What Went Down During The 2021 Elections

Micah, there’s a 2007 study from the “Journal of Politics” that analyzed weather patterns and turnout rates per county over 14 presidential elections and concluded that every inch of rain above the historical average for that date reduced turnout by around 1 percent. But there are good reasons to be skeptical such a result would still hold today, given the shifts in the political landscape and voter behavior over the last 14 years. The study’s authors actually excluded Oregon’s 2000 election results from their dataset because the state had implemented its first in the nation vote-by-mail scheme. Now that vote-by-mail is ubiquitous, the study’s results may be on even less firm footing.

I’m seeing lots of chatter (from people on the left, I think) that rain in Virginia today could depress turnout and hurt Youngkin — because Democrats have been more likely to vote early and Republicans more likely to vote on Election Day. Do we know anything about 🌧️ and elections?

Mayor Frank Jackson, the longest-serving mayor in Cleveland history, is retiring this year, setting up yet another progressive-versus-moderate mayoral race.

Jackson has endorsed City Council President Kevin Kelley, a 53-year-old white moderate, to be his successor, but nonprofit executive Justin Bibb — a 34-year-old Black progressive — is putting up a strong challenge. The most recent poll gave Bibb a 34 percent to 25 percent lead, but a whopping 40 percent of respondents were undecided, so this one could go either way.

But I also think it’s interesting that education has emerged as such an important issue in the race, in part because it’s really a local issue. It makes me think of some of the conversations I had with voters last fall, who said that the COVID-19 pandemic had made them think about how much power local politicians have over their lives. And many parents were already angry about school closures — so perhaps they were primed to get mobilized around another education issue.

While there’s a lot of focus on the binary of who wins or loses the election, margins should matter for interpreting how good the results are for Democrats. Say that McAuliffe wins by 3 points — that would still be a 7-point underperformance from Biden’s 10-point victory in Virginia last November. While we should be careful about drawing precise conclusions from a gubernatorial race with its own local dynamics, that kind of shift applied nationally would be more than enough for Republicans to win back the House. Expectations for Democrats have fallen over the last few months as polls have tightened, so they may go in with a mindset of “a win is a win.” But I’d argue that Democrats should still be concerned about the political environment even if McAuliffe wins narrowly.

You know it’s bad when even McAuliffe distanced himself from the president. Of course, he’s since changed tune and has campaigned with Biden, but last month McAuliffe essentially said that Democrats and Biden were a liability.

That’s a fair point, Amelia. But remember that McAuliffe won in 2013 when there was an unpopular Democratic president in the White House! And as you say, Virginia was even redder since then, so the closeness of this race, given how Virginia voted in 2020, has taken me a bit by surprise.

Hm, good question, Sarah. I’d say if McAuliffe wins, that will definitely temper some of the “red wave” talk. But I think it would take him winning by 5 points or more for the narrative to truly get reversed.

I mean, it doesn’t seem coincidental to me that the last time Virginians elected a Republican governor was in 2009, right after Obama was elected for the first time. Obviously, the state has changed a lot since then, and gotten bluer, so a Republican winning would be an even bigger deal in 2021. But to underscore what Micah was saying, it does feel like a big part of this is just a kind of natural process in politics — this is a year when it’s harder to energize Democrats and easier to energize Republicans.

The nationalization of these races — especially Virginia’s governor race — is a key aspect here as well, as Alex suggests. But I think, as Micah and Nathaniel are getting at, that’s also made it really hard to pinpoint one reason why this race has become so competitive in the last month.

Follow-up question for you all: What will it take for the Virginia governor race to not be interpreted as a rebuke of Biden and Democrats? Is it enough if McAuliffe just wins?

I mean, Kaleigh, I’m quibbling with the explanation for the shift toward the GOP, not the shift itself or its implications.

So if McAuliffe loses (or even wins by a small margin), I think that would be consistent with the electorate moving toward Republicans, and that would be a bad sign for Biden and Democrats nationally. That doesn’t mean 2022 is destined to be horrible for Democrats, but it’s not a good sign for them.

I guess my main point is just not to put too much stock in the elaborate theories people develop to explain the shift (which usually happen to support their policy preferences or ideological positioning).

Micah, what do you think is the more likely explanation if McAuliffe loses?

Yeah, I definitely agree with Alex that a Youngkin win would be interpreted as a direct rebuke of Biden and Democrats in Congress.

