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About those priors…
On Monday night, I posted some thoughts to make sure they were recorded for posterity before events overtook us and I semiconsciously retconned my priors to match. I approached the exercise with circumspect caution: positive portents abounded in the national polling, the data out of early voting in several states pointed to reasonably strong Democratic engagement levels, and local vibes were good in my homeland of Dutchess County, NY with all its competitive town and county elections. But we just didn’t know enough yet when I wrote those thoughts up. I couldn’t be sure that the national tide had truly shifted, that Black and Latino voters were starting to come back, that the reluctant Trump voters who backed him in ’24 because of cost of living concerns would pivot away from the party that has failed to address them despite unfettered control of the federal government (and here in Dutchess, control of most of county government). I couldn’t be sure that the “Mamdani Effect” that has re-engaged younger voters would overcome the corresponding fearmongering campaigns throughout the country but especially in the Hudson Valley, where the GOP sure seemed to think he was on the ballot in places besides NYC. Funny how they’re quick to condemn people for voting against Trump in local races, though.
So with all that in mind, I offered some tempered optimism: an 8-10 point win for Abigail Spanberger in Virginia with narrow wins for Ghazala Hashmi (lieutenant governor) and Jay Jones (attorney general) but uncertainty about how many House of Delegates seats she’d pull along with her; a 4-5 point win for Mikie Sherill in New Jersey; and juju-proof vagaries in Dutchess County.
Well, Democrats exceeded those expectations, and then some. Spanberger’s winning margin stands at 14.8% for the largest blowout in a Virginia gubernatorial since 2009. Polls close awfully early in Virginia, so the race was called even before Democrats in New York gathered for results watch parties that featured a a newly optimistic tenor. Hashmi and Jones won comfortably, too – however unfortunate that may be, in the latter case.1 In New Jersey, Sherill ran well ahead of most polling for a 13.5% margin of triumph.
Democratic successes were abundant downballot as well. They exceeded even the rosiest expectations for the Virginia House of Delegates, picking up 13 GOP-held seats to grow a 51-49 majority to 64-36, the largest Democratic majority in the Commonwealth since the 1987 elections. In New Jersey, Democrats have flipped three Assembly seats but Republicans concede that two more losses are likely. That’ll bring Dems to at least a 57-23 majority, the largest for either party since the GOP’s 58-seat win in 1991.
In Pennsylvania, where three Democratic justices on the state Supreme Court faced a retention vote, each passed the rest with flying colors – over 61% of Pennsylvania voters opted to retain all three justices. They carried the day in the usual Pennsylvania swing counties like Bucks and Erie, but elsewhere, too. Beaver, Fayette and Westmoreland counties spent decades as mighty Democratic strongholds in southwest PA before moving slowly to the GOP in the 1990s and 2000s, and sharply in the 2010s. But they supported all three Democrats for retention. Blue-trending Cumberland in the south-central portion of the state did, too – a result unthinkable 20 years ago. Luzerne County, home to Wilkes-Barre and Hazleton in the Anthracite Kingdom of northeastern PA, is often used to depict eroding Dem fortunes among working-class voters in the age of Trump. It, too, supported all three Dems. The red-for-decades Columbia, Montour and Union in the Susquehanna Valley? All three. Pike County on the NY border, which has neither an ancestral Dem heritage nor a notable recent trend toward Dems? All three. York County voted to retain two of them and Yes (retain) trails by only 20 votes for the third (David Wecht). Even Northumberland County – where Democrats are a half-century removed from their heyday – supported retention for one of the three.
The downballot triumphs in Pennsylvania are too numerous to list, but highlights include flipping the sheriff and district attorney positions in swingy Bucks County – the latter for the first time since the 1800s. Bucks was ground zero for Moms for Liberty victories in 2021; they were wiped out this time around. Clearfield County gave Trump 75% of its vote a year ago, but Democrat Josh Maines flipped a county court judgeship – beating the incumbent Republican district attorney for good measure. The small borough of Beaver went deep-red even when the surrounding county of the same name was a Democratic stronghold; it last voted for a Democratic presidential nominee in 1912. It had an unbroken streak of Republican mayors dating to World War II. Well, that streak is broken.
