VIRGINIA POST ELECTION ROUND UP
It was a great night for Democrats almost everywhere, and especially in Virginia. Democrats narrowly retained the 40-seat State Senate (21 Dem – 19 Rep). We also flipped the 100 member House of Delegates (51 Dem – 48 Rep). Wait?!? 51-48 doesn’t add up to 100. More on that below.
To recap, we supported two young promising African American candidates in the Hampton Roads metro area. Our candidates – Michael Feggans and Kim Pope Adams – challenged two first-term white Republican incumbents, Karen Greenhalgh and Kim Taylor. These races were consistently rated as among the most competitive, but were not drawing the same level of funding as those in the wealthier Northern Virginia DC suburbs.
We turned out to be a substantial percentage of small donations (under $100) to both candidates. Each received just over $50,000 in cash contributions of $100 or less in October. Conservatively estimated (and angel contributions would not be included in the small donor figures), BJ raised at least 20% of that total.
RESULTS ARE IN! Sort of…..
Michael Feggans pulled it off by over 2,000 votes – flipping the seat by 54-46 percent. And Michael’s victory was the win that flipped the House of Delegates!
VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. (WAVY) — All eyes were once again on Virginia’s largest city this Election Day as a pair of Virginia Beach Democrats were the pivotal wins to gaining control of both houses of the General Assembly.
Just past 11 p.m. Election Night, cheers erupted inside the Virginia Beach Democrats watch party as the campaign of Michael Feggans felt they had seen enough to declare victory.
Not just over their race, but over the fight for control of the House of Delegates.
With Feggans win, Democrats officially flipped it.
Republican Kim Taylor has declared victory, but our Kim refuses to concede.
A race that many political watchers had deemed the biggest toss-up in the entire commonwealth certainly is living up to its expectations. Republican incumbent Kim Taylor, who trailed Democratic challenger Kimberly Pope Adams for most of Election Night, surged ahead by 173 votes just before midnight, leaving the outcome of the election possibly contingent on the results of provisional ballots that have until Monday to be counted.
As of late Tuesday night, Taylor had 14,141 votes to Adams’ 13,968. Percentage-wise, that translates to 50.2% to 49.7% — a difference of 0.5%. That difference is right at the threshold for a state-financed recount.
It looks like we picked the race that needed us most! The non-partisan Virginia Public Access Project rated this race as the most competitive of all Virginia House raises.
Big thanks to all the Balloon Juice angels and to all who donated! And to all the postcard writers!!!
Anyway, stand by. This one isn’t over yet.
Baud
Um…
ETA: Regardless, kudos to you for your work in winning VA.
Stella
… 51 plus 49 does add up to 100, unless there’s a joke I’m missing?
H.E.Wolf
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_MyUGq7pgs
(hat tip to schrodingers_cat)
ETA: This video is my current fave for victory
206inKY
Wow, this is incredible! Congratulations to everyone who chipped in on these two.
WaterGirl
@Baud: @Stella: Everyone is allowed the occasional typo, am I right?
randy khan
So many people worked so hard to make the Virginia results happen, and in the face of a huge commitment by the Republicans to flip the State Senate and increase their majority in the House of Delegates – just wave after wave of money from superPACs.
It’s so gratifying to see that work pay off. And it’s even more gratifying because of what it does to cuddly moderate Glenn Youngkin’s presidential aspirations. That warms the cockles of my heart.
WaterGirl
@206inKY: And to all the postcard writers here!
WaterGirl
@randy khan: Here’s hoping that with these victories in VA, we have stopped Youngin for being the next DeSantis on the national stage.
I think the money folks were super hopeful that Youngkin could be the savior for the 2024 presidential election.
Ken
@WaterGirl: This is a politics post. Never admit error! Find some strained interpretation that means you were right all along.
The obvious out here is to insist your “-” was a minus sign, and indeed 51–49 is not 100, it is 2.
Tony Jay
OT – But speaking of vile right-wing shitstirrers on the wrong side of the Melanin Line (okay we’re not, but we were), it’s looking more and more like the UK’s Prime Miniature, Rishi Sunak, is going to have to ‘accept the resignation’ of Suella Braverman, the hugely underqualified and overpromoted Home Secretary, after she went too far in defying his non-existent authority and picked a culture war battle with the Metropolitan Police over their refusal to ban a pro-peace march taking place this Saturday on Armistice Day.
The long and short of it is that Braverman was one of Flobalob’s creations. A former undistinguished lawyer who entered Parliament and jumped straight into Hard Right politics as thought-leader of the anti-EU European Research Group (ERG) of Tory MPs. She’s always been 100% about taking any passing opportunity to get her name in the papers and get talked about as a willing conduit for extremist rhetoric, mouthing off about the threat posed by ‘Cultural Marxism’ back in 2019 (but it’s okay, concerned Media bros and hoes, the ever so jolly independent Board of Jewish Deputies took time out from their campaign of lies and distortion against Jeremy Corbyn to pronounce Braverman free of any antisemitic taint whatsoever and a good friend of the right type of Jew – wink wink) while generally making herself the Brown Best Friend of a host of far-Right causes. Anti-Woke, homophobic, transphobic, pro-authoritarian; you all know the drill, it’s exactly the same browsing buffet of fash-trash shibboleths you see over there, just with the serial numbers filed off and references to God and Apple Pie changed to The Crown and Bangers and Mash.
