume inflation) was already a top issue for voters, I feel like passing a large spending package right before these elections would’ve given the GOP even more ammo.

I wonder what’s hurting Democrats more: not having passed legislation, or their intraparty bickering dominating the political news? Even if voters won’t feel the benefits of passing the infrastructure bill immediately, they’ll at least get a news cycle that isn’t solely about dysfunction within the party.

That’s a really interesting question, Alex. I have to agree that it seems hard to fathom that Democrats passing their infrastructure bill and spending plan would have made a big difference in tonight’s races, but maybe it would have helped Biden’s standing?

That’s a little speculative on my part, because it’s hard to understand what causes a president’s approval rating to tick up outside of big events — usually ones involving issues of national security — that produce a kind of “rally-around-the-flag-effect,” but I do wonder if that would have maybe helped at the margins?

I agree entirely, Alex. I think for any effect to come out of the legislation on Capitol Hill, it would’ve needed to be passed at least two to three weeks ago, which would have given that accomplishment time to get tons of potentially positive media coverage. Maybe Biden’s approval rating ticks up a point or two as his administration looks more accomplished and competent. But all of that needed to happen with some lead time before the election to matter, so any talk of it mattering here in the final few days is misguided.

I figured Democrats would turn to this eventually, but I don’t really buy the argument that passing the bipartisan infrastructure bill or Biden’s Build Back Better reconciliation package would’ve significantly changed tonight’s results?

I mainly say that, though, because nearly half of Americans (45 percent) said in a recent Ipsos poll that they’re not closely following ongoing negotiations around the larger spending package. Plus, there’s still a fairly large chunk of Americans who believe the plan will hurt the economy (34 percent) or people like them (32 percent).

We’ve written about this dynamic before, but it’s also possible that voters would’ve been turned off by the long fight over passing both bills. Research has found that voters often punish — rather than reward — parties that move to achieve their policy goals, too.

New Jersey is close, to be sure. However, ABC News projects there’ll be around 980,000 total absentee votes, and so far only about 390,000 have been counted. That shortfall makes up around three-fourths of the roughly 800,000 votes that are outstanding, based on the expected vote estimate. If those absentees break about two-to-one for Murphy like the absentees counted so far, that’s going to probably put Murphy in a good position to lead.

Youngkin’s strong performance highlights the importance of nominating a candidate who can leverage the national environment — in other words, someone who’s not a “spoiler” candidate. That’s the first challenge Republicans will have to tackle in the midterms, since primaries tend to reward ideological purity rather than electability. Republicans might be in luck in New Hampshire if Gov. Chris Sununu enters the Senate race. He’s not be the Trumpiest potential candidate, but he’ll still have the clear advantage as an incumbent with institutional support who, despite having kept some distance from Trump during his tenure, has done enough to earn his support. It’s going to be tricker for Republicans in open seats in Pennsylvania and North Carolina, where Trump has already bestowed his endorsement on his favored candidates but the rest of the GOP field continues to fight for his base.

Incumbent Byron Brown has claimed victory over democratic socialist India Walton in the race for Buffalo mayor. Write-ins (most of which are probably for Brown) currently account for 59 percent of the vote (vs. 41 percent for Walton), but no absentee votes have been counted yet, so I don’t think this one is sewn up yet.

Our colleagues at ABC News still haven’t made a projection in Virginia, and here’s why. There’s no doubt that McAuliffe is trailing; in fact, he needs to win around 70 percent of the estimated 220,000 ballots left to count. That’s a very tall order — but it’s not impossible. Furthermore, ABC News won’t make a projection if the race tightens to within a percentage point.

Here’s another refreshed map version of Geoffrey’s and my benchmark table from earlier, showing where Youngkin has overperformed expectations based on our 2020 benchmarks. Ninety-five percent of the expected vote is in and Youngkin’s overperformance is holding, especially in the localities with the biggest shares of the 2020 statewide vote. Like Geoffrey explained, McAuliffe has a pretty rocky path to victory in Virginia, even as the margin somewhat narrows as we inch closer to counting all votes.