To bring it home, I’ll note that in Dutchess County – where I hedged mightily despite increasing signs for optimism as the election drew to a close – Democrats had the strongest night in the party’s history. There have been great federal and state elections before for Dutchess Dems, but in county races, nothing like this. I’ll be writing in more detail in a future post, but Dems held the Comptroller position and flipped a county court judgeship – by margins not previously seen for Democrats in countywide offices. And they decisively flipped the county legislature, last held by Dems in 2008-09, along with a dozen and a half town-level seats.
I was too cautious, it turns out – Democrats won, they won bigger and more widely than both the polls and the incorrigible optimists foresaw, and they did it both via increased turnout over similar contests in previous years and, as Nate Cohn notes at the New York Times, by flipping 2024 Trump voters. What a night. More to come from me on these happenings.
- I rarely vote for a Republican, but I would have in the Virginia AG race because I simply do not believe Jay Jones can hold a law enforcement position with any credibility with his history of graphic, violent texts. I understand all the counter-arguments; I also disagree with them. ↩︎
Very Quick Election Eve Thoughts
Keeping this very brief tonight, but I wanted to check in to deposit a few concepts so that I cannot retcon my priors after tomorrow!
Starting with the big picture: Trump is polling poorly by any standard, including his. He is polling particularly poorly on his handling of the economy and the cost of living – arguably the most critical aspect of his election a year ago. In most surveys, that’s top of mind for voters as is typically the case. Tariff wars, demolishing part of the White House to build a ballroom, fighting with Jimmy Kimmel…these do not make for a laser focus on affordability. The Democratic Party continues to poll at historic lows, but some of that is driven by committed Dems angry at party leadership but still highly motivated to vote against Trump and the Republicans.
On the whole it feels more like 2017 than 2021, as we might expect: there’s a Republican in the White House and negative partisanship is a powerful driver in today’s politics. Accordingly, Abigail Spanberger appears headed for a high-single digit or maybe double-digit win to flip the Virginia governorship back to Democrats. Ghazala Hashmi is probably set to win the lieutenant governor’s race with a smaller margin after a much more lowkey campaign. And potentially completing the trifecta of Democratic flips is Jay Jones, their deeply flawed candidate for attorney general against incumbent Jason Miyares. I do not personally see how Jones can serve in a law enforcement capacity given revelations of horrific, graphic texts he sent a few years ago, but polling shows a very tight race and historically, scandal-plagued candidates often overperform their polling a bit as voters tend to give a socially-desirable response to pollsters.
The New Jersey governor’s race is trickier. Republican Jack Ciatarelli nearly upset Phil Murphy in 2021, and since then we’ve seen New Jersey lurch rightward in last year’s presidential race. Democratic nominee Mikie Sherrill has struggled to close the deal, and I have concerns about whether Trump’s rapid collapse among the non-white voters he flipped last year translates to voting for Dems versus not voting at all this year. I have Sherrill winning, but by substantially smaller margin than Spanberger – let’s call it 4-5% for Sherrill versus 8-10% for Spanberger.
