Virginia Mega Thread: The Youngkin Administration

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

Tmac's entrance gives me Joe Biden vibes. An entrance into the race that draws reactions of disgust from twitter and people like me, ("Why is TMac coming in when we already have two wonderful black women running?!!?"/"Is Joe Biden really the best we can do?"), with an extremely centrist record(s), but likely has the name recognition and favorability from democratic primary voters needed to coast through. If anything, TMac should have an easier time than Biden did considering there isn't really someone with equal-ish name recognition (like Bernie Sanders) to take him on.

Your Overton Window is warped if you think TMac is "extremely centrist".

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

Carter's departure from HD-50 ironically makes me feel better about the seat. I wish he would stay in the house of delegates though as we need his voice. (I hate anyone who is wealthy).

But yea, HD-50 is relatively competitive for Northern Virginia so if the climate got good for the GOP it could flip especially with a Democrat like Carter.

Something seismic needs to happen in national/VA politics to get these college educated voters to defect, and after the election we don't really have any indication that that would happen. It's not 2014 anymore. Carter would be pretty safe in 2021/23 even in a reasonably bad year for Biden/national Dems.

More interesting question is can he get the seat back in the 2023 primary if he loses? Probably not. Would he want to though? Seems like he's trying to build a national following.

Tmac's entrance gives me Joe Biden vibes. An entrance into the race that draws reactions of disgust from twitter and people like me, ("Why is TMac coming in when we already have two wonderful black women running?!!?"/"Is Joe Biden really the best we can do?"), with an extremely centrist record(s), but likely has the name recognition and favorability from democratic primary voters needed to coast through. If anything, TMac should have an easier time than Biden did considering there isn't really someone with equal-ish name recognition (like Bernie Sanders) to take him on.

Your Overton Window is warped if you think TMac is "extremely centrist".

I was making broad strokes points. What would you consider him?

Center left but not "extremely centrist". This isn't JBE we're talking about.

I wasn't enthused about TMac when he ran in 2013 (only time in my life I have voted third party) but he exceeded my expectations. Not enough to guarantee my hypothetical vote at this stage if I was still living there, but enough that I wouldn't dismiss a primary vote for him out of hand.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

I'm excited both to see how Carter's campaign fares and also how its fate gets under-analyzed and warped to fit everyone's prior perceptions of him and the commonwealth.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

I'd love to see precinct-level results for HD-02 but VPAP doesn't have them and may never have them due to weirdness of vote by mail.

Looking back it looks like JCF racked up big margins here by flipping (bigly) Eastern Woodbridge and turning out great margins in the D core of the county (waterfront precincts) and close losses around Aquia Harbor. The only time the district has voted R in recent memory was another low-turnout 2015 race where Dudenheffer won by 1%. Looks like this coalition relied on big wins in Western Stafford and also overperforming around Woodbridge.

Hard to extrapolate from this too much without precinct-level results. But with the exurban development in PWC and Stafford (the latter of which Biden won) + military presence in Quantico this doesn't really seem like the type of place where Ds should be underperforming and failing to turn out votes. Ds swept the district in 2013 (including knocking off incumbent Dudenheffer) and it even voted for Warner in 2014. In the absence of precinct-level stuff to comb over I'd bet this is more a weird circumstance outcome (super low turnout for some reason) combined with the fact there was an established R candidate (also ran in 2019) and King sounds like she has spent a lot of time in recent years working outside of the district meaning her local support network wasn't really built up.

2015 result
Mark Dudenhefer (R)    5,839    50.41%
Josh King (D)                    5,714    49.33%
map: https://www.vpap.org/offices/house-of-delegates-2/election-results-map/?election=7152

2019 result
Jennifer Carroll Foy (D)    11,828    60.92%
Heather Mitchell (R)            7,563    38.95%
map: https://www.vpap.org/offices/house-of-delegates-2/election-results-map/?election=9762

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

Problem for VA GOP is that they are extremely unlikely to win either Loudoun or Henrico counties. A winning GOP map would not include either of those jurisdictions.

The GOP basically has to get rural MO style margins all across rural Virginia to win statewide.

I feel like if Hogan can convince suburban Democrats to vote for him in Maryland, there's no reason to think Republicans cannot do the same in VA. And they actually need fewer of them in VA, since it's like 20 points to the right of MD.