Flobalob, who BTW is getting murdered by the Covid Inquiry, elevated her to Attorney-General in 2020, mostly because she was horrifically unqualified for the job and would say whatever she was told to say on her bosses’ behalf. But she always had such heady ambitions. Once Flobby’s time in office was clearly coming to an end she dolched her sloss in his pasty white legende by publicly calling on him to resign and jumped ship to the Truss camp, where she was rewarded by Mad Queen Bess of the Vegetable Isle with the Home Secretary post, making this inch-deep pool of septic rat vomit the third most powerful politician in the country. She then repaid Truss for her promotion by savaging her in a resignation letter she had to write after only a month in office following her being found guilty of breaching the Ministerial Code (probably deliberately) and was rewarded for her assistance by the incoming Rishi Sunak with a return to the Home Secretary post she’d just vacated. So yeah, a highly trustworthy individual with a lot of moral and ethical fortitude.
The proximate cause of this new resignation crisis, if not the genuine reason for it, involves her getting way out over her skis regarding a planned Peace March being organised for Saturday. Long story short, Braverman’s entire career to date has been one long audition for the role of Leader of the post-Tory Nationalist Conservative (or, Nat-C) faction of the crumbling Tory coalition, feeding the rabid base the red meat and victimutude they crave while presenting herself to the Party as the only person who can credibly bridge the gap between the “We’re not racist, we just love being superior to ‘those people’” Tory voters (because she’s brown, see?) and the UKIP/BNP/Reform Party loons who would otherwise back either a breakaway or a takeover led by odious frogman Nigel Farage (because she hates the browns, see?).
While the Tories have gleefully jumped on the same “Israel can do nothing wrong in its own self-defence” bandwagon as the rest of the Global Right (closely tracked by their conjoined twins in Nu-New Labour) the bulk of Britain’s human population have been disgusted by the images coming out of the Gaza Shooting Range, and as more and more people have started raising their heads above the Media parapet to call out the politicians for their weasel words and demand they press for a humanitarian ceasefire and an end to the slaughter, the narrative has started to shift around. The right-wing Press, always on the look-out for a new Hate Week, started up a campaign claiming that ‘pro-Hamas terrorist-sympathisers’ were planning to ‘attack’ the Cenotaph in London (because they hate our freedoms, yeah?) under cover of a ‘so-called Peace March’ on Armistice Day, even though it was well-known to absolutely everyone from Day One that the Peace March wasn’t going anywhere near the Cenotaph.
Rishi Sunak tried to throw his ephemeral weight around by insisting that it would be some kind of insult to the memories of all those brave servicepeople who laid down their lives in a war against right-wing militarism and genocide if people were allowed to march in opposition to (checks notes) right-wing militarism and genocide, and he was, y’know, totally going to defend Britain’s great traditions of free-expression by banning it. It was pretty quickly noted by everyone with a brain that Sunak had neither the legal authority nor the political capital (or the metaphysical balls – not sure if he was hand carved to have physical ones) to do any such thing, and by yesterday he was furiously backtracking after the head of the Metropolitan Police (normally the first port of call if you want someone to smack around a bunch of peacenik marchers) said he wouldn’t be ordering his officers to police a ban. Gravitas of a gnat’s cock ring, that Rishi Sunak, with minus Charisma stats and the raw, physical menace of a week-old peanut shell.
Anyway, Braverman saw her chance. She wasn’t having any of this bourgeois Woke nonsense about ‘legal rights’ and ‘peaceful protesting’. While Sunak was occupied trying to pretend that he’d never threatened to hold the head of the Metropolitan Police ‘accountable’, she moved on from her latest dogwhistle about banning the homeless from using tents because living on the street is just ‘a lifestyle choice’ (I mean, WTF?) to publish a piece in the Press raving away about how this march was just a front for antisemitic hate, all true Britons wanted it banned, and the Met Police were obviously institutionally biased against patriotic right-wing groups while laying down for any Woke Marxist with a placard and a stupid chant. She all but outright called for these ‘patriotic right-wing groups’ to come on down and take on the job of defending the sanctity of the Cenotaph (by attacking the Peace Marchers) if the limp-wristed Met wouldn’t do it. Thing was, she hadn’t cleared any of this with Downing Street. Indeed, she may have gone and said it all after being specifically told to tone down her language, and now the Government Whips are taking the Party’s temperature on the idea of booting her.
