In “The Sound of Music,” the nuns who are exasperated by the hard-to-manage Maria sing, “How do you solve a problem like Maria?“
For Virginia Republicans, this week’s referendum results present the same old song and dance, except it goes like this: How do you solve a problem like Northern Virginia?
On Tuesday night, as the returns came in from the special election, the “no” side led most of the evening, but there was one big locality still outstanding: Fairfax County, Virginia’s most populous locality and a community that casts more votes than any other. Those votes were predominantly “yes,” so as the Fairfax votes came in, “yes” edged ahead for a narrow win.
The real problem for the “no” side, though, was not the number of votes from Fairfax County but the margin of the “yes” victory there. When political pros look at an election map, they don’t look at the number of votes — that’s important, but not the most important thing. The most important thing is the margin that a locality can deliver. Fairfax County isn’t just big, it’s also lopsided politically, and that’s what drives Virginia politics — including now, on the adoption of a new congressional map. If Republicans were more competitive in Fairfax County, as they once were, things might have been different.
Let’s show off our promised map and walk through why it’s different from most other election maps you’ll see.
Most election maps color-code places red and blue, the color scheme Americans have adopted for our political parties. (If you go to other Western countries, the colors are reversed — red for the left, blue for the right — but Americans are different.)
Some election maps may shade those places in by the percentage of the vote each party gets — so bright red for a strongly Republican community, a nice pink for a narrow Republican win.
Each of those maps serves its purpose, but that is not our purpose today. What this map shows, in a shaded, color-coded fashion, is the size of the margin for each side. (My software, oddly enough, doesn’t have a red/blue option, so here the green will be “yes” and the red will be “no.”)
Here’s how to read this, and then we’ll get into the significance. Let’s start with Virginia Beach. It’s the third-largest locality in Virginia, behind Fairfax County and Prince William County. It’s also a classic swing locality that is always fought over in each election. This week, Virginia Beach went “no” by a small margin — 50.57% for “no,” 49.43% for “yes.” That was certainly an accomplishment for the “no” side — last fall, Virginia Beach voted Democratic in the governor’s race — but it didn’t provide much of a margin. Lots of votes for both sides, but “no” came out of Virginia Beach with only a 1,692-vote advantage.
By contrast, when Fairfax County finally reported, it came in at 69.51% “yes” — and, in a community that large, that vote share translated into a margin of 147,521 votes on the “yes” side.
Statewide, “yes” won by 88,916 votes. Mathematically, that margin out of Fairfax County is what made the difference. It’s difficult to overstate the political magnitude of those Fairfax margins. The locality with the biggest margin for the “no” side was Bedford County, which delivered a 22,228-vote margin on behalf of “no.” If you add the five localities with the biggest “no” margins together — Augusta County, Bedford County, Campbell County Hanover County, Rockingham County, an all-star cast of Republican counties — you still only get a “no” margin of 95,427. This is the structural disadvantage that Republicans have in statewide elections in Virginia.
There are several points to be made here.
Republicans used to be competitive in Northern Virginia, then it realigned
Through the 2000 presidential election, Fairfax County was a reliably Republican county. The big political earthquake in Virginia was a realignment in the early part of the century, when first Fairfax County, and then Loudoun County and Prince William County, switched from red to blue. Even as late as 2009, though, Fairfax County could still be persuaded to go Republican in the governor’s race. Isaac Newton found that for every action there is an equal but opposite reaction. The reaction in Virginia was rural areas, especially Southwest Virginia, switching from blue to red — except that wasn’t an even trade in terms of votes or margins. This realignment predated Donald Trump, although his emergence as a political force has accelerated all these trends, making suburbs more Democratic and rural areas more Republican. In Virginia, the political effect has been to make Republicans less competitive.
This isn’t purely a Northern Virginia phenomenon; we just focus there because it’s so big. Other suburban localities have realigned, too — notably Henrico and Chesterfield counties around Richmond. Virginia Republicans, who once relied on those suburban votes, have yet to figure out how to win elections in this new political configuration except under occasional circumstances. Glenn Youngkin in 2021 was one of those. He mobilized rural voters in record fashion, but also cut into Democratic margins in Fairfax County. He needed both of those to eke out a win.
For comparison purposes, the Democratic margin out of Fairfax County in 2021 was 134,206; last fall it ballooned to 213,924. The “no” side this week cut it to 147,521, but that still wasn’t good enough.
This wasn’t necessarily a case of Republicans performing better in Fairfax, either. It was really a case of Democrats underperforming. Statewide, the “no” side drew more votes than the Republican candidate for governor did last fall. One notable exception was in Fairfax County, where the “no” side ran 773 votes below Winsome Earle-Sears’ tally — and she was the weakest Republican candidate for governor in 60 years. Those “missing” 773 votes hardly mattered statewide, but they do speak to a problem Republicans have. Republicans simply need to figure out how to run better in suburban localities, especially Northern Virginia. Republicans downstate can complain about being “Fairfaxed,” or they can work on improving their numbers there. That’s not politics, that’s just math.
Rural localities have an outsized impact because of their lopsided margins
This will seem contradictory in the same way that Schrodinger’s cat is both dead and alive at the same time. While rural localities have seen their influence overall decline, they have seen their importance to Republicans increase.
Here’s how margins work: Chesapeake is a key locality because it’s populous and, in political terms, “swingy.” However, because it’s “swingy,” it often doesn’t produce large margins for either side. This week, Chesapeake voted “yes,” with a margin of 1,199 votes. Tiny Craig County, though, produced a “no” margin of 1,553 votes — so Craig County essentially erased Chesapeake.
The “yes” side came out of Chesterfield County with a margin of 9,781 votes. Franklin County, Pittsylvania County and Washington County each had a bigger margin on the “no” side — a 12,000-plus edge for “no” in each locality, so take your pick as to which one canceled out Chesterfield.
The problem for Republicans is that they eventually run out of these rural counties with big margins and don’t have anything to counter those big margins out of Northern Virginia — especially Fairfax County — with.
This map also shows why Democratic candidates don’t visit Roanoke much
Roanoke is the biggest blue island west of Charlottesville/Albemarle County, but it’s surrounded by a vast red sea. Remember what I said about Newton’s Third Law of Motion about action and reaction? Politicians have to be careful about triggering unintended reactions. Yes, Roanoke delivered a 6,305-vote margin for the “yes” side, but Roanoke County wiped that away with an 11,273-vote margin on the “no” side of the ledger. A campaign has to worry that, yes, we can send our candidate to Roanoke to squeeze more votes out of the city, but the risk is that it simply provokes more people in Roanoke County (and Salem and Botetourt County and …) to vote the other way.
Democrats are unlikely to show up west of the Blue Ridge for the same reason that Vice President JD Vance probably didn’t campaign in Virginia on behalf of the “no” side — fear of helping the other side more than you do your own. Instead, he went to Hungary to campaign for Viktor Orban — and lost there, as well. A Vance appearance might have ramped up Republican turnout in Virginia, but likely would have dialed up Democratic turnout more.
In the end, all the math I run comes back the same: Since Republicans don’t have any counties where they can produce a 147,521-vote margin out of Fairfax County, they only have two choices. One is to increase turnout in the low-turnout parts of rural Virginia, which probably won’t give them 147,521 votes but would get them closer. The other is to do better in Fairfax County. Can they?
I’ll have lots more to say about the referendum results in today’s edition of West of the Capital, our weekly political newsletter that goes out Friday afternoons. If you’re not on the list, we can fix that right now:
