What Went Down During The 2021 Elections

My colleagues Geoffrey, Nathaniel and Ryan posted earlier this evening about how the New Jersey governor’s race was Murphy’s to lose, as much of the outstanding vote was concentrated in Democratic areas of the state, and you should read that recap for a better understanding of how Murphy pulled off what looks to be a narrow victory.

We still don’t have all of the expected vote in — 87 percent per ABC News’s latest batch of election data — but ABC News can project that Murphy will win reelection in New Jersey, joining the AP in calling the race for Murphy.

As such, we’ll be shuttering our live blog coverage of the 2021 elections, and focusing our analysis elsewhere on what Tuesday’s elections can — and can’t — tell us about the national environment heading into the 2022 midterm elections.

Thanks as always for following along.

This race looks to be Murphy’s to lose now, as Murphy now leads Ciattarelli by just under 1 percentage point. ABC News has not called the race, but the Associated Press has. At this point, we know that of the roughly 300,000 votes left to report around the state, around two-thirds are from Democratic-leaning counties and a large chunk of them are Democratic-leaning absentee votes.

And Murphy appears set to do just well enough to win a second term as New Jersey’s governor, as our benchmarks for the race based on the 2020 presidential election show in the map and table below. Murphy is running ahead where he needs to be in more places than he’s not, and additional votes reported in red-leaning counties like Monmouth have reduced Ciattarelli’s advantage in them, too. And the two bluest counties in the state, Essex (Newark) and Hudson (Jersey City) especially came through for Murphy.

It’s still closer than polling of the race suggested, but the Democratic incumbent can thank his lucky stars that he governs a blue state, while his Democratic counterpart in Virginia, Terry McAuliffe, came up just short in purpler Virginia — even though the states had somewhat similar swings to the right.

Our colleagues at ABC News have yet to make a projection in New Jersey, but the Associated Press has just called the race for Murphy, who currently leads 50.0 percent to 49.2 percent.

It’s been difficult to assess what of the outstanding vote is still not processed in New Jersey, but ABC News election data now suggests that there are more than 300,000 votes outstanding across New Jersey's 21 counties — and per our analysis, they seem more likely to help Murphy than Ciattarelli.

That’s because most of these votes appear to be absentee or provisional ballots — although a handful of counties still have some Election Day votes, too. But we think Murphy still stands to benefit since about two-thirds of the outstanding votes are in counties where Murphy currently leads, and Murphy has been winning absentee votes at a two-to-one rate.

How are President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris — both of whom campaigned in person for Terry McAuliffe — responding to his loss?

When asked about the Virginia results during a press conference about vaccines for children, Biden tied the loss to both the ongoing struggle to pass his legislative agenda, and the lingering influence of Donald Trump.

"I was talking to Terry to congratulate him today. He got 600,000 more votes than any other Democrat has gotten. We brought out every Democrat there was ... People want us to get things done. They want us to get things done. And that's why I am continuing to push very hard for the Democratic Party to move along and pass my infrastructure bill and my Build Back Better bill," Biden said.

Biden surmised that his agenda "should have passed before Election Day, but I'm not sure that I would be able to have changed the number of very conservative folks who turned out in the red districts who were Trump voters. But maybe. Maybe."

Speaking to reporters after a press conference on the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which failed a vote to start debate today, Harris said, "It's no surprise or no secret I supported Terry McAuliffe; I think he would have made a great governor, but it clearly was a fair election and I applaud the governor-elect."

When a reporter asked about lessons for the Democrats from Virginia, Harris said, "I'm gonna leave that to the pundits, but I will say this: We had great wins, as well as obviously what we talked about in Virginia, and I celebrate those."

Votes are still being counted slowly in New Jersey, but we have what qualifies as a major update out of Hudson County, where 1,865 additional votes have been counted. We're told these were mail votes, and they indeed broke heavily for Murphy, 1,429-496. Murphy now leads statewide 50.0 percent to 49.3 percent (a margin of 16,617 votes).

Our colleagues at ABC News are projecting that Republican Jason Miyares has won the Virginia attorney general's race. Republicans have officially swept all three statewide offices in Old Dominion.

India Walton, the democratic socialist candidate for mayor of Buffalo, New York, conceded the race this afternoon to incumbent Mayor Byron Brown, who waged a write-in campaign to keep his job after losing to Walton in the Democratic primary. The race exposed schisms within the New York Democratic Party, but ultimately, Brown paired Democrats still loyal to him with Republicans to win reelection. Right now, write-ins account for 59 percent of the votes cast in the mayoral race, compared with 41 percent for Walton, and it's likely that almost all of those write-ins are for Brown.

