Virginia went blue but is flashing 5 bright red warning signs for Democrats

Democrats are in for a very unhappy four years.

No political party likes to lose, but losing a race that many Democrats had called “existential” is a gut punch. Democrats are going to spend a long, uncomfortable time asking themselves what went wrong — and, if they’re smart, how they can make changes to their message.

Here are some observations, drawn from the numbers in Virginia and nationally. 

1. Democrats were out of touch with the independent voters who decide elections.

Poll after poll after poll showed that voters’ top concern was the economy, a concern that rarely works out well for the party in power, and Democrats obviously did not have a good answer for how they would improve an economy that their party has been in charge of for the past four years. The problem is easy to understand once you dig into the pre-election polling data. For Republicans, the economy was the top concern. For independents, the economy was the top concern. For Democrats, it wasn’t. 

Political parties typically have different ideas of what’s important. This wasn’t a case, though, of the two parties having conflicting ideas on how to fix the economy, this was a case of Democrats seemingly just not being very interested in the economy. My theory on that is that as the parties have realigned, and the Democratic base has become more white-collar and more affluent, it’s lost touch with many working-class voters. (Some numbers below will support this.) 

Donald Trump had the easier time message-wise: Whenever he talked about the economy and immigration, he was able to speak to the top concerns of both Republicans and many independents at once. Kamala Harris had to deliver different messages to different groups: Talking about reproductive rights and threats to democracy may have fired up Democrats, but not independents. Talking about the economy may have helped with independents, but didn’t energize her own party. Then, of course, there’s the basic question of whether independents unhappy with the economy under Joe Biden were willing to trust his vice president to make changes. They weren’t.

2. Harris was the weakest Democratic candidate in a two-way race since Michael Dukakis in 1988.

That’s not an opinion; that’s math. Harris is taking 47.4% of the popular vote nationally, with some votes yet to be counted. That’s less than any Democratic presidential candidate since Bill Clinton won 43.0% in 1992. Clinton’s share came in a three-way race with President George H.W. Bush and Ross Perot of the Reform Party, who took an impressive 18.9% of the vote. While there were other candidates on the ballot, this year was essentially a two-person race. By that measure, we have to go back to Dukakis, who took 45.6%, to find a Democratic candidate who ran as poorly as Harris did. 

All things are relative, of course. This was still a close race that continues a quarter-century of tight presidential contests, with only Barack Obama-John McCain in 2008 being an exception. This is analogous to the years from 1876 to 1892, which saw five straight elections where the winning margin was never more than three percentage points. That era was roiled by the same issues that roil us now: Immigration and an economic transition of historical proportions — then from the agricultural age to the industrial age, now from the industrial age to the information age. That era also saw a president who was defeated and came back to win again: Grover Cleveland. 

3. In Virginia, Harris’ biggest underperformance was in Loudoun County and Prince William County.

Harris was weak with multiple constituencies across Virginia. In terms of votes, the most significant underperformance was in Northern Virginia, the place Democrats have counted on to run up the score in Virginia and overcome Republican margins downstate. Harris still ran strong in Northern Virginia, just not as strong as previous Democrats have. 

I first looked at this in Wednesday’s column. Today, let’s zero in on the two counties where Harris saw the biggest drop from previous Democratic performances — Loudoun and Prince William. 

Harris took 51.6% of the vote statewide in Virginia, 2.5 percentage points behind Joe Biden’s 54.1% four years ago.

In some places, though, she saw a bigger drop. Some were small communities where not many votes were involved — in Buckingham County in Southside, the Democratic vote share dropped 4.97 percentage points, a drop of 525 votes from Biden to Harris. Loudoun and Prince William are far more significant, though, because they’re bigger places and have been key to Democratic statewide victories in years past. In Loudoun, the Democratic vote share dropped 5.24 percentage points, which translated into 13,576 fewer votes than Biden. In Prince William, the Democratic vote share dropped 5.31 percentage points, which meant 19,398 fewer votes than Biden. 

Virginia Democrats have gotten used to running so well in Northern Virginia that they wind up in trouble when they don’t. Here’s some more perspective: In Loudoun and Prince William, Harris pulled almost the same vote share that Terry McAuliffe did in his 2021 governor’s race — and he lost statewide. It’s not so much that Harris made up the numbers elsewhere as it is a case of third-party candidates taking away votes in a way that didn’t happen in the governor’s race. For Virginia Democrats, Loudoun and Prince William may still be colored blue on the election maps, but in other ways, they’re flashing red warning signs. What if Republicans have bottomed out in Northern Virginia and are now starting to come back in a way that changes the statewide dynamics?