New Jersey has been a challenging race to unpack. It’s unclear how many counties are reporting the early vote, and results are a bit all over the map with Ciattarelli overperforming in some areas but still underperforming in others, but per ABC News’s analysis, we know that with 72 percent of the expected vote in statewide, Ciattarelli’s lead has narrowed to 50.4 percent to Murphy’s 48.8 percent.

Murphy seems to have benefited from a vote dump from Essex County (home to Newark), which is now reporting 72 percent of its vote. Murphy leads there, 72 percent to 26 percent.

Likewise, Bergen County is reporting 71 percent of their vote but ABC News reports no mail ballots are included, which is at least one reason why Ciattarelli is maintaining his lead there, 52.2 percent to Murphy’s 47.3 percent.

As unsatisfying as it is, we’ll just have to wait for more results to trickle in in New Jersey.

It is still to early to call, but with about 45 percent of the vote tallied, it looks like New York may reject all three of its elections-related ballot measures. That would mean no same-day voter registration and no no-excuse absentee voting in New York. It would also prevent the state legislature from lowering the threshold required to ignore a redistricting commission and draw its own political maps.

My sense of New Jersey right now is Murphy is favored, but it’s certainly not a done deal. I’ve been told that there are a lot of absentee votes left to count in Bergen County, explaining why Ciattarelli leads there at the moment. Democratic Passaic County still has quite a bit of vote left as well. On the Republican side, they may gain some ground in Sussex County.

Atlanta has a new World Series trophy, and it’ll soon have a new mayor — but it looks like we’ll need to wait a few weeks to learn who. The AP has projected that City Council President Felicia Moore will advance to a Nov. 30 runoff, but her opponent is still TBD. Former Mayor Kasim Reed (23.2 percent) and City Councilman Andre Dickens (22.8 percent) are locked in a close race for second place.

Lots of “firsts” coming across my feed as well, Alex. Both Boston and Cincinnati elected their first Asian American mayor and we’ll have to stay tuned for Seattle. Seeing Asian American candidates for mayor in these major cities outside of states with historically large AAPI populations could signal the emergence of a more unified AAPI voting bloc. Polling suggests that more AAPI adults have identified with the AAPI community than before the pandemic.

At the start of the night, we set out benchmark vote margins for each Virginia locality to show whether Youngkin or McAuliffe was doing better or worse than they needed to perform to win. And with 95 percent of the expected vote in, Youngkin has outperformed the benchmarks in most of the biggest cities and counties in the state.

He’s doing about 3 points better in Fairfax County, which usually casts about 1 in 7 of the state’s votes, and about 4 to 5 points better in Virginia Beach city and Loudoun County. While the race remains uncalled, these trends mean McAuliffe is going to have to win a very large share of the outstanding vote to win, so it will be a difficult path for him to win.

By the way, the Atlanta Braves just won the World Series, which as a fan of the team since I was very small (thanks, TBS) is very exciting.

Ciattarelli’s lead in New Jersey has been cut from 3 points to less than 1 point now that votes from heavily Democratic Essex County have been counted. It still seems like there are a lot of absentee votes left to count in some heavily Democratic counties, which should help Murphy.

Maybe it’s just my Twitter feed, but I’m seeing a lot of “firsts” tonight. To name a few examples:

• Pittsburgh just elected its first Black mayor.
• Virginia (regardless of who wins) is set to elect its first woman of color as lieutenant governor.
• Boston, for the first time, just elected a woman and Asian American as mayor.
• Alvin Bragg was elected Manhattan DA tonight, becoming the first Black person to lead the office.

ABC News now has the expected vote total for Virginia at 3.3 million votes. With 3.1 million votes in, Youngkin leads by just shy of 3 percentage points. If there are about 200,000 votes outstanding in Virginia, McAuliffe would need to win nearly 3 in 4 of the remaining votes to take the slimmest of leads. So either McAuliffe needs more than 200,000 votes to be outstanding, or an unlikely percentage of those last votes to go his way. Hard to see that happening.