So, why has she gone and torpedoed her hold on a senior office for the second time? Probably because she – like everyone else – can see how toxic the Tories have become since they delivered their Brexit ‘victory’ (and since the Media stopped protecting them in order to do their hatchet job on Corbyn) and knows that there’s going to be a Tory leadership election either before or after they lose scores of seats in next year’s General. She’d rather be a right-wing martyr now (and conveniently out of Sunak’s witless Cabinet) than have to campaign for a Sunak-led Government that isn’t going to happen, planning on coming back later as the self-crowned leader of the rump Tory Opposition and occupying Number 10 once Starmer’s lot have spent five years reminding the electorate why they turfed New Labour out the first time by imposing further austerity, local government cuts and NHS privatisation on an already brutalised country.
You know what, that’s probably a smart career plan. Absolutely rotten and inhuman and doomed to end badly for 99.9% of the people within 1000 miles of her Nat-C policies, but since when has the common good meant jack shit to a Tory?
Baud
@WaterGirl:
There’s a reason we’re told there would be no math on this blog.
Lapassionara
Thank you, WaterGirl, for leading this effort. Well done!
Chris
Asses kicked, names taken. I am okay with this outcome.
rikyrah
I wouldn’t concede either. Make them recount.
And, well done, BJ!!!
Once again, using small $$$ to help turn it into bigger $$$ for help.
Every bit helps!!
Chris
@Tony Jay:
Jesus fuck, how far gone do you have to be for a police chief to tell you “sorry sir, we refuse to crack the left-wing protesters’ skulls.”
Tony Jay
@Chris:
I know! It’s like being turned down by The Dick Shaped Sausage Company when you ask them to cater your sexy party.
Just Some Fuckhead
Glad Virginia voters pulled through since no one in my household voted this year. We’re in a reliably gerrymandered Republican district anyway (two actually: the house district and the senate district.) Looks like there aren’t enough outstanding provisional votes for Pope Adams to catch up.
randy khan
@WaterGirl:
Absolutely, the money folks saw the 2021 election and decided that Youngkin – who is really quite smarmy and entitled, not that something like that would bother them – was the guy to either take out Trump (ha!) or supplant Trump if he faltered.
Now, not so much.
I’m not sure whether it would have turned out differently if Youngkin hadn’t been pushing the fake “compromise” of a 15-week abortion ban, but that strategic choice alone showed he wasn’t ready for prime time.
Wombat Probability Cloud
Thanks for tracking this, WaterGirl.
Uncle Cosmo
@Baud:Sorry to disappoint you, but…
Those Kim v Kim results show a margin of
(14,141 – 13,968)/(14,141+13,968) = 173/28,107 = 0.615%
Supposedly >95% of the votes have been counted, so Good Kim would need to beat Bad Kim by at least 2.3% in the votes remaining to be counted to reach the 0.5% automatic recount threshold. (But this is a rough calculation that presumes, among other things, that there are no other candidates or write-ins who got votes for that seat.)
MattF
@WaterGirl: Might have been autocorrect.
Jackie
@WaterGirl:
I do, too. He and Kemp have been mentioned as “sane” (by GQP standards) possibilities for the Never Trump faction.
randy khan
@Just Some Fuckhead:
Step one is getting below the recount threshold, which is a lot easier than overtaking Taylor with remaining ballots.
And I don’t know the specifics of your source, but it’s provisionals, late-arriving absentee ballots, and same-day registrations that haven’t been counted. (I actually would be curious about how many same-day registrations and late absentee ballots there are overall as a proportion of votes cast. Same-day registration is a great thing, but I’ve never know how often people use it.)
smith
@randy khan: I think we do need to fear that eventually they will come up with a smooth, plausible fascist who can sneak in under the radar, as Youngkin apparently did in his gubernatorial campaign. It will have to be someone without much political history who can effectively dog-whistle to the racists while passing himself off as a “reasonable” Republican. They haven’t yet got the formula right, but they’re working on it.
Baud
What happened to the Dem who got revenge porned?
Chris
@randy khan:
Honestly, in any state that’s either blue or too purple, the best move for any Republican candidate is probably to do as little campaigning as possible, pay for a bunch of ads attacking your opponents on things that poll well, and let the mainstream media blanket the airwaves with the kind of fluff portraying you as “a different kind of Republican” that they’ll do all by themselves without needing your help.
For the love of God, don’t actually make any policy proposals. Not about abortion, not about anything. Anything you propose is either going to piss off the general public and cost you the election or piss off your base voters and cost you the election.
Old School
@Baud: She lost
Edit:
Immanentize
@Baud: Susanna Gibson. Lost to odious Rep. who probably was behind the porn release (she and her husband had sex online for tips). But only by less than 1000 votes in a pretty red district. Normal result.
Baud
@Old School:
@Immanentize:
Thanks.
WaterGirl
@Just Some Fuckhead: I still think there should be a recount – with a difference of 1/2 of 1% that seems in order, regardless of who is ahead.
Just my opinion.
VeniceRiley
WaterGirl
@MattF: Good one!
Mallard Filmore
DougJ Pitchbot got a mention by Keith Oblermann today.
title: “MINNESOTA AVOIDS RULING ON 14th AMENDMENT AND TRUMP – 11.9.23 | Countdown with Keith Olbermann”
link: https://youtu.be/QqnOz1lGugU?t=1440
New Deal democrat
While I am glad that Democrats won both Houses, now that the election is over, I want to add one note of caution.
