We sit on the edge of a lake and watch the water level go down, proverbially at least.
We can see it’s going down, but we can’t exactly say why. The lake looks pretty placid, just a few ripples here or there. What we don’t see is, beneath the surface, there are lots of conflicting currents swirling back and forth, some water disappearing into a sinkhole, other water bubbling out of an underwater spring.
That’s how I like to think of election returns. There’s often a lot more going on beneath the surface than the final results alone can tell us.
Over the past week, I’ve been looking deeper into the returns in Virginia to see what they tell us. Overall, we know that turnout was down, but it was down more in Democratic localities than in Republican localities. That’s why the presidential race in Virginia was tighter than expected. Many Democrats simply didn’t show up.
I explored those Democratic no-shows in my column on Monday. On Tuesday, I looked at how much of Virginia has realigned politically.
Today, I will present some of those deep-down changes in a visual format. Let’s start in Northern Virginia because this is where the most significant changes took place — at least in terms of the sheer number of votes involved.
The Democratic erosion in Northern Virginia may not be as severe as it seems.
The numbers are big (Kamala Harris polled 54,289 fewer votes in Fairfax County than Joe Biden did), and they go a long way toward explaining why the final margin in the state was half what it was four years ago. Does this portend some impending vote swing in Northern Virginia? While the future is often unpredictable, when we look at the trend lines, the answer is clearly “no.”
Above is how the presidential vote in Fairfax County has changed since 1976. That chart tells us several things. It shows how Republicans once won, then things were close for a while, and now they're not because Democrats dominate. It also shows us just how much the total vote has grown in Fairfax. For our purposes today, here's what I call your attention to: Yes, the Democratic vote was down there. Democrats may spend years trying to puzzle out why, although it sure seems some Democratic voters simply weren't excited originally about the prospect of a second Biden term, and replacing him with his vice president didn't fully assuage those concerns.
This is the first time the Democratic vote in Fairfax County has gone down since 1980 when Jimmy Carter suffered an election wipeout. However, this chart helps us see in context that it doesn't seem a particularly severe drop — unless this is the start of a downward trend. If that's the case, this is a very big deal, but that's something we won't know for another four years.
It also seems significant that while Trump picked up 7,757 votes in Fairfax, that's not really much of an increase. It's not as if those missing Democratic votes switched sides. This feels more like natural growth of the Republican vote — and Democrats who just stayed home because they weren't thrilled with their nominee. You can also see from this chart just how toxic Trump has been in Fairfax; the Republican vote was pretty stable through 2012 and then dropped as soon as Trump became the nominee. This year, Trump got more votes in Fairfax than he ever has before, but that's still less than any other Republican presidential candidate in the county since Bob Dole in 1996 when the county's population was smaller.
We see a similar trend in Loudoun County:
And Prince William County:
For anyone who doesn't understand the electoral weight of Northern Virginia, and how that's changed, these charts help show that. In the 2000 presidential race, Democrats took just under 31,000 out of Loudoun County. This year, even with a relatively weak showing, they took more than four times that.
Maybe Biden's numbers are the aberration, not Harris'
It's natural to compare the results in 2024 with the ones in 2020, but maybe we need to take a wider view. Notice that spike for Biden in 2020 in all those localities above? Here's how the national results look from 1976 to 2024.
What I notice is that Trump's totals didn't improve that much from four years ago; it's the Democrats' numbers that declined. However, Harris polled more votes than any previous presidential nominee not named Joe Biden. What if this year was more of a “normal” Democratic vote and the Biden 2020 vote was the spike? If Harris is the aberration, then Democrats need to figure out what she did wrong. If Biden was the aberration, and this was a normal result, then they need to figure what they, as a party, are doing wrong. Those are two somewhat different things. Was it the messenger or the message?
The data won't give us the answer to that until we have another presidential election to pencil in, but it does seem to ask that question.
The Democratic declines among Black voters may not be that severe, either.
Percentage-wise, Trump made gains nationally among Black voters, particularly Black men. He took 21% of the vote among Black men, according to the NBC News exit poll, compared to 7% among Black women. This is a worrisome trend for Democrats and a welcome one for Republicans. It also overlaps the pattern of Republicans gaining votes among working-class voters.
