Virginia, McAuliffe, And Suburban Stagnation

Fighting A Suburban War

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If you take the three bluechip pollsters who have polled Virginia in the last few weeks - YouGov, Monmouth, and Fox - you get a rough polling average of D+2.7, which is broadly in line with the 538 average of D+2.5. The polls, such as they have any value, show the one interesting or notable feature of this race, which is the entire lack of suburban swing against Terry McAuliffe.

Now, that’s not quite true - TMac is winning college educated voters by 5.3% on average, a shade under 6% worse than Joe Biden’s 11% victory in 2020, but it is still a substantial retention of the Democratic vote, that is if the polls are right. The big feature of the 2020 polling miss was overstating Democratic gains with these voters - I’m still haunted by the scale of the misses. It’s inexcusable to get this wrong, and while pollsters have historically sucked at polling Black and Hispanic people, if they also suck with whites, there’s no value to them at all. That said, I do think it’s reasonable to think these tabs will be broadly correct, because of the way the polls have built such Republican leaning samples.

YouGov had a Biden +2 electorate and Fox, while not showing their electorate that clearly, can be reverse engineered to be about a Biden +6 on recalled past vote - and it’s worth keeping in mind that recalled past vote usually skews to the incumbent. I remember a fight about this during the 2019 UK election, when pollsters would do all their other weights - social class, geography, age, Leave/Remain, whatever else - and they’d get these electorates that were like Tory +10 by recalled 2017 vote, despite May only winning by just over 2%. This was used by many delusional Labour supporters to justify their belief that the 2017 polling miss would repeat, which, of course, it didn’t. Put more plainly, that YouGov sample probably voted for Trump, and the Fox one would have been pretty close too. Given that fact, the chances of the GOP being underestimated on election day is pretty damn close to zero - and that means the suburbs aren’t reverting.

Let’s put this another way - there’s a ~6% decline in the Democratic vote in Virginia with educated white voters per those three polls, and there’s a ~7% decline in the Democratic vote from 2020 to today per those polls. These voters aren’t rebelling on masse against Democrats or against Critical Race Theory or against mask mandates or anything. They’re not the drivers of the decline from 2020 to 2021 either, because that 6% decline is worth about 2% of the statewide margin decline. It’s not a revolt of the educated that’s causing the decline, it’s that Fox and YouGov think McAuliffe will win Black voters by 63% and 72%, respectively (Biden won them by 81%), and Monmouth thinks Youngkin will win non-degree whites by 48%, which would be double what Donald Trump won them by. You think either of those things are likely?

“The suburbs could revert” is born from an understandable bias - the “I hate Trump but still consider myself a Republican” voter is wildly overrepresented in 2 places - New York City and the DMV. The thing about being in either of those cities - and I can say this as someone who grew up and went to school in the Canadian capital, I get this very well - is there is an endless stream of charity dinners, fundraisers for this or that, events and galas that you can get invited to if you’re known as a good guest. Show up promptly, be polite at the table, never complain about the free meal you’re getting, and you just end up getting invited to these sorts of events again and again. I went to more than my share when I was in University, because the food was always good and my ticket was always free. And the people who go to these events are the bluechecks who end up shaping the discourse.

If you’re a political journalist in DC or New York - and I mostly mean those with some seniority and therefore some amount of wealth - your circles are going to be full of “professionals” - and I mean that with all the derision that the quotes imply. It’s a lot of doctors, lawyers, accountants, hedge fund people, and those people are substantially likely to pine for the old GOP - where they could vote for tax cuts for themselves and not feel bad about it. Talk to those people enough, and you convince yourself there’s a constituency for that kind of politics, and that Virginia, full as it is of NoVa social liberals with money, will be the first frontier. The problem is, it’s rubbish.

Orange County trended left from 2018 to 2021, and the white enclaves of the county trended left too. It’s not fucking hard to acknowledge reality, but here we are, with these narratives that CRT and wokeness are going to revert the suburbs when that’s not what the polls say. The polls are pointing to a close race in Virginia not because of suburban reversion, but in spite of the lack of it.

The reason I’m at McAuliffe by 8% still is the only way it gets substantially redder than that is either Democratic turnout falls off a cliff, Black voters rebel en masse, or Youngkin really does outrun Trump by that much with non-degree whites. I don’t find any of those things plausible, I really don’t - in the same way I won’t find a Tim Ryan 45-44 over Josh Mandel credible. A 6% slip with educated whites and everything else looks like 2020 is a D+8 result, and that’s what I expect. I could easily be wrong, but the lesson of 2020 is not to believe polls blindly, and to trust fundamentals over the polls where they disagree. Had I done that, I’d have never written the litany of idiotic South Carolina and Montana columns I wrote. 

There are few people I’d say are smarter than me about this, and two of those people made a model of the race, and their model broadly agrees with me. Little suburban reversion, most everything looks the same as 2020, and McAuliffe wins handily. Could I be wrong? Sure. Is continuing to go all in when I am merely starting to get my sea legs back under me from 2020 smart? Almost assuredly not. But what it is is intellectually honest. McAuliffe will win for the same reason he was always going to win - the suburbs ain’t going back to the GOP, because it’s a Global Fucking Realignment.