2024 Leaner Deep Dive and Forecast: Virginia (13 Electoral Votes)

Topic: 2024 Election Forecast

VIRGINIA

Basic Election Facts

2024 Electoral Votes: 13

Population (2020 Census): 8,631,394 (+630,369 since 2010)

Likely Population at 2024 Election: 8,750,000

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Partisanship

Governor Party: Republican

State House Majority: Democrat

State House Majority: Democrat

U.S. House Delegation: 6 Democrats, 5 Republicans

U.S. Senate Delegation: 2 Democrats

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Ethnic Demographics (2020 census)

White: 62.8%

Black: 18.3%

Latino: 10.5%

Other: 8.4%

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Presidential History since 1932

Times Republican: 13

Last: George W. Bush, 2004, +8.2%

Times Democrat: 10

Last: Joe Biden, 2020, +10.1%

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Presidential Election Characteristics

·      Virginia removed itself from a “Solid South” Democrat voting pattern (backed all but one Democrat nominee from 1876 through 1948) in the 1950s and supported all but one GOP presidential nominee (Goldwater in 1964) between 1952 and 2004 before its current streak favoring Democrat nominees began in 2008.

·      Two worlds collide in The Old Dominion.  Northern Virginia, colloquially known as “NoVa,” is made up of ten counties and independent cities largely reliant on the federal government and/or white-collar industries, and is rapidly populating with northeastern transplants and federal workers, while the remainder of the state is rugged, blue-collar, and fits the mold of a Southern conservative state.  Currently, the former overpowers the latter.

·      In 2016, Donald Trump became the first Republican to win the White House without carrying Virginia since Calvin Coolidge in 1924.  Virginia and Colorado have backed the same presidential nominee in all but one election (1992) since 1948.

Looking Back

I have written repeatedly about coalition shifts, a term Richard Baris is fond of using to describe the electoral changes in the Industrial Midwest since Trump arrived on the political scene nearly a decade ago.  Pennsylvania and Michigan are much different states now because hundreds of thousands of “blue dog” Democrats no longer vote for their grandfather’s “working man’s” party, largely because they hate regular, everyday Americans even more than the Republican establishment does.  They started dropping off in the 2010 midterms, and then for Obama’s reelection, and once they finally got a GOP candidate who spoke their language, came over in droves, creating a see-saw effect that flipped those states, and should have expanded those Trump margins in 2020 if not for massive electoral fraud.  Another coalition shift happened in Texas, when hordes of white evangelicals abandoned the Democrat Party in unison at the close of the 20^th century.

When Obama won Virginia handily in 2008 (+9.0%), the first Democrat presidential win of The Old Dominion since 1964, it was on the back of a major coalition shift in Northern Virginia (“NoVA”), a grouping of five counties and five independent cities squeezed into the far northeastern corner of the state in close proximity to Washington, D.C.  George W. Bush carried five of them (Loudoun, Stafford, and Prince William Counties, plus Manassas and Manassas Park) in 2004, and lost the ten collectively by 56,523 votes, keeping it tight enough for his landslide in “RoVA” (Rest of Virginia, to the locals – +318,740 margin for Bush) to give him a comfortable statewide win, which would be the last to this point on our timeline.  Here is how things have unfolded in NoVa in the four subsequent Republican defeats:

·      McCain ‘08 - lost NoVa by 230,574, held only Stafford County

·      Romney ’12 – lost NoVa by 225,407, held only Stafford County

·      Trump ’16 – lost NoVa by 391,260, held only Stafford County

·      Trump ’20 – lost NoVa by 527,709, lost all ten counties and cities

For reference, NoVa and RoVa are shown above in navy blue and orange, respectively.  Those ten cities and counties, collectively, charged hard away from Republicans for a combination of factors.  First, the staple Democrats stayed put.  Black voters remained firmly in the Democrat column and came out in droves for the first Obama run, counties like Prince William became increasingly diverse, and increased urbanization and population density trended NoVa further left.  Second, white, single women increased in number and broke hard to the left.  Finally, and most damning, the entrenchment of federal agencies and the regional dependency on the growth of the federal government and its resulting economy, combined with the push of the GOP toward populism in the 2010s, ripped away the moderate segment of the electorate that kept Bush treading water there in 2004 (and he actually won Fairfax County in 2000). For reference, Donald Trump had fewer votes in Fairfax County in 2020 (168,401) than George H.W. Bush did in 1992 (170,488).

My research accounts for a likely estimate of 74,983 fraudulent votes in NoVa in the 2020 presidential race, with none evident in Arlington County or Manassas and Manassas Park at the county/city level (I have to dig into precincts to find signs of disparity).  Fairfax, Loudoun, Prince William, and Stafford are obviously corrupt, and took advantage of no-excuse mail-in balloting in the 2020 presidential race.  It is apparent to me, given that I’ve estimated 297,664 likely fraudulent Biden ballots in Virginia’s 2020 race (and just a 3.7% margin of Biden victory instead of 10.1%), that the vast majority of the cheating is woven through the 123 remaining counties and independent cities in RoVA – the Rest of Virginia.  In fact, these 222,681 other likely fakes are responsible for dragging Trump’s RoVa margin down from +179,230 in 2016 to just +72,596.

The final tallies should have looked more like this:

·      Biden adjusted margin in NoVA: +452,726 (the bad news – 61,466 worse for Trump than 2016).

·      Trump adjusted margin in RoVA: +295,277 (would have been enough to carry Virginia with Romney’s 2012 losing margin in NoVa).

Looking Forward

I view Virginia like I view Minnesota, New Mexico, or any other white whale “blue state” out there.  If it is won by Trump in 2024, it will be won on top of a likely national landslide.  I don’t think Virginia should be targeted more than the six contested states of 2020, and I don’t think it creates a new electoral college pathway by itself unless Trump selects Glenn Youngkin, Virginia’s Republican governor, as his running mate.  Also, use caution in believing Virginia is “red again” just because a few races at the top of the ticket went Republican three years ago.  Youngkin and allies came into office in an off-year (2021) election with an unpopular Democrat president fresh off a disastrous evacuation from Afghanistan, and had substantially fewer votes than Trump did in 2020, with his opponent, Terry McAuliffe, a whopping 815,100 ballots behind Joe Biden’s count (which should amplify just how much cheating there was in The Old Dominion in 2020, which stopped its vote count when people were busy panicking over the Rust Belt).

Assessment