Before the polls opened in Virginia yesterday, Harry Enten of 538 went over what the polling data indicated might happen and admitted that it was hard to say. On the Democratic side, the average of polls showed a dead heat but there were a couple of surveys that showed a large lead for Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam over former Rep. Tom Perriello. Overall, the quality of the late polling wasn’t particularly high.
Here’s what Enten wrote about the Republican contest:
Most analysts believe that [Ed] Gillespie, who was the Republican nominee for Senate in 2014, will make it to another general election. The polling has been limited, but Gillespie has led in every poll but one by 15 percentage points or more. However, Change Research’s poll actually has [Corey] Stewart ahead 42 percent to Gillespie’s 41 percent. The poll is an outlier, but in a low-turnout open primary (where some nominal Gillespie supporters may decide to cast a vote in the Democratic primary) Stewart may benefit from an enthusiasm edge. Remember, this is the state where Eric Cantor shockingly lost his primary in 2014, even as the polls had him ahead.
In the end, averaging the polls gave us approximately the opposite of the actual results.
Northam, Ralph 303,541 56%
Perriello, Tom 239,505 44%
—————————————-
Gillespie, Edward 160,100 44%
Stewart, Corey 155,780 43%
Wagner, Frank 50,394 14%
Both Northam and Gillespie owe their victories to voters in the northern suburbs and more generally to the more populous and diverse blue parts of the Commonwealth.
One thing that is immediately noticeable is a large turnout disparity between the two parties, with many more people casting votes on the Democratic side. Part of this may have been precisely because the polls were wrong and indicated that the more competitive race would be on the Democratic side. But, be that as it may, the greater interest in the Democratic primary is a solid indicator that Northam begins the general election with a strong advantage. At NBC News, Chuck Todd & Company argue that Virginia isn’t a purple (competitive) state anymore:
One way to look at the closer-than-expected Gillespie-vs.-Stewart race is that Trump’s wing of the party is one the rise; this is no longer your Bush 43 party in which Gillespie served. The other way is that GOP moderates fled the party, with Northern Virginia Republicans voting in the Democratic contest (Virginia voters can pick which primary they want to participate in). “There’s a new name for the voters most people thought of as VA’s moderate Republicans a few years ago: Democrats,” observed the Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman. “VA is not a swing state,” he added. Indeed, Republicans have now gone 1-9 in major Virginia statewide races (for president, governor, U.S. Senate) since 2004.
I think this analysis is very premature. The Democrats definitely have an advantage but they should have had advantages in states like Maryland, Massachusetts, Vermont and New Hampshire where they recently lost gubernatorial elections. Almost no one predicted that Ed Gillespie would put such a scare into Sen. Mark Warner, but look at the 2014 results of their campaign:
Mark Warner (inc.) 1,073,667 49.15%
Ed Gillespie 1,055,940 48.34%
What should worry Gillespie is that he did best in areas of the state where he is going to get slaughtered in November. In the Republican areas of the state, most of the voters went for the guy who was trying to out-Trump Trump by celebrating the heritage of the Confederacy. Gillespie will need all their votes but it won’t be that easy for him to get them:
…Democrats today hold a unity event with Northam and Perriello, while Republicans aren’t unified. “There is one word you will never hear from me, and that’s ‘unity,’” Stewart told supporters, per the Washington Post.
The fact that President Trump currently has a job approval rating in Virginia in the thirties is another problem for Gillespie. While he’s positioned fairly well to make his case with moderates, he is going to have to figure out a way to mobilize the Stewart voters without any help from Stewart. Northam will have Perriello stumping for him which should help him vacuum up some of his downstate support.
Having interviewed Perriello for our current issue, I am disappointed that we won’t get to see him put his strategies and messages to use in a general election. I haven’t been able to do more than a cursory analysis of the election returns yet, but there are some indications that Perriello succeeded in making inroads into some of the more rural and exurban parts of the state. It appears that Northam’s overwhelming support from elected Democrats was convincing to the primary voters as he rolled up huge margins in the areas represented by Democrats. I wish we could have seen this experiment play out on a more neutral playing field.
YAWN!
A Real Republican is beating an ex-Republican. Why should we care?
Let me try to understand the logic here. If someone abandons the GOP, for whatever reason, and switches sides, that person is automatically suspect. Is that about what you would say?
Circa 1994/95, a whole bunch of Democrats, mostly of the Southern persuasion, switched to the GOP. I don’t recall that the GOP treated them as suspicious, as some sort of 5th columnists.
Interesting asymmetry.
Isn’t it?