This was the first post-Dobbs election in Virginia. We made no headway in the Senate, and flipped only 4 of 100 seats in the House.
in other words, this may be the first time in 16 months that Democrats have not overperformed in an election vs. expectations (there really was no polling). Abortion is certainly a very good issue for us, but in Virginia it was not the Holy Grail.
rikyrah
@Tony Jay:
LIPS SO PURSED.
I know this type. They are loathesome.
rikyrah
@Baud:
She lost? Awe. that sucks.
rikyrah
@New Deal democrat:
But, is it that disappointing? After all, if you live in Virginia, you are literally on the gates of the Pro-Choice America, from Maryland on North.
But, abortion was enough to make enough women think…even though I’m close to those states, I still want Virginia to stay Pro-Choice.
Most important thing is that millions were spent by the allies of Governor Sweater Vest, who was peddling that 15 week compromise bullshyt. If they had succeeded, that swill would begin to be blanketed everywhere. So, it’s best that it failed in Virginia.
TriassicSands
Oh, WaterGirl, not for some Juicers, you know, those who have never made a typo or mistake in their entire lives.
I assume that you originally had typed 51-49, probably thinking of what the total should be. I hate comment typos, but they happen all the time, especially when a person is busy or being distracted by other things. When I read your post it said 51-48, so I guess you got what for and fixed up.
Suggestion (which you shouldn’t consider) — go do the job for a right wing blog — all the typos in the world won’t bother them, as long as the mistakes favor the Republiclowns.
You do a great job.
Geoffrey Knobl
I am happy Virginia has moved back toward intelligence and wisdom but disheartened by my own area’s losses (apparently) for Trish White-Boyd and Lily Franklin to individuals who may not even in The Enlightenment. I wouldn’t be surprised if their opponents believe the earth is flat.
Geminid
@Immanentize: I think it was Youngkin’s minions at the state Republican party apparatu, not the opponent, who peddled Susanna Gibson’s sex tapes.
JoyceH
I particularly like that the Loudoun school board was retaken by the normies. Loudoun was pretty much Patient Zero of the “scream at the school board” genre of right wing performance art in 2021. Hopefully that fad is over.
Matt McIrvin
This kind of laser targeting is why I do a lot of my political donation through this blog. It looks like the best bet for making a difference that we could have made.
Matt McIrvin
@JoyceH: Back before Lyndon LaRouche was in jail, Loudoun was his home base and that guy’s weird conspiracy cult was a pioneer in the screaming harassment school of politics.
Major Major Major Major
@WaterGirl:
Only commenters, never front-pagers. Especially not me, if the voices in my head can be believed.
Almost Retired
I’m really pulling for Good Kim, and I hope she wins her recount. If she doesn’t, I hope she runs again. Michael and Good Kim were such likeable and appealing candidates that I’ll be following their careers in the future.
Matt McIrvin
@New Deal democrat: Based on the pre-election polling I’ve seen, the ballot questions in Ohio, and Beshear, did not dramatically overperform polls– the results were well in line. There was enough spread that you could say they overperformed polls cherry-picked to be dramatic.
kalakal
@Tony Jay: Heh, great stuff. I do however have to take exception to this bit
You ever stood on one of those in bare feet. They’re evil little bastards, they lurk.
japa21
Regarding being somewhat concerned that there wasn’t a major over performing of the polls, I think 2 things are important to understand. Many of these special elections are off-year elections. Normally Dems have a problem getting out voters in off year elections. This, IMHO, portends well for 2024. Secondly, I am not sure that Dems have over performed in other special elections unless you look at historical turnout. IOW, the previous election results were not that much out of line with what limited polling was done.
cmorenc
@Mallard Filmore:
Given that both Minnesota and Colorado are significantly more likely to go blue in the 24 Presidential race than red, I’m not sure kicking Trump off the ballot would have been a smart tactical move, even if Judge Luttig is correct that in principle, Trump should be disqualified under the US 14A insurrection clause. Trump getting kicked off the ballot could create grounds for a House thin majority to vote to disregard those states’ electoral votes, and RW SCOTUS to uphold their non-counting, at least absent a prior conviction for a crime SCOTUS regards as equivalent to insurrection rather than some other form of misconduct.
Alison Rose
@Matt McIrvin: Same! It can be difficult to figure out where your dollar will go furthest, especially if you only have a few to spare. I appreciate this place for helping us navigate that.
Geminid
@Matt McIrvin: Loudon County is slso where Grover Norquist set up his direct mail operation. I think Loudon County attracted other “movement” conservatives in the 1960s and 70s, because it was close to DC but not too close.
One of my high school friends from Annandale High moved there. I rediscovered her while looking at the very conservative Bull Elephant blog. She’s the founder and editor. I plan to parachute into the comments section someday and say, “Hey Jeanine, remember me?”
Fun Loudon County fact: During the Civil War, a band of partisan cavalry from Loudon sparred a lot with Mosby’s Rangers, especially in the first two years. They were Quaker Unionists.