With Proposals 3 and 4 (to legalize same-day voter registration and no-excuse absentee voting, respectively) currently failing in New York, many liberals have been critical of the fact that there was no big push to pass them (whereas Republicans actively campaigned against them). And it seems like voting-rights advocates left a lot of votes on the table as a result:

Ranked-choice tabulations are complete in Minneapolis, and they've confirmed that moderate Jacob Frey will be reelected as mayor, defeating two progressives who had charged that Frey hadn't done enough to reform the police both before and after last year's murder of George Floyd. Minneapolis voters also passed City Question 1, which gives the mayor's office more power, and rejected City Question 2, which would have replaced the police department with a department of public safety. Add it all up, and it appears Minneapolitans have issued a vote of confidence in the status quo despite the past year-plus of turmoil in the city.

If you're looking for an illustration of how dominant national political trends are these days, even in local elections, look no further than New Jersey's 3rd Senate District. Republican Edward Durr, a truck driver who claims to have spent only $153 on the primary portion of his campaign, is on the verge of defeating Democratic Senate President Stephen Sweeney, one of the most powerful politicians in the state. How was this possible? Trump won Sweeney's district by 2 points in 2020, and while Sweeney hasn't had too much trouble garnering crossover votes here in the past, the current anti-Democratic political environment was likely too much for him to counter.

An addendum to my last post that's interesting but doesn't really change the overall takeaway: Dark-blue Essex and Hudson counties are two of the few counties that aren't exhibiting about a 15-point swing toward Republicans since 2020. That suggests to me that the votes we do have there are Democratic-leaning mail ballots, while the uncounted votes are Republican-leaning Election Day votes. However, these areas are so blue that even Election Day votes should be good for Murphy. Reporting from NBC News's Steve Kornacki seems to confirm this theory, too.

Right now, Murphy leads Ciattarelli in the New Jersey governor’s race just 50 percent to 49 percent, but it’s been tough to know how to interpret that result since we don’t have reliable numbers about how many votes are outstanding and what type of ballots (Democratic-leaning mail votes or Republican-leaning Election Day votes) they are. But some back-of-the-napkin math I just did suggests that the uncounted vote should be disproportionately good for Murphy.

The table below shows each county in New Jersey, how it’s currently voting, and what its turnout rate is so far as a share of total votes cast in the 2020 presidential election. Of course, there’s no way that turnout in this off-year election was ever going to match 2020’s, but in a world where it's extremely challenging to estimate expected voter turnout, 2020 at least provides a consistent turnout benchmark against which to measure the current results.

You’ll notice that several (mostly Republican-voting) counties are hovering around 60 percent of their 2020 turnout — and that several (mostly Democratic-voting) counties are still below 50 percent of 2020 turnout. That, in a nutshell, is why I think Murphy will pick up votes: If turnout reached 60 percent of 2020 levels in counties like Hunterdon and Ocean, it probably will at least approach 60 percent of 2020 levels in counties like Hudson and Essex when all is said and done. And given how strongly Democratic those two counties in particular are, it’s very likely that the uncounted votes there will break for Murphy.

Given how close the governor’s race in New Jersey is, we’ve calculated how the candidates are doing relative to 2020 presidential benchmarks. Murphy now leads by about 0.3 percentage points, which isn’t much, but you’d still probably rather be Murphy than Ciattarelli at this point. That’s because a couple of Democratic-leaning counties — Essex (Newark) and Mercer (Trenton) -- still likely have a fair number of votes left to report, which should be good news for Murphy. Still, our benchmark analysis suggests Murphy is way outperforming what he needs from Hudson County, the second-bluest county in the state, after Essex. Murphy has a margin akin to Biden’s in 2020 there, even though he’s running behind Biden pretty much everywhere else. That raises questions about whether some of the remaining vote in Hudson might actually be friendlier to Ciattarelli than you’d expect in such a major Democratic-leaning county. But with a lack of clarity on what of the remaining vote is still left to count — many Democratic-leaning mail-in and early votes but also some Republican-leaning Election Day ballots, too — we can’t know with certainty how things will shift from here.