4. Harris saw Democratic support drop in Black precincts

National exit polls show Trump made gains with Black men, in particular. The election results can tell us nothing about gender, but the overall results do show that, while Harris ran strong in Black-majority precincts, she didn’t run as strong as previous Democrats have. 

We can see this in some specific precincts, although the math is a little less than perfect. The best thing would be if we could compare 2024 precinct results in Virginia with 2020 precinct results, but we can’t; 2020, the pandemic year, saw a surge of early voting, and the early votes weren’t allocated to that voters’ precinct. They were simply reported as a massive “central absentee precinct.” That means the precinct results we see from 2020 are only for the day-of voters, and those skewed Republican. We can, though, compare the 2024 results with last year’s state legislative races, when a new state law was in effect that now counts those early votes as part of a precinct.

For instance, last year in Roanoke’s Lincoln Terrace precinct, Democratic state Senate candidate Trish White-Boyd took 91.0% of the vote. This year, Harris took 83.2%. 

The State Board of Elections website has precinct results back to 1996; no other Democratic candidate for president ran that low in Lincoln Terrace in that time.

Sometimes percentages can be deceiving. Let’s look at Petersburg, a city that’s 75% Black residents. Harris took 85.6% of the vote there, down slightly from the 87.8% Biden received four years ago. In terms of actual votes, that works out to 1,560 fewer votes.  Why? Because Petersburg saw its voter turnout fall. Four years ago, 62% of Petersburg voters went to the polls; this year only 51% did. For whatever reason, many Petersburg voters simply weren’t motivated to vote. The same thing happened in many other cities with either Black majorities or pluralities. In Emporia, voter turnout dropped from 61% to 53%. In Norfolk, 66% to 56%. Both Danville and Martinsville saw voter turnout go from 68% to 60%. Black Virginians weren’t alone, though. Turnout was down everywhere from 2020 but it was down more in Democratic localities than Republican ones.

Those trends likely overlap with these:

5. Harris also saw Democratic support drop in working-class precincts.

Nationally, Democratic strategists have argued for years about whether the party should invest in trying to hold its so-called “blue wall” in industrial states or focus on the rising population centers of the Sunbelt. Four years ago, Biden did both — winning the trifecta of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin as well as picking up Georgia, Arizona and Nevada. This year, Harris did neither. Democratic strategists will likely still argue over which is the best approach, but the fact remains: To win this year, Harris had to win those three Rust Belt states, and she didn’t. 

For a party that has historically claimed to represent working people, Democrats haven’t been doing particularly well with actual working people. 

In Roanoke’s most affluent precincts, Harris’ vote share didn’t change much from what the Democratic candidate in last year’s Roanoke state Senate race took. 

In Crystal Spring, Trish White-Boyd took 55.3% last year. Harris took 54.0% this year. 

In South Roanoke, White-Boyd took 47.3% last year. Harris took 45.7% this year. 

However, for Harris, the Democratic vote share dropped by bigger margins in more working-class precincts. In the Williamson Road precinct, the Democratic vote share dropped from 56% to 50%. In the Summit Hills precinct along Peters Creek Road, the Democratic vote share dropped from 58.9% to 49.9%. In percentage terms, the biggest drop in Democratic vote share was in the Peters Creek precinct, from 78.2% to 65.0%. 

I will offer a prediction: Democrats are going to spend a lot of time trying to figure out how they lost so much support among working-class voters. Some will no doubt tie this to Harris’ race and gender, and we’d be foolish to say that’s not a factor; we don’t live in a race-blind or gender-blind society. However, overall, Democrats over the years have increasingly presented a more white-collar persona, and that’s also translated into both positions and positioning. Just look at the plans the two candidates had for manufacturing. Trump wants tariffs. Harris talked about artificial intelligence and data centers. If you’re a factory worker worried about your job, which sounds more relevant to your daily life? Trump’s fixation with tariffs may be economically wrong-headed but is politically popular. Harris’ manufacturing plan read like something written by someone who’d never actually worked in anything other than a think tank.

I’ve also seen some liberal groups say Democrats need to refocus on economic issues and embrace “economic justice.” The challenge for Democrats is that many of these working-class voters are culturally conservative; pulling the party further to the left might actually alienate them more. The question is who do Democrats have who has actually been able to win over such voters, something that Harris, a politician from San Francisco, never had to do until now?

The election gave us a clear result and lots of new numbers. Over the coming days, I’ll be working to make some of them clearer, but these will do for now.