J. Miles Coleman, associate editor at the University of Virginia’s Sabato’s Crystal Ball, said Democrats’ problem wasn’t so much a lack of enthusiasm among their voters — Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe received over 150,000 more votes than Gov. Ralph Northam (D) did in 2017 — as even greater enthusiasm for the Youngkin ticket. National Democrats’ failure to pass President Biden’s priorities in Congress wasn’t helping, he added.
(Video) The University of Virginia’s Larry Sabato joins Shep Smith to discuss the message to Democrats after yesterday’s election and heading into the 2022 midterms.
“Since August, Biden’s national standing has weakened,” Kyle Kondik and J. Miles Coleman wrote in an analysis published Wednesday morning by the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. “That decline, combined with the usual headwinds the president’s party faces in off-year elections, helped fuel Youngkin’s 12-point net improvement over Trump’s 10-point loss in Virginia last year.”
“My take is that the key factor was, in fact, President Biden’s low ratings,” said Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. “You can’t avoid it. I can’t see how anyone can deny that...That’s what it’s about, it’s not just about his agenda.”
“Glenn Youngkin benefited enormously from the fact that President Biden has become quite unpopular even in a state like Virginia that he carried by 10 points,” said Larry Sabato, founder and director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. “[President Biden’s] approval level is somewhere in the mid-40s. And that isn’t good enough to get a member of your own party elected governor, in Virginia. It’s only happened once since 1977. Usually, the party, not in control of the White House wins the governorship and that happened yet again.”
Just that the race was close in New Jersey was a poor sign looking toward the midterm elections, said Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics. “If you combine the results in Virginia and New Jersey, it confirms that the political environment is bad for Democrats and Joe Biden’s approval rating is a real problem,” Kondik said. “Tuesday was sort of a test of how resilient the Democrats could be with Biden at negative approval. Turns out they’re not that resilient.”
(Commentary) While appearing on MSNBC, Larry Sabato, a political science professor at the University of Virginia who is a media favorite, said: “This is a postfactual error. It doesn’t matter that it isn’t taught in Virginia schools.”
A political odds-maker at the University of Virginia changed its ratings Wednesday in four competitive Democratic U.S. Senate races, after Glenn Youngkin won the Virginia governor’s race. Sabato’s Crystal Ball, which is named for Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said the election confirmed a poor environment for Democrats, which if replicated in 2022 could help Republicans could win control of the House and Senate.
McAuliffe, a Clinton Democrat who served as Virginia’s governor from 2014 to 2018, tried during the campaign to portray Youngkin as a Trump acolyte. “The McAuliffe campaign was just non-stop trying to tie Youngkin to Trump,” said J. Miles Coleman of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. “I don’t think it was that effective. Youngkin just doesn’t talk or act like Trump. He’s more of a Mitt Romney or a Paul Ryan-type Republican,” he said, referring respectively to the senator from Utah and the former Republican speaker of the House. Youngkin, while giving a “wink and a nod” to Trump,...
(Video) Political analyst Larry Sabato and Republican strategist Scott Jennings discuss the gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey and what it means for President Biden and his party.
Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics moved Senate races in Arizona, Georgia and Nevada from the “lean Democratic” column to “toss-ups.”
Youngkin was also able to harness more general dissatisfaction among suburban parents — an important part of Democrats’ coalition last year — whose children could not attend in-person learning for much of the COVID-19 pandemic. Forty-five percent of working parents in northern Virginia said supporting their children’s education made work more difficult, according to a Washington Post-Schar School poll in July. “Youngkin winning these college-educated white voters who are skeptical of Trump indicates Biden’s approval is likely slipping with these same types of groups in key battleground metropo...
(Video) CNN’s Rosemary Church speaks with Larry Sabato, political scientist and Director at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, on what he thinks of the result of the Virginia’s governor race.
Political analyst J. Miles Coleman at the UVA Center for Politics says it came down to Biden’s approval rate slipping, and Democrats failing to pass bills in Washington, D.C. “One of the big lessons of this election: Persuasion still matters,” said Coleman.
“The turnout across the board, especially in Republican strongholds, was really something else,” said J. Miles Coleman, with the University of Virginia Center for Politics.
“The bottom line is that this is about Biden,” said Kyle Kondik of the non-partisan University of Virginia Center for Politics. “If the political environment is like this next year, you expect the Republicans to win both the House and the Senate.”
“To the extent that the indecisiveness in Washington mattered, perhaps it makes Biden look less effective and maybe contributed in some marginal way to his low approval rating,” said Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics.
Relative to Northam, McAuliffe’s share of the vote consistently declined more in the southern half of the state, an area with relatively fewer college graduates, than it did in more white-collar Northern Virginia. “An engaged GOP base delivered Republicans even bigger landslides than usual in rural central and western Virginia,” the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics wrote in its analysis of the results yesterday. “In 2013, McAuliffe lost the 9th Congressional District, in the southwestern corner of the state, by about 30 percentage points. Last night … McAuliffe’s deficit there fell...
If past is prologue, the burdens of the moment on the electorate could prove too heavy a lift even if Biden gets what he wants. “Historically speaking, passing big legislation does not lead to electoral success,” said Kyle Kondik, an elections analyst at the University of Virginia Center for Politics. “Voters just often won’t reward those things and sometimes they punish aggressive legislating.”
(Commentary by Joy Milligan, professor of law) Destin Jenkins’ compelling book, “Bonds of Inequality: Debt and the Making of the American City,” helps us better understand how municipal debt deepened racial and economic inequality in the United States over the last century.