Well, it happened. After witnessing the party get shut out of statewide races for the last dozen years, the 2021 Virginia GOP ticket swept all three major races on Tuesday, flipping a state that voted for Joe Biden by ten percentage points just one year ago. Any way you slice it, this is an incredible feat. In my predictions post yesterday, I offered the following analysis, which I believe has aged rather well:
This race is a home game for McAuliffe. The fundamentals of the new Virginia electorate favor him and his party. On the other hand, all the other fundamentals of the race are falling Youngkin's way. The momentum. The national environment, including the president's unpopularity. Virginia's long history of (almost always) voting in the party opposed to the recently-inaugurated president. And an apparent enthusiasm gap between the two parties' respective bases...As for my prediction, nearly everything I've seen, heard, and read leads me to conclude that the moment is ripe for a Youngkin victory. I'd say there's a 50 percent chance that Youngkin wins by 1-3 points. I'd also say there's a 20 percent chance that he wins by a larger margin. And I would guess that there's a 30 percent chance that the deepening blueness of the state is too much to overcome, and McAuliffe survives the scare with a win.
Some take-aways, in no particular order:
(1) In Virginia, the polls were roughly right. They'd missed fairly badly across a number of races in the Old Dominion in recent cycles, as we've discussed, but not this time. They were basically bang-on, give or take a percentage point. Glenn Youngkin's campaign told me that they were pretty consistently ahead in their internal numbers over the final weeks by three points, and those internals were also vindicated.
(2) Youngkin ran up astounding margins in rural and conservative areas of the state (the intensity was real), and made significant gains, well, everywhere.
