How should we interpret the vote as it gets counted and reported tonight? As Anna, Nathaniel and I wrote, last year Virginia was one of the states where the ballots that were counted early on looked good for Trump, but ballots counted later in the night revealed Biden’s lead.
This year, as FiveThirtyEight friend (and my brother!) Lenny Bronner from The Washington Post writes, we should expect to see a slightly different pattern: The first ballots counted are likely to be early in-person votes, which will likely favor McAuliffe. They’ll be followed by Election Day vote, which will start out looking redder (since smaller, rural places are likely to finish counting faster) before the bigger, Democratic-leaning counties report. So: expect a blue-red-blue pattern, rather than the red-blue from last November.