Emily
Congratulations on the victories in Virginia! 🎉 It’s inspiring to see grassroots support making a real impact. Keep up the fantastic work in building positive change at the local level! 👏🌟
Emily
@Geminid:
Congratulations on the impressive victories in Virginia! 🎉 It’s heartening to see the positive impact of grassroots support and the triumph of dedicated candidates. Your contributions to these successes are truly commendable!
Geminid
I saw a headline saying that Michael Feggins’ win spelled trouble for Rep. Jen Kiggans. His district falls within her coastal 2nd CD. I think Kiggans beat Rep. Elaine Luria by less than 4 points last November. Democrats think they can win that seat back, and are already targeting Kiggans with attack ads.
Barbara
@New Deal democrat: It’s hard to know what expectations should have been. The watershed was 2017, where we went from a house of 67/33 to 52/48 (if memory serves). I think it went back to 51/47 through some subsequent cycles. In my view, flipping four house seats is actually a really big deal. It’s hard to say whether Gibson might have won if her participation in a porn site had not been publicized. But consider that she almost won even with that incredibly negative development.
In addition, a few years ago Virginia adopted a constitutional amendment on “fair” redistricting, and although I voted against it because I accurately predicted that it was guaranteed to deadlock between the parties, the new process definitely prevented Youngkin from effectively restacking the deck against Ds. (So I am happy to have been wrong about this overall even if I was right about it in the details.) What ultimately happened after a special master was appointed to come up with a neutral plan probably diluted the strength of Democrats a bit. It’s hard to know for sure, but that’s my take. Scott in Virginia might be more knowledgeable.
Another thing — Youngkin put his heart and soul into this election. He raised a ton of money for Republican candidates and he made more than 100 personal appearances. With all that, he moved the needle in his direction by exactly one Senate seat — and moved it in the other direction by four house seats. I am sure that he is taking the loss pretty personally, especially after his confident blather that limiting abortion after 15 weeks was a consensus that “most” Virginians would back. No, as it turns out, it isn’t. Some people think he went so public with that sentiment — which risked alienating moderates — in order to goose the turnout of evangelical and other conservative voters. That tells me he wasn’t feeling all that confident about what he was seeing in terms of early voting patterns.
YMMV. But I wouldn’t be too disappointed about Virginia. The big swings had already occurred for the most part.
hrprogressive
This Virginian who is adjacent to Virginia Beach thanks everyone who helped send Feggans across the finish line.
Greenhalgh ran some slimy ads, but her “last week before election day” ad tried to bury all that with colorful bubble lettering and a plea from her dachshund to vote for “his mom”. Hurl.
Things went better than I expected down here.
The NoVA areas always get big attention and dollars due to their proximity to DC, but Hampton Roads and the Richmond area (Henrico County, etc) often get looked at less, even though these three areas are the true “population centers” of the state.
Thanks again. 🤘
Tony Jay
@rikyrah:
There are a lot like this in the Tory Party. Cameron made a genuine effort to recruit outside the male, white, pub-bore stereotype in a campaign to shed the nasty image of the Blair Years, but what that meant was recruiting a lot of FYIGM psychopaths who thought they could profit from being ‘the good ones’ and taking advantage of the opportunities for profit and advancement the Party offered.
Biting them in the ass now. Braverman, Kwarteng, Badenoch, Sunak himself, it’s a shitshow of selfish fuckery and in Braverman and Badenoch they’ve got accelerants in the far-Right solution who push the Party farther and faster in that fashy direction by virtue of needing to prove their loyalty to ‘proper British traditions’ every single day because, you know, of how they come packaged.
Barbara
@JoyceH: My daughter’s best friend teaches in Loudoun and she is horrified by what happened there. However, she wasn’t really surprised. Let’s just say that Loudoun’s population has changed and grown a lot more than its political class had, and the school board that was in place two years ago was ill-equipped to run a school district that is now the home to some of the most academically ambitious parents on the planet.
Barbara
@hrprogressive: Well. Fairfax County is home to 25% of Virginia voters. Virginia Beach County is the next largest at 10%. But however you measure it, it’s hard to win statewide without having a rock solid base in either Fairfax or Hampton Roads. Hence, the statewide results in Virginia over the last 15 years.
lowtechcyclist
@Geminid:
Loudoun County was more exurban and even horse country back then, back in the days when Dulles Airport wasn’t part of the built-up suburbs yet. Much more red than it is now.
You’ll have to do that, and tell us how it goes!
Reminds me of when I found that the horny chick from my high school that a few of us got friendly with back then, turned up as a GOP state legislator in Wisconsin, all about ‘family values.’
And now I’ve got “My Old School” as an earworm. California tumbles into the sea, that’ll be the day I go back to Annandale. ;-)
Barbara
@lowtechcyclist: Annandale on the Hudson . . . I can never listen to that song without laughing. My first year roommate at UVA was from Annandale, VA. It was not a match made in heaven, that’s for sure.
