Virginia: Red Wave Crashes Onshore

A Disaster for Dems

I’m not sure if anyone cares what I have to say about US elections these days - or, frankly, if they should still care what I have to say - but Glenn Youngkin is clearly the Governor-elect of Virginia and the GOP are now obviously, clearly, favourites to flip the Senate next year - let alone the House. Tonight is an utter disaster for the Democratic Party, and they ought to be ashamed of themselves for this bullshit. But I’m not going to focus on that, because I’m going to focus on why I got this wrong.

In 2020, there was a group of polls which were hilariously, comically, insanely optimistic about the Democratic chances of outrunning past results with white voters, and especially suburban whites. Even as Biden et al did much better with whites with a degree, they still massively underran their polls with these voters, because partisanship locked in and voters were unwilling to default from their past partisanship. The lesson I took from that was that partisanship was king.

Even in Governor’s races, we saw that partisanship lock in in 2020, with Missouri and Montana having races that were close-ish in the polls and then they tracked close to the Presidential result. In 2018, the GOP overperformed in the rust belt and underperformed their polls in the sunbelt (with Florida as the one notable exception). Richard Cordray was favoured by about 3% in the polls in Ohio in 2018, and he lost by 4%, because partisans came home. I thought the same thing would happen.

I also saw the global trend towards left wing parties in the suburbs and the fact that realignment survived California, and I assumed things wouldn’t change much. Having been caught believing low quality polls which posited a large swing in 2020, I wasn’t prepared to do that again. And then, I just got smashed tonight.

It looks like the swing to the GOP is fairly uniform - they’re just outperforming by about 10-15% everywhere, and that’s a result you can’t come back from. They’re massively outperforming in the rural areas, which are not at all surprising, and also doing so in the DC suburbs, which is more surprising. Clearly partisanship wasn’t enough here, and I got that very very wrong.

If you want the short and long of 2022 analysis, it’s a disaster. The House map is going to be heavily defensive, and even if the national environment recovers, the GOP are much more live in places like the Colorado 8th than I would have thought before tonight.  Democratic dreams of winning the western Montana seat, amongst others, should be understood now as the delusions they are.

The Generic Ballot polls showing a tight race are clearly trash, and should be rightly dismissed from here on out. This is a disastrous night for the Democratic Party, but it’s a worse night for my predictive skills.

I got it very, very wrong. I deserve all the slings and arrows I will inevitably have thrown at me. Clearly, whatever talent I have at predicting Canadian and UK elections I do not have at predicting US ones, and my apologies to everyone who trusted me in Virginia. I got it wrong, and I feel worse about it than you do. To the Republicans who thought I was an idiot the whole time, congrats on the victory, and have fun dunking on me. I deserve it.