Former MLB manager Bobby Valentine is on the ballot today, running for mayor of his hometown of Stamford as an independent against Democrat Caroline Simmons. We don’t have hard numbers, but Simmons’s campaign says they won the in-person vote by 125 votes — and Valentine’s campaign says there are 6,000 absentee ballots left to count.

In New Jersey, the remaining vote should be Democratic-leaning relative to current results. Essex County (77 percent for Biden in 2020) still has a lot of vote left to count. It netted Murphy around 92,000 votes in 2017 and has only 25,000 votes so far. For reference, Ciattarelli has a 53,00-vote lead statewide right now.

Here’s a refreshed map version of Geoffrey’s and my benchmark table from earlier, showing where Youngkin has overperformed expectations based on our 2020 benchmarks. Youngkin’s strong performance continues as more votes come in, as he’s still beating his targets across almost the whole state. The vast majority of localities where he’s running behind his benchmarks are smaller, rural counties that tend to vote overwhelmingly for the GOP. Even if Youngkin manages to lose this race, he’ll do so running well ahead of Trump’s performance in Virginia in 2020.

I think there’s also evidence that, to the extent candidates do matter, they matter more in gubernatorial races. Fundamental partisanship is a better predictor of vote choice in federal elections — Senate, House, president. Those elections also have a lot to do with message and identity as opposed to visible functions of government. People are probably more familiar with the nuts and bolts of how their governor affects their lives than their congressperson. After all, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Maryland and Vermont all have governors from the opposite party that you’d expect, given how those states very reliably vote in national elections.

Yeah, Leah, and relatedly, incumbency advantage has shrunk to almost nothing. Take a look at the three statewide races in Virginia. The governor’s and lieutenant governor’s races were open, and the Democratic candidates are winning 48.6 percent and 48.8 percent, respectively. For attorney general, though, the Democratic candidate was incumbent Mark Herring — but he’s doing only a little bit better, 49.1 percent.

So, a lot of this comes back to the tried-and-true debate over whether candidates actually matter. On one hand, the answer is of course, unequivocally, yes — just ask former Alabama Sen. Doug Jones. But candidates matter less and less as voters become more polarized, sorting themselves around a central nationalized issue rather than on individual state and local matters. The letter by the candidate’s name on the ballot, “R” or “D,” now tends to matter more than the qualities of the individual candidates or their campaigns.

Using our benchmark vote margins in each Virginia locality, Youngkin is outperforming where he needs to win. Although some localities have only reported some of their vote, and some have not reported their Democratic-leaning absentee ballots, this looks like Youngkin’s race to lose at this point.

Virginia Beach, the largest independent city in Virginia, is a slightly Republican-leaning locality that usually casts about 5 percent of the statewide vote. When Democrats win it, it usually signals a Democratic statewide win, while if Republicans carry it by more than a couple points, that tends to be a good sign for the GOP. And with 95 percent of the expected vote now reporting, we can say Virginia Beach is definitely leaning red in this election: The city is going for Youngkin by about 9 points after backing Biden by 5 points in 2020. That puts Virginia Beach’s margin about 4 points to the right of the benchmark we set out, which has helped Youngkin have the edge in this race.

We’ve spent a lot of time talking about the “red wave” narrative emerging from the night’s Democrat-vs.-Republican races, but can we draw any conclusions from the night’s Democratic primaries about the progressive-vs.-moderate fight? Seems to me like not really. Progressives have gotten big wins in Boston and Cleveland, but it looks like they will fall short in Buffalo and Minneapolis.

Funnily enough, if Murphy and Youngkin both win you could make a halfway-decent galaxy brain argument that what the people really want is understated uber-wealthy investment bankers.

I’m not quite sure how right that is, Micah, because New Jersey is also extremely suburban. So it reinforces the “Democrats having trouble in the suburbs” conclusion.

That’s a good point, Micah. It’s possible, too, that we are overlooking other trends that exit polls picked up in Virginia’s race, which is that voters who said the economy mattered most also broke for Youngkin, 56 percent to 44 percent, which is actually … the exact same margin among those who said education was the most important issue. 🙃

It’s just another sad example of the D.C.-centric media overlooking events in the New York media market.