I agree with the first part of what Nathaniel said. The prospect that Youngkin might win truly speaks to how the national political environment has soured on Biden’s candidacy and Democrats writ large. But because McAuliffe has brought in people like Biden and former President Barack Obama to campaign on his behalf, I do believe that McAuliffe’s losing would be seen as a direct rebuke of Biden’s presidency (and maybe even national Democrats).

I’m honestly a little terrified, Sarah, about all the 🔥 takes that are likely to emerge from this election — almost no matter the result. I think we know a few things (to echo what Nathaniel said a bit). The beast that is American politics tends to behave like an ouroboros: One major party rises and defeats the other to gain power, then the defeated party makes a comeback. Rinse and repeat.

Democrats had a good 2018 and a good 2020, and there’s a Democrat in the White House, and so the natural gravity now shifts to advantage the GOP. Pundits and analysts are ascribing a lot of causes to that shift, including inflation, the legislative sausage-making in Congress, the focus on education by the Youngkin campaign, the delta variant, etc. But if not for those factors, the shift likely would have happened anyway (and we’d all be ascribing different causes to it). Also, voters themselves might be doing the same thing — shifting to Republicans and then finding reasons after the fact. (So the causal relationship is the opposite to how it’s typically defined.)

That’s the safest and most accurate interpretation, in my mind. Does that mean that these issues — Congress, inflation, education and so forth — are having no effect? No, I don’t think so. But the fundamental back-and-forth of American politics is likely the biggest factor.

I do think national factors are the biggest reason Virginia is competitive, yeah. But I’ll make a subtle distinction here, Sarah. I don’t think Virginia has tightened because of Biden’s sagging approval rating, but rather that both are two symptoms of the same cause: Americans souring on the Democratic Party. The real question is what’s causing that to happen. Is it the delta variant? A sluggish economy? The inevitable end of Biden’s honeymoon and thermostatic public opinion? Whatever the cause(s), I think they explain why Democrats in both D.C. and Virginia are not as popular as they used to be.

Well, it seems like Democrats don’t think it’s been a huge factor, which is something. Biden isn’t being shunned on the campaign trail; he’s still showing up to events with McAuliffe and Murphy. It’s possible they’re just miscalculating, of course. But maybe it’s also an acknowledgment of the fact that, as Nathaniel wrote a few weeks ago, there may not be an easy fix for Biden’s approval rating in this environment — and there are benefits to having him front and center, too.

Ryan’s post just detailed the role Biden’s approval rating has had in the governor’s races — especially Virginia’s.

I’m curious to hear the extent to which all of you think Biden’s approval rating is the main reason the race there has tightened. I for one have been surprised by how much education has emerged as a top issue in voters’ minds, which to me seems separate from Biden’s lackluster approval rating. How are you all thinking about the role Biden’s approval rating is playing in today’s races?

A major reason the Virginia governor’s race is competitive is because of Biden’s low approval rating. In early May, when Youngkin won the Republican nomination, Biden’s national approval rating was at 54.1 percent approve, 39.7 disapprove, according to FiveThirtyEight’s presidential approval tracker. And although FiveThirtyEight’s polling average of the Virginia governor’s race only goes back to August, McAuliffe initially had a wide lead over Youngkin, +6.8 points as of Aug. 1.

But by late October, the president’s approval rating had fallen to 43.0 percent approve, 51.2 percent disapprove. Similarly in Virginia, McAuliffe steadily lost his edge. In fact, FiveThirtyEight’s final polling average suggests Youngkin actually has a slim lead of +0.6 points.

There are, of course, a number of reasons why the race in Virginia could have tightened that have nothing to do with Biden. Voters don’t necessarily trust McAuliffe on education, which has emerged as an important issue in the race, and Youngkin has polled better with voters on issues like the economy and crime.

But Biden’s approval rating does seem to be dragging down McAuliffe, and unfortunately for McAuliffe, that rating seems to be lower in Virginia than the state’s 2020 vote margin might suggest. Biden won Virginia by 10 percentage points in 2020, compared to his national popular vote margin of 4 points. As such, we might expect that if Biden’s net approval rating is underwater 8 points nationally, it would be about 2 points underwater in Virginia.

However, polls of Virginia seem to have shown Biden’s approval rating much lower than that among registered voters. A Fox News poll found Biden’s approval rating 8 points underwater, 45 percent approval to 53 percent disapproval, among registered voters. A Monmouth University poll similarly had the president’s approval rating 9 points underwater, 43 percent to 52 percent. And a Washington Post–Schar School survey had Biden’s approval rating 10 points underwater, 43 percent to 53 percent. If the president’s approval rating in Virginia really is negative by almost double digits, that bodes well for Republicans, and might explain Youngkin’s surge.