Drilling down much closer to my own context in Dutchess County, I don’t want to engage bad juju by offering specific predictions. It invites extra disappointment if you predict local wins and they don’t happen, and recriminations are inevitable if you predict local losses. So I’m staying above the trees here. The national factors mentioned above, in combination with the shifting makeup of the respective party coalitions in ways that have substantially raised the floor for Dem turnout in off-year races, provide reasons to believe that a strong slate of Democratic candidates can hold the comptroller’s seat, flip a county court judgeship, and flip the county legislature to Democrats for only the third time in our county’s history. There are some hyper-local things to mitigate against that – a boat club controversy in Red Hook, the ever-looming specter of low turnout in Poughkeepsie though signs are encouraging on that front so far – but the much bigger issue in my view is the dichotomy in what drives each party to the polls here. It certainly seems like the GOP can just scream “Mamdani!” over and over and presto, a good chunk of their base buys that Democratic candidates must be socialist, Muslims and whatever else annoys them about Mamdani. But at the same time, in my experience, convincing certain Democrats that a candidate is sufficiently left for their preferences is a massive challenge. Mamdani excites, but proving someone without such a high profile is worth their time – even if their progressive credentials are solidly in order – is an undertaking that is often met with shrugs. I don’t know how to square that circle. And it likely won’t hold Dutchess Dems back if indeed the national tide has truly shifted substantially in Democrats’ direction – but if it has not, it may well prove decisive. Tomorrow will provide much-needed illumination.
House Race Capsules: Virginia and the Carolinas
There is no longer a competitive district in the Palmetto State, alas, but Virginia and North Carolina offer some hotly contested and vitally important Congressional races.
First, a look at all three states, and then we’ll zoom in individually and present some analysis.
On to the states!
Read more…Trump Surrenders Virginia
It’s not quite Appomattox Court House, but…
In 2004, I was desperate for Democrats to expand the electoral map – at that point, the institutional advantages in the Electoral College clearly favored the Republicans. Further, the most recent reapportionment meant that simply winning the Gore 2000 states would actually leave Kerry further behind. Of all the Bush 2000 states, only New Hampshire (which Kerry ultimately did recapture) showed consistent signs of flipping in 2004…and those four electoral votes would not longer be enough to win the election, as they would have been in 2000. So I spent the year rooting for Kerry to fight hard in places like Colorado, Nevada and Virginia.
He opted for the first two and fell short; to my dismay (and that of John Edwards, unpleasant though it is to agree with him on any element of human existence) the Kerry campaign never seriously competed in Virginia. I saw it as a missed opportunity: Fairfax County and the other northern suburbs were rapidly trending blue and at that time, southwest Virginia’s coal country was not so virulently anti-Democratic as it is today. Throw in some Democratic strongholds in Southside Virginia and Hampton Roads, and there seemed to be the makings of a viable coalition. But they didn’t pursue it, and Bush won the state comfortably.
Four years later, Obama was always going to compete in the Commonwealth, and indeed he won pretty comfortably in the end: 52.6%-46.3%. He crushed it in the NoVA ‘burbs, including the first Democratic presidential victories in Loudoun County (the northwest suburbs and exurbs along the banks of the Potomac, going out toward Harper’s Ferry) and Prince William County (the southern ‘burbs including Manassas and the Quantico area) since 1964. 2012 saw a narrowing of the margins, but Obama still won his old and new strongholds and carried the state 51-47.
And now, just twelve years after Democrats weren’t ready to compete there when they urgently needed to remake the map, Hillary Clinton’s position in Virginia is now so strong that NBC News reports that Trump is bailing on the state. The decision appears to be borne out of a strategy to concentrate resources on four states – Florida, North Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania) that get past 270 electoral votes. Presumably, Trump is banking on Iowa, as his leads in that Obama ’08 and ’12 state have been durable – but those four states, plus holding Romney’s 2012 territory, puts him at 273, so Iowa would be gravy.
This doesn’t seem like a viable strategy just now – most Pennsylvania polls have him trailing by high single- or low double-digits. But no plan looks great when you’re down as much as Trump is less than four weeks out. Clinton will now be able to shift Virginia resources elsewhere, too, either to bolster defenses in Trump’s dwindling targets or to expand the map into places like Arizona and Georgia where the campaign has at times been hopeful of triumphing for the first time since the 1990s.
It also remains to be seen how accurate this initial reporting is: Trump has been pursuing Colorado aggressively, so a pullback there would be abrupt and dramatic. And it would leave this kid with less to do.
Things evolve quickly in presidential election politics. What was a safe Republican state in the Bush years has become, for the moment, a safe Democratic state.
Within the Margin 