I wrote a little while ago about how Democrats had axed paid family leave as part of their big spending bill — well, it looks like that might not be the case anymore. Now there are reports that Democrats are adding four weeks of paid family and medical leave to their reconciliation bill. It's possible that the timing is coincidental, but it's really interesting to think about this move in the context of their loss in Virginia last night, and the role of education and parental anger in that race. Is this an attempt to show parents who are running on fumes after 20 months of unpredictable-to-nonexistent childcare that Democrats are there for them? A way to prevent some of the clear frustration that parents are feeling from backfiring against them again? If that's the case, I'm not sure that four weeks of paid leave will do the trick — but it's interesting to think about the political chess here.

In Virginia, I was struck by the extent to which Youngkin was able to improve double-digits on Trump's performance in many different counties across the state. It wasn't just one demographic or region where he was able to make significant inroads — he gained in urban, suburban and rural areas. He gained in counties with high percentages of college-educated whites as well as in counties with high percentages on non-college-educated whites. There's also some evidence suggesting that he may have gained a decent amount of ground with Black voters. This suggests that Republicans might be able to contest a wide array of districts and states in next year's midterm elections if the political environment stays poor for Democrats.

If anything, I was surprised by how the results in Virginia fell pretty neatly into the big, macro patterns we're used to! Everyone is looking for reasons that Youngkin won — when, as we've been discussing, if you look at the fundamentals, that's exactly what you'd expect to happen. So, I guess my wet-blanket take is that even at a time when everything feels unpredictable, we shouldn't write off the extent to which American politics is pretty cyclical and predictable.

Readers, we're going to transition our live blog coverage to focus on the outstanding governor's race in New Jersey, but before we go New Jersey all the time, I wanted to ask our live blog crew one more time for their thoughts on Virginia, as the 🔥 takes have startled to trickle in. For example, it was all about Biden. It was all about education. It was all about Trump.

As we've said on this live blog, it's really hard to land on just one explanation for why an election unfolded the way it did — or, to borrow Micah's words, the macro versus the micro trends here are still related. But, knowing that, what one thing surprised you about the governor's election in Virginia, and how will it shape — or not shape — your understanding of the national environment moving forward?

Fresh off their big win in Virginia last night, national Republicans are signaling they’ll go on the offensive more in 2022. In a statement early Wednesday, the National Republican Congressional Committee, the campaign arm of House Republicans, announced that it’s targeting 13 more Democratic-held seats in the U.S. House as Republicans seek to regain their majority in 2022.

Republicans have taken the lead in a 52nd seat in the Virginia House of Delegates, although it seems like this one won't be called for a while.

So now that McAuliffe has officially conceded, I guess we can say for sure that Taylor Swift fans ("Swifties") were not able to save the former Virginia governor. There was so much "the NASCAR dads of 2021" potential, too! 😞

Our own Geoffrey Skelley discussed this not-so-pivotal voting bloc on The Daily Show last night!

Terry McAuliffe has conceded the Virginia governor's race:

One wildcard that could actually be helpful for Democrats next year, though, Micah -- although it would hurt their agenda in other, maybe longer-lasting ways -- is the Supreme Court. The justices heard oral arguments over the structure of Texas's highly restrictive abortion law on Monday, they're hearing their first gun rights case in over a decade this morning, and they're going back to abortion in early December. I could definitely imagine a world where the conservative majority does some controversial and unpopular things, like limiting or overturning Roe v. Wade, and Democrats try to use that to mobilize voters.

Micah, last night's results do make me wonder how challenging the long tail of the pandemic will be for Democrats going forward. Obviously, many voters did not like how Trump and the Republicans handled the public health side. But I think voters were also primed to care about education because there's still some lingering anger from parents over last year's school closures -- and tensions around parental autonomy are not going to abate as vaccinations for younger children become a reality. I've seen some discussion of whether congressional Democrats' decision to bag paid family leave as part of the big spending bill will anger parents in next year's midterms, but I think debates around schools could be a lot more potent.

I said this (ineloquently) on the podcast, Micah, but I agree with you that a lot can just be chalked up to human nature — and, therefore, you can't easily separate my "it's all macro trends!" from Nate's "what are the real-world reasons?"

It's virtually impossible for a government to do everything well, and because the grass is always greener on the other side, voters (and, to be honest, the media) will fixate on the stuff that isn't going well, and that becomes the reason (or excuse, if you like) why voters turn against the party in power. Right now, it might be the delta variant; it might be the sluggish economy; it might be lack of action in Congress. But whatever it is, it's scratching an itch that is inevitably going to be there.

Ahead of yesterday’s election, both Trump and Youngkin surrogate Amanda Chase were still beating the election fraud drum, with Chase even baselessly claiming that votes would be digitally switched. So how does Youngkin’s win fit into that narrative?

