Former President Donald Trump speaks to a crowd over 1,000 people at a June 28 rally in Chesapeake, Virginia. (Charlotte Rene Woods/Virginia Mercury)
In elections, the most important thing is who shows up.
What makes things interesting in a democratically elected republic is that “who shows up” can vary wildly from election to election based on recent events plus economic and societal conditions and which party and candidates get the blame (or credit) for them.
That’s about to play out in another presidential race in Virginia, a state that in many ways is a political and demographic microcosm of the nation as a whole.
Virginia’s rural areas vote overwhelmingly Republican and its major cities and suburbs, mostly in the eastern third of the state, usually back Democrats and have the population numbers to determine an election’s outcome.
That leaves us to ponder events and circumstances influencing voters in Virginia’s vastly different regions and cultures. Let’s start with recent events, which couldn’t be more bizarre.
In June, a frail-looking, seemingly confused octogenarian President Joe Biden performed so poorly in a debate with Donald Trump, the former president he defeated 3 ½ years earlier, that Americans were shocked and Democrats were panicked.
On July 13, a would-be assassin’s bullet grazed Trump’s ear during a campaign rally in rural Pennsylvania. Days later, a defiant Trump basked in rapturous ovations when he appeared at the Republican National Convention with a bandaged right ear.
By the end of July, with Democrats in abject despair and Biden’s poll numbers sinking, the president acquiesced to growing calls to quit the race and threw his support behind his vice president, Kamala Harris.
In August, Democrats were instantly buoyed by the switch and the Democratic National Convention imbued them with fresh optimism. Online donations soared and poll numbers rebounded as her candidacy energized previously apathetic Democratic constituencies, particularly women, minority and young voters.
The Sept. 10 second presidential campaign debate did not go well for Trump. Harris toyed with the former president’s vanity and deftly baited him into dismaying diatribes about crowd sizes at his rallies and false claims of Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, devouring family pets. Minutes afterward, global pop megastar Taylor Swift endorsed Harris.
The next day, Springfield’s Republican mayor, the city’s police chief and Ohio’s Republican Governor, Mike DeWine, felt compelled to publicly and forcefully reject the pet-eating claims and call upon Trump and his running mate, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, to renounce them. DeWine ordered Ohio State Police into Springfield to help with unrest and threats that have arisen from the unsubstantiated rumors.
A little over week ago, a second assassination attempt against Trump was foiled after Secret Service agents spotted a rifle barrel protruding from undergrowth surrounding the Trump-owned Florida course where he was playing golf.
It’s the stuff of a Franz Kafka fever dream — strange news bulletins that stand out even in these strange times — but it all happened, leaving us to ponder what unimaginable twists await in the 42 days and a wake-up until the election.
Those events exist atop longer-term issues, and the issue most on voters’ minds is the economy and inflation, according to poll after poll. They show that Trump holds a significant advantage on that issue.
Harris, however, has found traction by moving the visceral issue of abortion rights to the forefront in ways Biden never could. No poll ranks it as high as the economy, but it’s an exceptionally persuasive issue among women, particularly moderates in urban and suburban areas where Democrats win when turnouts are strong.
A recent statewide poll by the Washington Post and the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University showed Harris leading Trump among likely Virginia voters by 8 percentage points, a margin outside the survey’s margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points. Among women, Harris’s lead grows to 19 points.
New polling finds Harris ahead of Trump by a comfortable margin in Virginia
But Harris’ chief advantage in Virginia is Trump himself. Every time he appeared on the ballot and throughout his presidency, he was poisonous to GOP candidates in Virginia, said Mark Rozell, a political science professor and dean of the Schar School.
“Virginia voters rejected him soundly twice, and when he was in the White House they rejected Republican candidates all over the commonwealth. Only when Trump was out of the White House and looked to be politically finished in 2021 did it become acceptable for many swing voters in Virginia to vote Republican again,” Rozell said.
Trump lost Virginia’s 13 electoral college votes by 5 percentage points to Hillary Clinton in 2016, when home-state U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine was her running mate, and by 10 points four years later to Biden and Harris. In between those elections, Democrat Ralph Northam routed Republican Ed Gillespie in the 2017 governor’s race and Democrats won majorities in the Virginia Senate and House of Delegates plus seven of its 11 U.S. House seats while retaining both U.S. Senate seats.
Things changed once Trump seemed banished to Mar-a-Lago.
State Department of Election data from the 2020 presidential race and the 2021 gubernatorial race shows how dramatically the partisan polarity of Virginia shifted in the year after Trump left Washington.
In the 2020 election, Biden took 54% of the Virginia vote to Trump’s 44%. Few imagined that in 2021, behind a former investment fund executive with zero experience in elective politics, Republicans would boost their share of the vote by 6.6% while the Democrats’ share fell by 5.5% — a remarkable net partisan migration of just over 12 points.
Gov. Glenn Youngkin accurately read and leveraged voter frustration with Democrats who then held all the levers of power in Virginia and the White House as the nation struggled to emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic. He also avoided being Trumped.
“The GOP nominating process in 2021 rejected a Trump extremist,” Rozell said, referring to former state Sen. Amanda Chase, “and Youngkin ran a middle-right campaign that kept a smart strategic distance from the former president.”
Again, the data comparison of 2021 to the previous year is telling. Republicans won 99 of the commonwealth’s 133 localities in Youngkin’s 2021 victory, including a dozen where Democrats won in 2020. In the 34 the GOP didn’t win, Youngkin narrowed Democrats’ margins enough that a powerful rural turnout by conservatives was decisive. In 93 localities, the GOP share of the 2021 vote improved by 5% or more year over year.
But, Rozell notes, that was then.
“The GOP triumphs in 2021 do not portend a competitive race in Virginia this year. The problem for the GOP in Virginia is Trump,” he said.
Which brings us back to recent events and how Virginians perceive them. Traveling with alt-right conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer in his campaign entourage and comments about pet-eating immigrants and “childless cat ladies” from those who seek control of the nation’s nuclear arsenal may rouse Trump’s base, but they dissuade unaligned moderates.
“Trump’s disastrous debate performance and close associations with far-right extremists such as Loomer just remind swing voters in Virginia why they rejected him every time in the past,” Rozell said.
Or, as William Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
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