There is no logic involved. This is the same guy that threatened over and over again last year that he was going to have to become a Republican. Same guy commented recently that the Republicans were becoming the progressive party.
It would have been nice to see Perriello win it. But if he campaigns along with Northam we can still see the strength of his anti monopoly message.
Local NPR station did do an initial analysis of the electoral results and commentators noted that he did very well with downstate rural voters precisely because he had a strong and compelling economic message despite being liberal on social issues. OTOH, Northam benefitted from having wide support of the VA and DC Democratic establishment and strong northern VA support including millennials. Also Northam has been able to mobilize an increasingly strong GOTV apparatus that has made a difference in recent elections. Northam also benefitted from wide name recognition as Lt. Governor. Perriello had less name recognition and also not as much money. So, it looks as though the Democratic primary results reflect the classic elements of state politics. Next year, if the Trump Administration is still in chaos and, if the AHCA becomes law, we may see the GOP getting trounced in VA.
Northram didn’t oppose Perriello’s economic suggestions. No reason he couldn’t adopt them.
Booman, I love your analyses, man, but will you please stop including Massachusetts in the “blue states electing a Republican governor — what does it mean for the nation?” stories? It means bupkis, okay?
Massachusetts has a considerable history of electing GOP governors to counterbalance the heavily Democratic legislature, where the GOP is and will remain a tiny rump element. Baker’s a tall, attractive, genial, media-savvy social liberal with a long history of civic involvement in good causes; he’s about as far from a Paul LePage as you can get. As of April his approval rating was an astounding 75 percent, best in the nation. In any other part of the country he’d be dismissed as a RINO or enrolled in the Democratic Party.
Plus: Baker ran against Martha goddamn Coakley.
Baker sucks. Just because the legislative leaders play footsie with him doesn’t make him a good person. His approval ratings are so high because elected Massachusetts Democrats refuse to criticize the clown.
Yeah, I grew up in MA and this is exactly right. It’s just a different political world. Boo’s references to MA as an example of a national swing towards Republicans have been nails on a chalkboard to me as well. That’s not what’s going on here.
Ayup. But he’s got his narrative and he’s sticking to it, no matter what lifelong Bay State residents* may tell him.
*Politically active since Mel King. Mel who, you may ask? If you have to ask, don’t try to tell me how Massachusetts politics work.
History doesn’t mean shit in our current era. Democrats won in Arkansas, Kentucky and West Virginia until recently. The Dems have collapsed all over the country while Republicans win in New England.
It’s something I won’t stop mentioning.
…the Dems path to power is in winning over disillusioned moderates. I know HRC tried that without success, but she was a bad vessel for that message bc she was so widely disliked and we had not yet experienced the horrors of Trump yet.
Heck, even Corbyn, despite his unabashedly lefty platform, outperformed expectations because he won over educated voters. The racist working class whites who abandoned Labour did not return. At least, that is what I have read.
The racist working class whites who abandoned Labour did not return. At least, that is what I have read.
Given the collapse of UKIP, they went somewhere. And Corbyn didn’t pander to them either.
Are you using “racist working class whites” as some sort of shorthand for folks in the industrial cities of northern England who voted to leave the EU?
Of course. As Democrats morph into 1950’s Republicans, it is necessary to disdain “the lowers”.
…immigration was the best predictor of voting Leave.
So, Yes, I am.
Granted, not everyone who voted Leave did so for that reason.
As I’ve said before, as long as democratic voters trust democratic office-holders, their endorsements will carry weight. I think this is a mistake, but it’s the reality. You have to make the case that the old leadership is discredited.
Here is a results map-
https://www.nytimes.com/elections/results/virginia-primary-elections
Perriello did better than I though he would in the central and South Side part of the state, plus the Far SW. Interesting as he could not get that same support when he ran for House Re-election a few yrs ago. In fact, just looking at the map; it is reverse in areas of support for Northam and Perriello than I thought it would be. County analysis would be key to seeing why. How much is Charlottesville and area in total Perriello votes ? That is his base.
Ridge
Maybe you should have read my articles and listened to me.
Perriello went after the exact demographics I’ve been advocating that Democrats go after and he won in those areas.
He lost among strong Democrats and he lost very badly.
I thought the polling which mostly indicated a deadlocked race meant that Perriello would do better among progressives and well-educated suburban Democrats, but he got slaughtered there and also probably got very little of the black vote.
His endorsements from Warren and Sanders did very little that I can see. He would have won Charlottesville anyway, and he got crushed near DC.
My best guess is that strong Democrats listened to the unanimity in the party leadership and it was decisive. In a race where neither candidate had that kind of advantage, we’d get a better picture of how Perriello’s strategy can play in Democratic primaries.