It’s of course possible the polls are overestimating Youngkin. After all, they overestimated Republicans in the last governor’s race in 2017. But Democrat and now-Gov. Ralph Northam also likely benefited from Trump’s 38 percent approval rating as he ended up winning by 9 points, even though polls showed him and Republican Ed Gillespie within 3 points of each other going into the election. The question now is whether Biden’s tanking approval rating will be enough for Youngkin to eke out a victory.

One ballot measure I’m watching today is Proposal 1 in New York, which would reform the state’s complex redistricting process. New congressional and legislative maps in New York are initially drawn by a bipartisan commission, but the final authority lies with the legislature. And the catch is that, when the legislature is controlled by one party (as it is currently, by Democrats), a two-thirds vote is required to pass any maps.

If Proposal 1 passes, however, the legislature would need only a 60 percent majority vote to override the commission and pass a more partisan map. Democrats already have two-thirds majorities in both chambers of the New York legislature, meaning they are already capable of passing whatever maps they want — so Proposal 1 is mostly about making it easier for the legislature to gerrymander in the future. That said, it could also allow them to pass gerrymandered maps this year that they otherwise couldn’t have, over the objections of a handful of their own members.

Proposal 1 also includes a number of other tweaks to the redistricting process, such as enshrining a ban on prison gerrymandering in the state constitution, requiring the state to use total population rather than the citizen population in redistricting and moving up deadlines so that new districts are finalized before campaign season begins. However, these changes may be the spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down: For instance, prison gerrymandering is already illegal in New York by statute, and after Trump’s effort to collect citizenship data in the census failed, there is no imminent danger of citizen populations getting used in redistricting.

The practice of lumping controversial provisions with more popular ones in order to boost a ballot measure’s chances of passing is a phenomenon known as logrolling.

Voters in Ohio’s 15th Congressional District are heading to the polls today to elect a replacement for former Rep. Steve Stivers, a Republican who resigned earlier this year to run the Ohio Chamber of Commerce.

The two candidates are Republican Mike Carey, a coal industry lobbyist who won a crowded GOP primary after he was endorsed by Trump, and Democratic state Rep. Allison Russo, a public health consultant. There’s only been one public poll of the race, from Emerson College and local NBC affiliate WCMH in mid-October, which showed Carey ahead by 11 percentage points, 50-39 percent. Given the district’s Republican lean, Carey is favored to win. Trump won here by 14 points in 2020 and 15 points in 2016, and Stivers won his last re-election by over 26 points. (Though Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown narrowly carried the district in his 2018 race.)

Russo is a serious underdog, but she’s run a credible campaign (even Stivers agrees). She raised over $823,000 through mid-October, enough to outspend Carey and his allies on TV over the last two months. And while the race has received little attention nationally, Republicans in D.C. are following it more closely. The National Republican Congressional Committee recently spent $170,000 on a TV ad attacking Russo, and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy campaigned with Carey late last month.

The race’s final margin will be another clue as to the national political environment one year before the midterms. As Nathaniel has written, special election margins historically have some predictive power. This year’s special elections, though, have painted a muddled picture, so the margin in Ohio’s 15th could offer some clarity, especially if it departs significantly from the district’s partisan lean. A massive Carey win could confirm Republican optimism and Democratic fears about Biden’s drag on Democrats up and down the ballot; a narrow Carey win or an unlikely Russo upset might cause some Democrats to rethink their increasingly gloomy outlook on 2022.

As making it easier to vote has become more and more of a priority within the Democratic Party, Republicans have accused some blue states — especially New York — of hypocrisy for their restrictive voting laws. Most notably, the New York Constitution forbids same-day voter registration and requires voters to provide an excuse if they want to vote absentee (although during the pandemic, mere risk of transmitting the coronavirus qualified as an excuse, which meant that, effectively, anyone could vote absentee).

New York’s new Democratic trifecta, though, has been working on liberalizing those laws in recent years, and New York voters could put a bow on those efforts today if they vote in favor of two ballot measures that would repeal those two parts of the state constitution. Proposal 3 would allow the state legislature to enact same-day voter registration (one of the most powerful election reforms for increasing turnout), and Proposal 4 would make New York the 35th state (plus Washington, D.C.) to allow anyone to vote by mail without an excuse.