Geminid
@Barbara: Virginia Democrats went from down 65-35 in the 2011 House of Delegates to down 51-49 after the 2017 election. That was the time a seat was decided by drawing slips out of a hat because of a tie. The Republican won the drawing and averted a 50-50 House.
A Voting Rights Act lawsuit resulted in 11 districts being redrawn before the 2019 races. Democrats came out of that election up 55-45. The VRA suit accounted for 2 or 3 of those pickups. The rest were the continuation of a breakdown of the Republican’s 2011 gerrymander.
lowtechcyclist
@Barbara:
51-49, and the equivalent of a coin toss away from 50-50. That was when that one district in Newport News ended in a tie, and they drew lots or something to break the tie, which the GOP candidate won.
divF
@JoyceH: Loudon County used to be reliably red, sending the odious Barbara Comstock to the HoR from the 10th congressional district. Then finally in 2018, Democrat Jennifer Wexton won over Comstock by 12%, and things have been much more blue since then.
Barbara
@Geminid: I didn’t look up the numbers, I just know the directional trends, and a lot of people were really surprised that D’s flipped so many seats in 2017, especially after all the last minute news stories about how the momentum had shifted in favor of Gillespie. I even made phone calls on Election Day, and stood out in the pouring rain at TJ Middle School to hand out literature. And then went home and nearly cried because the results were so positive.
Eyeroller
@lowtechcyclist: It was an actual coin toss.
This state was very red when I moved here 29 years ago. It stayed red for a long time after that. This assumption that it’s now reliably blue is based on barely more than a decade of voting patterns. The off-year elections, especially those without the governor on the ballot, keep it purple at least at the state level, in my opinion.
Major Major Major Major
@cmorenc: Agreed, it’s a dumb stunt that will accomplish nothing and might hurt us and/or America.
Barbara
@Eyeroller: I first showed up in 1978 when John Warner was elected to the U.S. Senate. I moved out of state and then back for good 35 years ago. It was so reliably red at the federal level that I used to decamp to my mother’s house in Pittsburgh to help in canvassing for elections. More likelihood of having an impact.
But I also try to remember that at the state level it was never as red as many other states — Douglas Wilder was one of the first African American governors in the country, if not the first.
New Deal democrat
@Barbara: In re
I wrote Josh Marshall about this. I think most people saw right through this as a classic bait and switch. In other words, had they won, the GOP would have immediately disregarded this and enacted the most extreme bill they could.
Had people thought the ads were in good faith (and if the cutoff were 17 or more weeks, where polls for decades have shown that support for abortion begins to drop off a lot) it probably would have gotten much more traction.
Another Scott
@New Deal democrat: @rikyrah:
Virginia has a history of being contrarian to the party that holds the White House.
It was a very, very good day for Virginia.
That said, of course we have to remember that the country is still too closely divided to be complacent. Every election will be a struggle.
But we’ll win if we turn out.
Cheers,
Scott.
lowtechcyclist
@Eyeroller:
You moved to Virginia right when it was in a bit of a red wave. Right before then, we’d had three Dem governors in a row: Chuck Robb, Gerry Baliles, and Doug Wilder. Things have swung back and forth at different levels, but I wouldn’t have characterized Virginia as ‘very Republican’ (the red v. blue nomenclature dates from the 2000 election’s rather extended election night) anytime since I became politically aware. Maybe ‘very Democratic’ back in the Dixiecrat days, though.
Well, not that long: Mark Warner got elected governor in 2001.
Well, it’s reliably blue on what level. It’s one of those odd things about politics that very red states will elect Democrats for governor when they won’t for President or Senator, and vice versa. 2004 was the last time Virginia voted for a Republican for President or Senator; it’s gotten pretty reliably blue at that level.
Barbara
@New Deal democrat: One problem is all the horror stories coming out of places that have also supposedly enacted exceptions for the life or health of the mother — basically, requiring women to be at death’s door before allowing intervention. This is a problem for them, more so I think than the specific limiting period.
New Deal democrat
@Another Scott: But for McAuliffe’s gaffe, VA would have remained and would now be blue.
lowtechcyclist
@Another Scott:
11 Congressional districts – what were the other four races? (No Senate race in 2022, IIRC.)
New Deal democrat
@Barbara: Agreed.
Unfortunately, the problem with this starts with Justice Blackmun, who in the companion case to Roe, Doe v. Bolton, wrote that health means:
Besides being micromanaging, it seems (and more importantly was understood by RWers) to suggest that a “bad hair day” is enough.
So the RWers have gone overboard in the other direction about “health.”
I think most of us understand that “health” in this context ought to mean “physical health” as unreasonably agreed to by the woman and her physician.
Anyway, moot for the moment now.
Jeffro
VERY true.
Ari Melber had James Carville on last night, and asked James why Virginia had rejected Youngkin’s “15 week ‘limit’ compromise” and by extension, GOP candidates.
Carville: ” ’cause everyone knows the GOP is lying”
Geminid
@Barbara: In 2017, Ralph Northam and Democratic House candidates centered Medicaid expansion in their campaigns. The Blue wave that year was enough to induce Republican Speaker Kirk Cox and 9 other Republicans to help pass expansion. Three of Northam’s former Republican Senate colleagues also joined Senate Democrats in passing Medicaid expansion.
