Among the big questions going into Tuesday’s elections were these: Would President Donald Trump’s unique combination of racism, authoritarianism and embrace of unpopular GOP policies energize Democratic voters sufficiently to overcome their tendency to stay home in off-year elections? And would Trumpism rev up Republican voters enough to keep pace with or possibly supplant that energy?
We now have resounding answers to both questions: Yes, and no. Democrat Ralph Northam defeated Republican Ed Gillespie in the Virginia gubernatorial contest by 54 percent to 45 percent, a decisive rout by any measure.
Democratic pollsters tell me the results are causing them to rethink basic assumptions about next year’s elections. In interviews, they pointed to two major factors (among others) in yesterday’s victory: Northam’s larger-than-expected share of the college-educated white vote (a factor of persuasion) and the off-the-charts turnout relative to previous off-years (a factor of energy and engagement).
Northam hauled in more than 1.4 million votes — nearly 340,000 more votes than current Gov. Terry McAuliffe won in 2013. This was driven in part by massive turnout in suburban and exurban areas heavily populated by college-educated whites: Northam ran up substantially larger vote totals than fellow Democrat McAuliffe did in Fairfax, Loudoun and Prince William counties, the northern Virginia suburbs of D.C., and in places like Chesterfield and Henrico counties, around Richmond. At the same time, nonwhite voters may have represented a slightly larger share of the electorate, relative to 2013.
Geoff Garin, Northam’s pollster, told me the campaign’s internal polling confirmed that Trump is driving Democratic energy. “Democratic voters are more engaged than ever, and as a result, they’re showing up,” Garin said, adding that Democratic voters and Dem-leaning independents are “engaging in politics more,” out of dismay at the “division and divisiveness” that Trump is creating and out of a sense that “existential things are occurring in this country.”
“The enthusiasm gap is real, and the likely voter universe in 2018 is going to be substantially different from 2014,” Garin said. “There will be higher off-year turnout with Democratic voter groups, and I doubt that will be matched to any significant degree by what happens among Republican voters.”
Gillespie attempted a double game: using Trumpist race-baiting appeals to energize the deep-red southwestern counties — Confederate statues, tattoo-festooned immigrant MS-13 gang members — while playing the temperamentally safe establishment Republican to reassure swing and more educated suburban voters. At bottom, this was a test of whether Trump-era Republicans can avoid alienating more educated constituencies while galvanizing Trump voters who crave something more than the usual plutocracy peddled with limited government platitudes. As Brian Beutler says on crooked.com, Gillespie papered over this problem by combining “the Chamber of Commerce’s policy agenda” with “an overlay of toxic racism and xenophobia.”
But Garin says the double game failed. “There was a very negative reaction among college-educated voters and swing voters generally to his MS-13 ads,” he said. Meanwhile, some polling had shown the race-baiting might have energized Democratic constituencies. Gillespie’s strategy did allow him to run up enormous margins in deep-red counties. But preliminary analyses suggest he was unable to drum up the enthusiasm levels seen in Democratic strongholds. At the same time, Northam edged Gillespie among college whites, outperforming Hillary Clinton among them by six points and defying predictions by Gillespie’s pollster, who insisted that Gillespie’s immigration appeals were working on those voters.
To be sure, Democrats did not improve among working-class white voters, and this is something to worry about: GOP-held House districts with a lot of those voters could still be an obstacle to Democratic hopes of taking back the lower chamber. And a lot can change between now and the 2018 elections, so Democrats can hardly count on their edge in enthusiasm holding — they’ll have to not lose sight of how high the stakes are for the country of unchecked Trumpian rule.
But the Democratic edge among college-educated white voters, and the surprisingly juiced-up turnout, suggest trends that could have a big impact next year. “You start to rethink the ceiling on the number of college-educated whites that Democrats can get,” Nick Gourevitch, a pollster for the Democratic Governors Association, told me. “That changes the map.”