If you genuinely believed an election was rigged, would you bother voting in it? Possibly not. Voter discouragement has always been a potential risk of Trump’s Big Lie. In fact, some Republicans blamed Trump’s beating of the election fraud drum for GOP losses in the Georgia Senate runoff elections earlier this year (yes, that was this year). “Telling everyone that the race was stolen when it wasn’t cost the Republicans two Senate seats,” Georgia conservative radio host Erick Erickson told NPR at the time.

Yet Trump shows no signs of dropping the Big Lie campaign, so how can he convince voters that the elections are rigged while insisting that they vote in them anyway? So far, his strategy has been to simply make both contradictory claims.

On Oct. 13, Trump released a statement saying “If we don’t solve the Presidential Election Fraud of 2020 (which we have thoroughly and conclusively documented), Republicans will not be voting in ’22 or ’24. It is the single most important thing for Republicans to do.” Two weeks later, he published another statement saying that the first statement “was in no way meant to imply that I would tell them not to vote, but rather that they may not have the incentive to vote,” and urging Republicans to “get out the Republican and SANE VOTE!”

And on the eve of today’s gubernatorial election in Virginia, Trump released two statements encouraging voters to cast their ballots, while simultaneously sowing distrust around the election saying he is “not a believer in the integrity of Virginia’s elections,” but that “we must win bigger than the margin of fraud by flooding the polls.”

In other words, Trump’s message is: The elections are fraudulent, but if enough patriots turn out to vote, the fraud won’t matter. Unless Republicans lose, naturally.

Both Virginia and New Jersey also have elections for their state legislatures today, but here, too, the drama mostly centers on Virginia, which will elect the 100 members of the House of Delegates, the state’s lower legislative chamber. (The 40-seat Virginia Senate isn’t up again until 2023.)

Heading into the election, Democrats hold a 55-to-45 edge in the House, but some Democratic-held seats that the party captured in 2017 and 2019 are competitive and could flip back to the GOP in a more Republican-leaning environment.

Additionally, because of the delayed release of census data due to COVID-19, Virginia is holding its state House elections under the district lines drawn after the 2010 census instead of under new boundaries that reflect population changes in the 2020 census. Republicans might reap the benefits of this, too, as the map was originally drawn to favor the GOP significantly. Moveover, the old lines don’t account for the disproportionate population growth the more Democratic-leaning areas have experienced over the past decade, especially in northern Virginia.

In New Jersey, the entire state legislature is up for election on Tuesday, but there’s not much uncertainty about control of either chamber. Democrats hold a 25-to-15 advantage in the state Senate and a 52-to-28 edge in the General Assembly, and it doesn’t appear that their majorities in either chamber are under threat.

Seattle is the biggest city with a competitive mayoral election today, and it’s an open seat thanks to the retirement of Mayor Jenny Durkan. City Council President Lorena González is the progressive left’s candidate (she has been endorsed by Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Pramila Jayapal), while former City Council President Bruce Harrell is seen as having a more business-friendly record (while still being plenty liberal — this is Seattle, after all).

One recent poll gave Harrell a 48 percent to 32 percent lead, so this one might end up being a win for the moderate wing of the Democratic Party.

This year’s gubernatorial contest in Virginia is already the most expensive election in commonwealth history. According to data collected by the Virginia Public Access Project, McAuliffe and Youngkin spent a combined $105 million through Oct. 21 (the end of the latest disclosure period).

That’s $39 million more than Ralph Northam and Ed Gillespie spent on their race in 2017, and $45 million more than in 2013 when McAuliffe and Ken Cuccinelli combined for nearly $60 million in expenditures.

And in those two previous races, the Republican candidate was significantly outgunned by their Democratic opponent. In 2013, McAuliffe outspent Cuccinelli nearly two-to-one overall, $38.5 million to $21.1 million, and in 2017, Northam enjoyed a narrower, $37 million-to-$29 million advantage over Gillespie.

But in 2021, Youngkin and McAuliffe are at relative parity. The candidates reported nearly identical receipts through Oct. 21: $57.7 million for Youngkin compared to $57.4 million for McAuliffe.

And while McAuliffe had outspent Youngkin slightly, $55.5 million to $49.8 million, through Oct. 21, Youngkin entered the final weeks of the race with significantly more money left to spend, $7.8 million to McAuliffe’s $1.9 million.

The reason why Youngkin was able to be the first Virginia Republican in over a decade to reach spending parity is his personal wealth; his net worth is an estimated $440 million. Of the $57.7 million in receipts reported by the Youngkin campaign, $20 million came out of his own pocket.