If Hogan wasn't running on incumbency in the Trump/post-Trump era he would never have gotten that many people to vote for him. His presence in 2021 is a pure 2014 legacy effect. It'll take something seismic to make these voters available to even the mildest Republican.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

Wasserman is concern trolling or huffing paint. The odds are closer to 10% than they are to 25%.

Do we buy this?

https://twitter.com/Redistrict/status/1391777855474999298?s=20

https://twitter.com/Redistrict/status/1391781567119364098?s=20

I'm kind of torn on this. On one hand, NoVA has become a hell of a mountain to overcome, and the shifts in Richmond and Hampton Roads haven't helped. McAuliffe is also very much a known quantity.

But Youngkin seems likely to be the nominee, and I feel like he could have some upset potential. Plus if Republicans were able to win in Maryland, Virginia should be hypothetically within reach.

So I guess I'd say Democrats are clearly favored because of the state's partisanship, but I wouldn't completely rule out the possibility of a GOP victory.

em added

It's not 2014 anymore and top of the ticket notwithstanding, the Trumpified VAGOP of 2021 is not the pre-Trump MDGOP of 2014.

Even still MDGOP of 2014 needed a sleepwalking Lt. Gov inheriting the throne of a relatively unpopular governor to win that race. If TMac campaigns anything like Brown did I'll start sweating a little but the state of the race is much harder for Republicans now than it was seven years ago.

I’m more interested in turnout dynamics. I suspect we might see quite the drop off in dem turnout which might make this race closer than the underlying dynamics in the state would suggest. Curious what tea leaves we can read from the dem primary turnout in June.

The VA Dem base includes enough cosmopolitan and college educated voters, still more or less addicted to Trump/conservative outrage porn, that I think turnout won't fall as much as it did in other states under Obama.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

Re: "electable" candidates winning in the primaries and their competitiveness... we already saw this happen four years ago and it didn't work out for Republicans. Electable Ed Gillespie fought off a (should-be) fringe candidate but still ended up getting subsumed into culture war nonsense that was fairly unpersuasive and led to him being crushed. Youngkin will follow the same script and end up campaigning on some anti-CRT nonsense because that's where the Republican party is. It will be slightly more successful than talking about MS13, but the fact that the craziest person doesn't seem to be on track to win doesn't necessarily make the actual winner competitive.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

O

Is the Democrats' campaign really just boiling down to Orange Man Bad? It's bad enough that he's completely dominated national discourse since June 2015, but he's not even president anymore. He's basically Grampa Simpson yelling at a cloud. At least in a state-level race, not everything needs to come back to him.

Orange man bad seemed to work pretty well for Northam in the 2017 primaries (he had other institutional advantages of course).

I wouldn't be surprised if it was just primary maneuvering the same way that the way many earn their conservative bona fides. But also in a state so reliant on the federal government and its workers I think tying any candidate to Trump will be fairly effective - not enough to win in a toss-up state but enough of a cushion in a state with a big D advantage.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

So glad that the good people of Virginia threw this fascist to the curb in the most humiliating way possible.
https://twitter.com/carterforva/status/1497593577551106050?s=21

Wasn't this man the fiancee of the reporter who was killed on live television several years ago?

No. Carter is the DSA member from Manassas. You are thinking of Chris Hurst, who lost his re-election bid last year.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

Yikes. Bull Run anchoring that district is really not a great place for a candidate associated with a total abortion ban. Competent Dems should be able to sink his campaign as long as nothing bad happens nationally to steal the spotlight.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

https://twitter.com/RRHElections/status/1704918721976844675?s=20

And how long ago was this?

he was born in 1956 so we are talking are  talking mid 70s here.

The article says 1989 (and he was born in 1967).

Anyway I don't think this has any legs to do damage. Northam made a mess of his situation in large part by having an abysmal response and I have a hard time seeing Mason doing anything near as bad. Even still I have a hard time believing that either AA blue collar workers in Newport News or college kids and professors in Williamsburg will care about this enough to sit out the race.

Also the D+1 refers to the 2022 House Race which was an R overperformance. Going back further, it's Youngkin +3, Kaine +13, Northam +6, and Clinton+3 according to VPAP. Obviously an R upset is possible but I don't think this scandal makes it especially likely.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

I wonder if the entire speaker ordeal hurts VA Republicans right now.

NoVA voters are on average more tuned-in to federal politics (it's a local industry in the same way that film is in Hollywood), but I imagine to most of these people the speaker ordeal is old news. If they've been tuned in to federal politics for more than six months, this shouldn't be surprising behavior at all.