Well, Big Lie believers are rationalizing the victory by claiming that the election was rigged but that enough patriots came out to vote to overwhelm the planned fraud. Here’s the top comment on the top post currently on Patriots.win, a pro-Trump message board:

“Of course the elections are still rigged. I am not even remotely pretending otherwise. We need to vote en masse every time anyway to keep forcing them to cheat even harder. Not voting is surrender.”

And here’s part of a Telegram post from last night by a major QAnon influencer who has more than 125,000 subscribers:

“Here’s a dose of reality: Youngkin’s already won the Governorship. Right now the slow motion votes rolling in closing the gap is them attempting to cheat. Here’s the kicker though; MAGA came out and crushed their algorithms tonight! Virginians weren’t leaving it for chance and swept the state red!”

If you thought Republicans winning elections undercuts the Big Lie narrative, that is absolutely not the case.

We're still waiting for more New Jersey updates, but I wanted to return to a theme we were discussing on the live blog last night (and which Sarah, Nathaniel, Geoff and Galen covered on the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast in the wee hours of the morning):

How much of the strong shift toward the GOP that we're seeing is down to macro factors versus local factors?

There's been general agreement (on this live blog at least) that the macro factors are the more important ones, including the tendency of voters to swing against the party that controls the White House, the president's unpopularity, etc. But Nate made the very good point last night that saying these macro factors are the bigger factors doesn't quite answer the question of why those macro factors are factors in the first place. For example, sure Biden is unpopular and that matters, but why is he unpopular?

I won't try to answer all that, though I think human nature is part of it -- that it's easier to motivate voters in opposition to something than in support of it. But I did want to posit a different way to look at this: It's one thing to say that local/discrete factors weren't determinative. So all the "education" talk in Virginia may not really be what drove the bulk of the swing among suburban voters to the GOP. Congressional Democrats' failure to pass the infrastructure and Build Back Better bills likely wasn't a major factor. And so forth.

But you can also reverse that: The macro forces this year and next are bad for Democrats. They know that. So the idea that they can upend these historical trends without doing something big -- passing really ambitious legislation in Congress that really helps people, for example -- is sorta crazy. Doing so still might not work. Passing health care reform didn't help Democrats in the 2010 midterms, for instance.

Still, Democrats are fighting tectonic forces -- don't they need a strategy that is similar in scale?

An update from late last night: We had thought that the Virginia House of Delegates was going to be tied, but Republicans actually took the lead in a race that had been called for Democrats. It now looks as though Republicans will take a 51-49 majority in the House of Delegates to go along with their wins for governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general.

It's the morning after Election Day, and the New Jersey governor's race is neck-and-neck. Just how close?

Per Edison, Murphy has taken a 1,667 vote lead over Ciattarelli with about 85 percent of the expected vote reporting. It seems likely that Murphy will expand his lead as additional votes are counted. There seem to be a substantial number of absentee votes yet to be reported in heavily Democratic Mercer County (69 percent for Biden in 2020) as well as additional batches of votes from other counties like Somerset, Essex and Union.

There is some uncertainty about exactly how many votes are left to be reported, but directionally it definitely seems like they should favor Democrats.

Programming note: As mentioned, we'll be back here in a bit with more updates from New Jersey (where we expect to get more results soon). But in the meantime, courtesy of Geoff, you can find a more detailed look at what went down in Virginia here.

Good morning, early risers! It's a little after 6 a.m. on Wednesday, the day after Election Day in Virginia, New Jersey and a bunch of other places around the country, Things stand mostly where they did when our crew said goodnight a few hours ago: In Virginia's governor's race, Youngkin has been projected the winner by our colleagues at ABC News. In New Jersey's governor's race, only about 84 percent of the expected vote has been counted; at the moment, the Republican, Ciattarelli, and the incumbent Democrat, Murphy, are separated by less than 100 votes.

We'll be keeping you updated here today as more votes are counted in New Jersey -- and we'll have more data-driven analyses of "what this all means" -- but in the meantime, check out our crew's late-night thoughts in the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast they recorded in the wee hours this morning.