Democrats also campaigned on gun control in 2017- or as we like to say now, “gun safety.” Virginia Democrats used to be afraid of firearms issues, but now gun safety seems to be a winning issue in the suburban battleground districts.
Democrats campaigned on gun safety again in 2019 and were able to pass six good gun safety laws in the 2020 session. A Wason Center poll showed 70+% support for the proposals. There was a big gun rights demonstration in Richmond at the start of the 2020 session. I’m not sure there were any protests the following July, when the new laws took effect.
Kent
Out here on the west coast it looks like a bunch of centrist Dems are beating the incumbent liberals on the Seattle City Council. Republicans are a non-factor, the races are usually between lefty types and centrist corporate type Dems. There has been endless social media and local media coverage of homelessness and crime in both Seattle and Portland which is no doubt the main reason why the lefty types are losing. They are all getting the blame for “defund the police” and the failure of west coast cities to clean up visible homelessness and fentanyl use in visible public spaces and downtown. Votes are still being counted. OR and WA are 100% mail-in voting so takes time to count all the late arriving ballots, which typically trend more blue.
Here in my own little town of Camas WA the municipal elections are all nonpartisan but you can dig and find out who the MAGA folks are. They tend to put very milquetoast civic minded profiles in the voters guides since full MAGA doesn’t sell around here. But you can always find out who the MAGA ones are by looking up their campaign contributions on the FEC web site. The Trump 2019 contributions are a dead giveaway as are contributions to other local rabid MAGA folks and election deniers.
Good news is that every MAGA candidate lost and all the centrist Dem types won in the municipal elections. I don’t know how much research the typical voter does. Only two of them gave off MAGA vibes in their public profiles, the other two were pretty stealth Republicans. But it is nice that all the good guys won. That is the main difference between living here in WA vs TX. The people I support actually win more often than not. It is a nice change of pace.
Armadillo
Thanks again to Watergirl for selecting the key races and keeping us on point with where we could have the biggest impact!
Another thing we should keep in mind is that Youngkin wrongfully disenfranchised thousands of voters. He claims it was an error. Maybe it was. But when our Kim is in such a close race and Susanna Gibson lost by less than a thousand votes, these things can matter.
We need to vote them all out and restore sane Democratic government.
WaterGirl
@Immanentize:
WaterGirl
@Armadillo:
Yes!
WaterGirl
Here’s one for Geminid:
Barbara
@WaterGirl: Did Dems abandon her? If so, how? Genuinely curious to know what the evidence is.
Geminid
@WaterGirl: Senator L. Louse Lucas lept to Gibsons defense when the “scandal” broke. Or rather, to Gibson’s offence; Lucas did her best to turn the attacks on Gibson back on Youngkin.
I am not surprised Democrats did not campaign for Gibson in person, and left her to sink or swim on her own. I’m pretty sure Gibson would have won that seat but for her online sex videos. But under the circumstances, I’m not sure that other Democrats could have pulled her across the finish line in first place.
cain
@Old School: She lost by less than 1000 votes. She’ll be back.
Another Scott
@lowtechcyclist:
I assume it’s a reference to the various people he donated and campaigned for across the country.
E.g. APNews.com (from 10/24/2022).
I haven’t done the sums myself.
Cheers,
Scott.
Geminid
@WaterGirl: I disaprove of Mr. Nuttycomb’s* insulting language towards Levar Stoney, but I think he is right about the outcome of a Spanberger/Stoney contest. When word of Abigail Spanberger’s plans went public, former Republican Lt. Governor Bill Bolling described her as “a formidable politician,” and I think he’s right. Bolling added that he did not see anyone on the Republican bench who could compete with her.
Bolling is a shrewd observer, and won 8 straight campaigns himself. He would have beaten Terry McAuliffe in 2013, but he was blocked out of the nomination when the Republicans used a caucus/convention process to nominate Ken Cuccinineli instead. I think Bolling would have won a primary, and then he would have gone on to beat McAuliffe. McAuliffe just wasn’t that strong a candidate then or in 2021.
* Chaz Nuttycombe is a very proficient predictor of Virginia political races. He’s also a Virginia Tech undergraduate. Nuttycombe evidently affects a hard-boiled persona, which I think was unfortunate in this case.
Barbara
@Geminid: That was my take. There were so many other close races and the news came out pretty late in the cycle. No one asked her to withdraw or affirmatively threw her under the bus. I am not sure that people knew enough to know what would help or hurt.
@Geminid: Re Stoney: Not only is it insulting but presumably we want Stoney on Spanberger’s side in the general election. Richmond is still one of the population centers that help decide elections, especially close ones. Tim Kaine was the mayor of Richmond.
Geminid
@Barbara: Chaz Nuttycombe ought to apologize. He chose terrible language when he compared to Black Mayor of Richmond to a dog.
