Republicans ran 1.5% ahead of trump in the Virginia senate and basically even in the Virginia house, those results would suggest this poll is to pessimistic on trump’s numbers.
The State Senate election is of course on issues more local than those on which the President is elected. Candidates for any State Senate are not running on such issues as foreign policy and national security. Donald Trump has been the quarterback, and he has fumbled those two issues to the Democrats about as badly as George McGovern did in 1972 to Nixon.
Virginia is anti-populist, which has usually hurt Democrats in Presidential elections. This said, Obama showed what a non-populist can do in Virginia. Virginia voters pay much more attention to defense and foreign policy. You can trust that senior military officers generally ill fit the old image of those in
Doctor Strangelove. They are too sophisticated for that. The military used to be indifferent to college education, but it now promotes it. The disciplinary problems used to be heavily concentrated among the high-school dropouts that it used to get in large numbers.