That’s a large chunk of change. But it’s notable that Youngkin only dipped into his personal resources to get himself to parity with McAuliffe, and not to extend his own spending advantage.

And in the grand scheme of self-funding political hopefuls, Youngkin isn’t anywhere near the top of the list. His $20 million contribution pales in comparison to the $36 million in personal money Bob Hugin spent in the 2018 New Jersey Senate race, or the nearly $99 million that Linda McMahon spent on two Senate races in Connecticut in 2010 and 2012. It lags the nearly $28 million Bruce Rauner spent in 2014 to win the Illinois governor’s mansion, or the $71.5 million he spent in his unsuccessful attempt to stay there in 2018. And it’s nowhere near the $144 million Meg Whitman threw down in her 2010 loss to Jerry Brown in California, or the $161.5 million that J.B. Pritzker spent to oust Rauner three years ago (still the non-presidential self-funding record).

If Youngkin comes up just short tonight, it’d be fair to ask if the result would have been different had he harnessed his vast financial resources not just to keep pace with McAuliffe, but to overwhelm him entirely.

Another election in a pandemic means COVID-19 is at play for some voters in the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial elections. It’s an issue that’s played along party lines and the impact the pandemic might have on these governor’s races won’t be an exception.

In fact, if the New Jersey race is an assessment of Murphy’s COVID-19 response, Murphy should be feeling pretty confident about his chances. An October Monmouth University poll found that 45 percent of registered voters in the state trusted Murphy more than his challenger Ciattarelli (26 percent) on handling the pandemic. Working in Murphy’s favor, too, is that Ciattarelli has positioned himself in opposition to some of Murphy’s COVID-19 policies like a school mask mandate, which New Jersey voters broadly support, according to an August Monmouth poll. The trick here, however, is that COVID-19 isn’t an outsized issue for New Jerseyans overall: Just 15 percent of voters in that October Monmouth poll said the pandemic was their top issue when deciding who to vote for, making it the fourth-most important issue to New Jersey voters.

It’s a similar story in Virginia, with just 14 percent of voters saying they thought COVID-19 was a top issue facing the Old Dominion state, according to an October Emerson College/Nexstar Media poll. COVID-19 was a more important issue for likely McAuliffe voters than for likely Youngkin voters. And as was the case in New Jersey, polling shows that almost a majority of voters, 49 percent, trust the Democrat in the race, McAuliffe, to handle COVID-19 over the Republican, Youngkin, at 39 percent, per a recent Washington Post/George Mason University poll. The Emerson poll also showed a plurality, 23 percent, of likely McAuliffe voters said they thought COVID-19 was the top issue for Virginia, while education was the top issue in the state for 34 percent (also a plurality) of Youngkin voters.

We’ll just have to see how large of a role the pandemic will play in these gubernatorial races — it was a big part of California’s governor recall election — but it doesn’t look likely to play the same role here. If anything, voters in Virginia seem to be more concerned about education, as that Emerson poll suggested. The economy is also an important issue for voters in both Virginia and New Jersey.

Back in June, four-term Mayor Byron Brown shockingly lost the Democratic primary for mayor of Buffalo, New York, to democratic socialist India Walton. And normally, that would have been the end of that particular intra-Democratic fight, but Brown has opted to continue his campaign into the general election by waging a write-in campaign.

There is no Republican candidate on the ballot, so Brown may be able to ride a combination of Republicans and moderate Democrats to victory. One recent poll put Walton at just 36 percent, while 54 percent volunteered that they were voting for Brown; however, it’s notoriously difficult to poll a write-in campaign, so there’s still a lot of uncertainty here.

Regardless of the outcome, the race has created a lot of internal strife within the New York Democratic Party, with Sens. Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand endorsing Walton but Gov. Kathy Hochul and state party chair Jay Jacobs refusing to take sides (which has been interpreted as an implicit rebuke of Walton, the official Democratic nominee).

Just a few months after a highly restrictive abortion law in Texas made it effectively impossible to obtain the procedure in the state, the Virginia governor’s race will be the first big test of how much abortion is motivating voters — particularly Democrats.

It was already a challenging issue for Youngkin, the Republican candidate, who was caught in a video saying that he’d ignore abortion during the campaign but “start going on offense” if he became governor. Since then, McAuliffe has included the clip in TV ads and emphasized the issue of abortion more broadly, talking about the threat laws like Texas’s pose in the hope of motivating suburban women and other voters who support abortion rights.