Many narratives will emerge regarding what tonight means for Democrats moving forward, given that Youngkin narrowly defeated McAuliffe in Virginia — a race that until the last few weeks of the campaign had been McAuliffe’s to lose, according to the polls — and the New Jersey governor’s race remains too close to call. In Virginia, it’s notable just how much Youngkin overperformed counties’ and cities’ 2020 benchmarks. Geoffrey and Ryan wrote about this extensively on the live blog, but Youngkin overperformed in most of Virginia’s largest cities and counties, which the table and map below show:

Part of this shift undoubtedly had to do with the fact that the electorate was very different than the one that voted in the 2020 presidential election. That is, in a state that voted for Biden by 10 percentage points, voters said in exit polls that they were evenly divided in who they voted for in 2020. Forty-six percent said they cast their vote for Trump and 46 percent said Biden, suggesting that at least some Biden supporters sat this contest out. In terms of what motivated voters, per exit polls, the number one issue in Virginia was the economy (33 percent) followed by education (23 percent). While it’s easy to focus on the role education played in the race, given Youngkin’s success in campaigning on it, the story there seems to be more complicated given that voters, per these exit polls, broke for Youngkin at similar rates, regardless if they cared about the economy or education more. And given how close the race is still in New Jersey, it does seem as if what happened on Tuesday is a story of both macro- and micro-trends. On the one hand, we saw what happens in an election when there’s an unpopular Democratic president in the White House; on the other hand, we must now unpack what contributed to that environment. The answer is more complex than just Biden’s approval rating alone. We’ll be back tomorrow to give you updates on the race in New Jersey, but in the meantime, stay tuned for our late-night podcast that should hit your feeds by tomorrow a.m. and our reaction to the Virginia governor’s race.

If Democrats want to have a fighting chance at bucking history in the 2022 midterms, the biggest lesson they can take from Virginia might be that they need a positive, cohesive message of their own to run on next year. McAuliffe spent far more time trying to tie Youngkin to Trump than he did talking about his own record as governor or any of the accomplishments of the unified Democratic state government over the last two years (of which there were many!). That's a strategic decision that will likely come under a lot of scrutiny in the coming weeks, especially given the contrast with Youngkin, who was relentlessly on-message in the closing weeks of the race. Right now, Democrats don't look like they're for anything, only against Trump. That may have been an effective message in 2018 and 2020 when Trump was a presence in everyone's life, but he's not now. What Democrats' new message should be, I don't know. But the mishegas on Capitol Hill, where the contents of the Build Back Better agenda seemingly change hourly, doesn't seem to help.

Well, this could be interesting. We didn't actually get to learn much about what Youngkin thought about most major political issues during the campaign. Rather than running as a "moderate," he ran more as a blank slate. He's certainly embracing conservative principles in education in this speech, but it's a far cry from the Trumpian rhetoric of the campaign. I guess we'll have to wait and see what he actually wants to see happen.

Both contenders for New Jersey governor made remarks to supporters early Wednesday morning after midnight, neither conceding and both asking supporters to be ready for a longer wait than expected.

“We’re all sorry that tonight could not yet be the celebration we wanted it to be. But as I said, when every vote is counted, and every vote will be counted, we hope to have a celebration,” Murphy said to his supporters.

Around the same time, Ciattarelli was telling his, "We want every legal vote counted. And you all know the way the VBMs [vote by mail ballots] work and the provisionals work; we’ve gotta have time to make sure that every legal vote is counted."

He also promised his supporters at the campaign headquarters pizza from DeLucia's in Raritan. Campaign reporters everywhere are eyeing the leftover election night pizza ...

Youngkin doesn't say critical race theory by name, but says he will listen "to parent input on curriculum."

Youngkin is speaking now and, somewhat surprisingly, I haven't heard him mention critical race theory by name yet? He was quick to talk about education broadly, though, as Leah just noted.

Glenn Youngkin takes the stage in Chantilly, Virginia, calling it a "defining moment" and sharing a positive message — a stark difference from campaign rhetoric that warned of the threats children and parents face in schools. He said his vision for education included promoting school choice, specifically charter schools and alluding to vouchers, refining a message that, as we discussed earlier in this blog, had previously been more about culture wars than the nuts and bolts of education.

This thread was illuminating, in my very humble opinion.

It’s still fascinating to me that exit polls so far show that Youngkin was able to successfully about to win groups that traditionally support the GOP (e.g. white voters, older voters and Trump supporters) while also making inroads among some groups that tend to lean Democratic, like women.

Based on analysis of the vote, ABC News projects that the Republican Winsome Sears will win the Virginia lieutenant governorship. As I mentioned earlier, her win is notable, in part, because she makes history as the first Black woman and woman of color to serve in the post.