Going into the general, I’d rather have Perriello’s geographic base of support because the Democratic areas will deliver regardless.
I liked Perriello and his message. I also liked that he stood up on the Obamacare vote and a lot of Obama alums supported him. Then Bernie came along and endorsed Perrielo and the Sanders cult immediately turned the race into Bernie versus Hillary again.
Emotionally – and irrationally – I immediately began to hope against Perriello. I do not think women (because of Hillary) or blacks (because of Obama) will ever forgive Bernie.
That is really bad news for the progressive cause and Democrats generally but even worse news for the Sanders Revolution.
I’ll mention your analysis to the two women in my household who voted for Sanders in our state’s primary.
Your mileage may vary, of course. In my particular media bubble Bernie is toxic, particularly among black women. I grant that – like everybody else these days – my bubble is less than representative of opinion broadly.
Before closely analyzing the election returns Martin posits that the difference between the candidates was that Northam was supported by the establishment. I think that is thin, but maybe.
I am going to guess that Perriello got crushed in the black communities and lost women by a healthy margin. I know the polling is problematic, but this race was supposed to be close. Sanders delivered a late endorsement. The race turned out to be not close.
I think Martin is wrong about the Sanders endorsement. I think it was consequential. It hurt Perriello.
Because you have a narrative and you’re sticking to it.
GMAFB, the media and others were pigeonholing this race before Perriello could even announce. This is WaPo, January 5th:
You keep trying to put yourself above it all but you’re just as juvenile. Someone on this board voted for Stein because of another member here at the Pond. How absurd to base your political opinions about candidates based on a small cadre of people online you don’t like. Pick your scabs elsewhere.
I agree. I said it was an irrational reaction. In Virginia, I probably would have voted for Perriello. When Clinton and Obama camps go in different directions that is fine, and healthy for the party. However bitter the fight, they will unite when push comes to shove.
The problem I see is that I do not believe the Clinton camp and the Sanders camp can ever be united. The Democratic candidate will be fighting a two front war again in 2020.
The map supports that view. He won the center of the state. And could be expected to carry the north in the general.
Well I’ve been a little busy. But I have now read your interview.
The themes he sounded were absent or certainly muted in his 2011 run. Why? the conditions in the regions he needed in 2011 haven’t changed that much. Was it a “road to Damascus” realization or was it National Politics that changed the dynamic and gave him the impetus in those regions? Is he leading or following the regional mood?
The whole region he won is the part of the state that has NOT benefited greatly from Va’s economic growth of the last 8yrs. It wasn’t doing great in 2011 and doing a little better now. The NoVa/Piedmont/Tidewater region has seen vastly better growth and went with Northam.
Also Perriello’s wins are in the areas with the comparative small populations. Some counties had less than 2000 Democratic Party votes (some 1 thousand). Can you really extrapolate Democratic Party support in those regions from that small a number turnout?
And something else – I noticed on his web site, events mentioned almost all through May and Early June are in the regions he lost. Few are in the areas he won. Some of the commentary after Nov 2016 was that a greater rural Democratic turnout would have won those states on the margins; but were ignored by Clinton campaign. Could the same be said in rural Va? Could increased votes for Tom in Rockbridge, Augusta or Patrick … Counties overcome the margins in NoVa or Norfolk for Northam ? I don’t know but he certainly ignored those areas in the last months. Sounds familiar.
So to recap-
Perriello campaigned on a “progressive” economic message.
He won in some of the most rural areas of the state with the least number of voting Democrats in that primary. Areas that have seen limited economic growth over the last Obama Admin.
Though previously endorsed by Obama, he lost in the areas that had the core support for Obama. Areas that have had the greatest economic growth in the state for the last 8 yrs.
In the last months of the campaign, he ignored the areas he was winning (often by small margins) to concentrate in Norfolk, Richmond, NoVa regions. Areas that he lost by larger margins.
So the question becomes, is he now still worth the National Exposure? Maybe he should win something once again to become a national figure.
Ridge
Interesting as he could not get that same support when he ran for House Re-election a few yrs ago.
That was after he voted for Obama care
Excellent point as he was my congressman in 2009 -2011. He swept in with Obama but did little to create a constituency outside his UVa base to sustain him in the next election. Albemarle dinner parties do not generate support in Halifax or Main Street Chatham. Nor was he loudly sounding those themes of 2017 in 2011.
I’m sure he is a nice guy but parlaying one 2 yr Congressional career into repeated losses and National Exposure is not the way to get Dems in office. How much more (on the campaign trail training) can the party afford ; though it may be good for Perriello
R