Virginia is, of course, a very different place to be campaigning on abortion rights than Texas. A CBS poll conducted in October found that abortion is a major issue for 58 percent of Virginia voters in the governor’s race — behind the economy, COVID-19 vaccine mandates, taxes, crime and school curriculums on race and history.

It’s not a surprise, then, that while Youngkin has tried to paint McAuliffe as extreme on abortion, he’s spent much more of his campaign trying not to talk about it. This makes sense for Youngkin given that Virginia isn’t a place where abortion restrictions — particularly restrictions on abortion before a pregnancy is viable — have recently found much success.

But the way abortion has played out as a factor in the Virginia campaign is also a sign of where the politics of the issue stand now. As FiveThirtyEight contributor Michael Tesler wrote in October, abortion is now a more important issue to Democrats than Republicans.

That could make it an even bigger issue in the 2022 midterm elections, particularly if the Supreme Court limits or overturns Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that established a constitutional right to abortion, this term. First, though, we’ll see what actually happens in the Virginia governor’s race — and whether anxiety about more abortion restrictions galvanizes Democrats to turn out for McAuliffe.

Claiming election fraud before an election is even over seems to be the new favored play among Republicans. It happened earlier this year during the California governor recall election — with the leading GOP candidate setting up a website ahead of the election calling for an investigation into the “twisted” results — and it’s cropping up again ahead of today’s elections.

In Virginia, Youngkin has tried to thread the needle, neither embracing Trump’s Big Lie nor completely writing it off. He has questioned the reliability of voting machines while also asserting that Biden indeed won the 2020 election. He’s also allowed a surrogate (State Sen. Amanda Chase) to trot out election fraud conspiracies ahead of the vote, including claims that votes will be digitally switched during Virginia’s election. Trump himself even made baseless election fraud predictions in a statement on the eve of Virginia’s election where he encouraged voters to support Youngkin, saying, “I am not a believer in the integrity of Virginia’s elections, lots of bad things went on, and are going on. The way you beat it is to flood the system and get out and vote.”

In New Jersey, Democrats have tried to make hay out of Ciattarelli’s appearance at a “Stop the Steal” rally last November (Ciattarelli has said he didn’t realize it was branded as such and would not have attended had he known), but the Republican nominee has largely steered clear of making overt claims of election fraud — and has notably not attracted an endorsement from Trump.

Meanwhile, even ballot measures in New York have attracted some of this rhetoric. One constitutional amendment on the ballot would eliminate a requirement for voters to register 10 days before an election while another would make no-excuse absentee voting legal in the state, but the GOP has criticized these measures claiming, without evidence, they would increase voter fraud.

Though it’s an off-year election, a number of important races are on the ballot today. Most notably, the Virginia gubernatorial race, which has gone from favoring the Democratic candidate, former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, to a tossup. Going into Tuesday’s elections, FiveThirtyEight’s polling average shows that Republican Glenn Youngkin now has a 1 percentage point lead over McAuliffe.

Virginia has steadily voted more Democratic in recent presidential elections, voting for Biden by 10 points in 2020. And a Republican hasn’t been elected to statewide office since 2012, but the state isn’t actually that blue. According to FiveThirtyEight’s partisan lean, Virginia is only a D+5 state, which means it is still susceptible to shifts in the national environment. And thanks to an unpopular Democratic president in the White House, the electoral environment currently favors the GOP, which helps explain the shift toward Youngkin in recent weeks, although as we’ll discuss on this live blog, it isn’t necessarily the only reason Youngkin has edged ahead of McAuliffe.

In New Jersey, the governor’s race seems to promise less drama than Virginia with Gov. Phil Murphy leading anywhere from the double digits to the low single digits in recent polls. It’s true that Biden’s sinking approval seems to have also played a role in the New Jersey race, but New Jersey is simply a bluer state than Virginia, and as an incumbent, Murphy has remained relatively popular in the state.

But, of course, it’s not just the Virginia and New Jersey governor races on the ballot today. A host of down-ballot races are also taking place in both states, with the question of which party will control Virginia’s lower chamber in the state legislature front and center. We’re also tracking key mayoral races across the country and important ballot initiatives, so stay tuned to see what happens not only in Virginia and New Jersey but across the country too.

As always, thanks for following along, and if you have any questions, ping us @538politics and I’ll try to get your question answered on the live blog. We’ll be live blogging today until the wee hours if need be, as we expect we’ll know who has won the governor races in both Virginia and New Jersey tonight — polls close at 7 p.m. Eastern in Virginia and 8 p.m. Eastern in New Jersey.