It feels a bit late for Youngkin for him only to be leading by 2 in what looks like an actually solid poll this late in the process.
If he doesn't get enough Election Day votes to swamp Dem early votes, he's screwed.
What?
I legitimately don’t understand what this post is trying to convey — if it’s "Youngkin needs to be ahead by more at this stage of the race", perhaps (although this is just one poll), but for the umpteenth time, relying on selective early voting data to predict an election when there are several things we don’t know about election-day turnout and the early vote itself is a fool's errand which we’ve been through before.
Youngkin has no issue with making this race close; getting above T-Mac in numerical votes is the hard part, one that people underestimate the difficulty of.
I don’t think there’s a single person on this board who doesn’t realize how difficult winning this state/race will be for the GOP (and who hasn’t pointed this out), so I’m not sure who you’re referring to with "people"?
My calculation is simple. Youngkin needs to cut into the D base to win OR get more Rs on Election Day. He can't rely on an "enthusiasm gap" that probably never really existed as a huge factor in the race in the first place.
T-Mac's polling leads when there was early voting were enough that he basically did decently there at least, as polls are generally a snapshot of what the race is at the time. In some places up to 2/5 of the broader electorate early-voted, which locks in a significant part of his built-in advantage as Democratic candidate for Governor of Virginia. In the Old Dominion, if you hold the Dem voter base and don't get sufficiently swamped in Independents (like how the D incumbent in IL-GOV 2014 was), you will very, very, very likely win. Late-breaking momentum in the polls doesn't matter as much if a sufficiently large share of the vote happens earlier. And yes, it is true partisans who are likelier to vote to begin with are a disproportionate share of early voters, but the slice of people who early-voted this time has to have included some swing voters. Youngkin HAS to do well among swing voters. T-Mac can lose most swing voters and still win.
Youngkin - already a long-shot - has his chances diminished still by this factor. Some of the vote he needed has already voted and likely has gone for T-Mac. Further hurting Youngkin in this (helping him in the race in aggregate but not in this specific facet) is that since Rs also advertised early voting, this means a sizable number of firm R voters in rural VA will also have voted. So he can't rely on a 2020-style surge as much as Trump did.
The big question mark to me, for quite some time, is if he can do well among the Election Day vote. I don't know what to assume about election day turnout, so I have the broader race as a Tossup out of an abundance of caution, but Youngkin's path for victory is extremely narrow. That's what people don't get. They get it is hard, but they don't get how hard it is. Only the black box which is Election Day turnout keeps me from rating this at least Lean D.