Stacy
@Geminid: I’m in Loudoun as well and we flipped our house seat to blue in 2017 and our senate seat was already blue as we had Jennifer Wexton as our state senator. When we flipped the house seat our rep won by maybe just a few points and got reelected by maybe 2%. She’s retired now and our new rep reflects the demographic change in my area and the redistricting and he won 60%-39%.
Matt McIrvin
@Barbara: No doctor wants to be in the position where some non-medical authority is scrutinizing their actions to figure out whether they go to jail. They’re going to err on the side of providing no service.
Matt McIrvin
@lowtechcyclist: Governors at least *can* be less ideological creatures than legislators, and people seem to care about administrative competence. Voters accept that a governor could be something other than a creature of the national party.
Barbara
@New Deal democrat: Deep breath. Someone very close to me had a psychotic episode for which she needed to take strong medications that are not safe for a fetus to be used in pregnancy. Most doctors will not prescribe them for pregnant women.
Part of this person’s psychoses was a crazy romantic obsession that a neighbor took advantage of and she ended up becoming pregnant. Fortunately, she was in touch enough to be able to obtain an abortion before the second trimester but there was definitely a possibility that she might not have been able to.
Would you say that being able to take antipsychotic medication was a good enough health reason for her to get an abortion even though the pregnancy didn’t endanger her physical health? I don’t even think that’s a close question.
When I drove this person to the clinic location, there were all these right to lifers there, and I remember one of them kept saying that everything could be okay, they could definitely help her and so on, and thinking, “You have no idea. None.”
Whenever the topic of “health exceptions” comes up I feel like most people don’t have enough frame of reference to understand what’s at stake.
WaterGirl
Wolvesvalley just sent me this excerpt from a DCCC fundraising email:
BREAKING: Virginia House race will go to a RECOUNT.
Election Day was two days ago, but as you read this, we’re waiting on a few hundred more ballots to come in from HD-82, a key seat that would expand our thin margin in the VA House and solidify our hold on the chamber.
While we wait on a final count, one thing is certain: this race will be going to a recount.
We need to be sure that we’re equipped to give state Democrats the on-the-ground support and resources they need to stay competitive in every single race – and every single recount.
randy khan
@New Deal democrat:
All things considered, I’d say the Dems did pretty well. The state was fully targeted by Republicans, redistricting put a lot of people in districts that didn’t know them well, and Youngkin inexplicably remains fairly popular (although this election undoubtedly hurt him on that point). This is only the second time since 1995 that the Dems have controlled both houses of the General Assembly.
Matt McIrvin
@lowtechcyclist: I lived in VA through that era of Dem governors and thought of it as a deeply Republican state in presidential elections– but, then, that was true of almost the entire country in the 1980s.
ancien regime
Psychosis clearly endangers physical health. It’s a physical condition. One that increases the mortality rate by about 10x.
RevRick
I know Pennsylvania has taken a back seat in this election, but in case it hasn’t been mentioned before, the Democrats swept all four statewide judicial races. Of course, next year we’ll be in the front seat, hogging the lion’s share of attention. It’ll be wall to wall TV ads.
WaterGirl
@Barbara: Chaz Nuttycombe is one of the key “predictors” for VA, and he got at least 98 out of 100 House of Delegates predictions right, so I assume he is pretty clued in.
But I do not know details.
WaterGirl
@Geminid: I did not know Stoney was black, but yeah, that’s really bad.
Geminid
@WaterGirl: Nuttycombe is young and did not experience segregation, but he still should have known better. I just told him that he should apologize. That’s the kind of stuff a sports journalist might say, but it has no place in the field in which he wants to build a career.
Geminid
@WaterGirl: Chaz Nuttycombe is a good data cruncher and is rightfully proud of his success this year. He’s strutting now, but he ought to be more careful.
Kent
Doctors are actually caught between a rock and a hard place.
State law may mandate precaution and may discourage doctors from taking the risk to perform abortions
Federal law and malpractice laws will push them in the opposite direction. If necessary care is denied they may face an enormous malpractice suit, possible sanctions by state medical boards, and so forth.
That conundrum is why OB/GYNs are fleeing red states in droves. They are literally in a no-win situation.
New Deal democrat
@Barbara: Thanks for the insightful comment.
Just Some Fuckhead
@New Deal democrat: Not sure I agree with this. I’m a Virginian and I didn’t see abortion spotlighted in most of the ads. Feggans ads were mostly, I’m a veteran, I’ll cut taxes for veterans.
Sure, other areas may have gotten a different ad blitz than we got in Hampton Roads but there weren’t nearly enough about abortion rights, IMHO.
Also (pedant alert), Kimberly Pope Adams isn’t in Hampton Roads and Virginia Beach is a city, not a county.
rikyrah
@Barbara:
Yeah, I mean, cause, you know, folks weren’t supposed to have a WTF moment to having a candidate who had sex on camera – FOR PUBLIC CONSUMPTION?
That she was even a candidate was poor Candidate Research on the part of the Democratic Party.
Mike
It’s truly amazing to witness the impact of grassroots support in Virginia. Congratulations on the victories, and keep up the great work in building positive change at the local level!