In Virginia, I think an underrated angle is the continuation of education polarization. Looking at the shifts by county from the 2020 presidential election, it seems like the broad Trump-era realignment by education continued tonight, just with a fairly uniform shift to the right among all types of counties. Youngkin gained ground throughout the state: in highly educated suburban counties outside D.C., but also in rural and urban counties elsewhere. One interesting example is suburban Loudoun County — although McAuliffe is doing about 5 points worse statewide than he did in 2013, he's doing about 7 points better in Loudoun.

Well, it might be a little later in the night than we had hoped, but we're going into Wednesday morning with the results of Virginia's governor's race. There's going to be a lot of speculation about what the outcome means for 2022, and it's fair to say that it's not a great sign for Democrats. That said, there's no clear answer as to how Democrats can rectify their problems before November, and there's no way to make an apples-to-apples comparison between today's gubernatorial race and the upcoming midterms. Trump will likely be more involved in November, when there will be a bigger congressional and gubernatorial battleground, with the added uncertainty of newly drawn congressional maps after redistricting. Today offered a temperature check for the national environment, and it seems that Republicans are enjoying the perks of the opposing party's first term in the presidency. From here, continue to read polling wisely and watch which candidates emerge in key races.

We're going to spend a lot of time talking about why certain issues mattered in the election, but the long and short of the Virginia result mostly comes down to Biden being unpopular as well as differential turnout, whereby Republicans turned out at somewhat higher rates than Democrats. The exit polls showed the electorate's recalled 2020 vote was Biden +2 in a state that the president carried by 10 points. Many Virginians and Americans in general aren't happy with the status quo, and that showed.

Youngkin is the official winner in Virginia's gubernatorial race, thanks to him beating his benchmarks across the more populous areas of the state. Youngkin overperformed across most of the state's eastern counties and cities, which drove the highest proportions of the statewide vote in the 2020 presidential election. Those pink counties in the southwest corner of the state are relatively smaller, rural GOP-friendly areas -- so even though McAuliffe did relatively better there, GOP margins were still quite large. Any improvement compared to Biden's 2020 results weren't enough to offset Youngkin's overperformance in more populous suburban areas.

As you wave at, Jacob, there’s already some chatter that the Republican upset in Texas’s special election runoff tonight might foreshadow large GOP gains in south Texas next year. As Geoffrey and I have written before, Hispanic voters trending further right in metro areas, specifically, could be an obstacle for Democrats — especially if Republicans continue to make inroads with Hispanic voters here and voters along the border, too. As such, it was already in Texas Republicans' best interest to improve their margins in Hispanic communities in more populous areas (like HD-118) that lean Democratic.

One group we haven't heard too much about tonight are Latino voters, who shifted toward Trump in 2020. But a special election taking place in Texas tonight might shed some light on whether those shifts have staying power. This is a state House race in a district where 73 percent of residents are Hispanic, and where former Rep. Beto O'Rourke won by 20 points in 2018 and Biden won by 14 points in 2020.

Currently, Ciattarelli leads Murphy 50 percent to 49 percent in New Jersey, with about 80 percent of the vote counted. But it's really hard to know where this race will end up, and that's because the county-level results are all over the place. For instance, Murphy currently leads in Hudson County 74 percent to 25 percent, which is actually better than Biden did last year. But he only leads 56 percent to 43 percent in Mercer County — a county Biden carried by 40 points last year. My guess is that these discrepancies are due to different counties reporting different types of votes (in-person vs. absentee), but we don't have any data on which counties have counted which type, so we're just left to shrug our shoulders.

Even with a close race in New Jersey, no one is giving up, and Team Murphy is leaning into the fact that not all votes have been counted yet. New Jersey Lt. Gov. Sheila Oliver addressed supporters late Tuesday night at the Murphy campaign headquarters in Asbury Park.

"Now, our adversaries may be jumping up and down with glee. But let me tell you something: I know Essex, my home county. I know how we roll. And we know that the votes in that Democratic stronghold have yet to be counted in total. Bergen County, the home of our beloved Sen. Loretta Weinberg — Bergen is still counting. Union, still counting. Middlesex, still counting," she said.

In our last major mayoral race of the night, moderate Bruce Harrell leads progressive Lorena González by a strong 65 percent to 35 percent margin in the open-seat race for mayor of Seattle.

With the race now called for Youngkin, we can see how he outperformed the benchmarks we drew up in most of the largest cities and counties in Virginia, which explains why he won. Among the 10 localities that provided at least 2 percent of the statewide vote in 2020 (we won’t know their exact share in 2021 for a little while longer), Youngkin did better than the benchmark margin in eight of them. And the two where McAuliffe did better, Prince William County and Richmond city, were barely more Democratic than the benchmark figure.