However, percentages can be misleading. We don't have a good way to look at the total number of votes involved — the ballot is color-blind — but we can look at certain localities with large minority populations and draw some inferences. Petersburg is Virginia's least-white locality; it's about 75% Black. When we look at the voting trends there, we don't see much of an upturn for Trump. His vote totals there were only up 55 from four years ago. Harris, though, was down 1,522 votes from four years ago — and down 3,416 from what Barack Obama received in his 2012 reelection bid. This definitely seems to be a case of Democratic voters staying home. Democrats would do well to study the numbers nationally, but as far as Petersburg is concerned, they just need to do a better job at engaging people who have supported them in the past. They haven't lost voters to Trump; they've lost them to disinterest.
Republicans continued to gain, and Democrats continued to lose, votes in rural localities
One of the more remarkable electoral trends of the past quarter-century or more has been the realignment of rural Democrats into rural Republicans.
This year, we saw one rural county that's voted Democratic every presidential year since the 1972 Richard Nixon landslide flip into the Republican column: Surry County.
What we see when we chart this is that Republicans have been consistently picking up votes in Surry County since 1996. For much of that time, Democrats were gaining, too, so the Republican increases didn't matter. This year, though, the Democratic vote dropped (as it did almost everywhere), and that was enough to turn Surry red (or at least pink). The Democratic vote in Surry peaked under Obama in 2008, stayed high in 2012, and then declined. We don't have enough data points to know whether this is a permanent decline or just the natural ups and downs of politics, but it seems pretty obvious that the Republican growth is a permanent trend. While the numbers vary from place to place, we see this in many other rural areas — it's not so much that the Democratic vote is declining (although it often is), it's that the Republican vote is growing.
Surry County has remained Democratic for a long time because of its demographics (55% white, 38% Black), but the overall trends — Republican gains, Democratic declines — are the same elsewhere. Here are two other rural counties:
Henry County used to vote Democratic but now doesn’t. The raw Democratic vote there hasn't changed much, but the growth has been on the Republican side:
Wythe County once was competitive, but tilted Republican, and now it’s no longer competitive. The Democratic vote there hasn't really fallen much, it's just that all the growth has been Republican:
Buena Vista is a bellwether for Republican gains among blue-collar voters.
In Tuesday's column on realignment, I zeroed in on Lexington and Buena Vista. In 1976, Lexington was Republican and Buena Vista was Democratic. Now they're exactly opposite. Buena Vista is also a place where statewide candidates, both actual and aspiring, once congregated every Labor Day. Republicans still do go there, but Democrats have largely abandoned the practice (although Sen. Tim Kaine made an appearance this year, while Republican challenger Hung Cao ducked out before the traditional speech-making). In any case, Buena Vista occupies an iconic role in Virginia politics because of that Labor Day tradition, honored or otherwise.
This chart shows a trend similar to Surry County. The Republican vote bottomed out there in 1996 and has been growing since then. Once Buena Vista was competitive; no longer, which certainly makes it hard for Democrats to justify spending time there.
Democrats in the coal counties are in free fall.
The two most Republican localities in the state this year were Lee County and Buchanan County. In each one, the Trump vote topped 85% – 85.67% in Lee and 85.03% in Buchanan. Not that long ago, in historical terms, both of these were Democratic localities.
In both Buchanan and Lee counties, the Democratic vote peaked with Bill Clinton in 1992 and has declined every year since. The Republican vote in both hit bottom with Bob Dole in 1996. It's increased every year since in Lee. In Buchanan, it increased every year except this one, when there was a slight drop in turnout.
How low can the Democratic vote here go? This may not matter to Democrats because the numbers are so small compared to what's possible in Northern Virginia, but this collapse does speak to some of the difficulties Democrats have had connecting with working-class voters.
Here's another indication of how much things have changed: In 1976, a good year for Democrats, the party took 7,995 votes out of Loudoun County and 5,415 out of Lee County. This year, in a not-so-good year for Democrats, the party took 126,897 votes out of Loudoun and 1,364 out of Lee County. I can write thousands of words about why Democrats should pay more attention to rural Virginia, but these numbers explain why they don't.
Five localities that voted Republican in 2016 haven't in 2020 and 2024, and they have a lot of voters
Some of these charts look pretty bad for Democrats. Here are some that look bad for Republicans. I've written lots about how suburbs have realigned from red to blue; here's a visual presentation of that. Five localities that voted for Trump in 2016 didn't in either of his other two races. These aren't insignificant ones: Chesapeake, Chesterfield County, James City County, Stafford County and Virginia Beach. All are suburban localities. These charts help explain why Democrats don't have to worry about the declining rural numbers. Let's look at the two biggest of these five R-to-D localities:
You'll see the sharpest Democratic growth came after Trump's first election in 2016. The question is whether we'll see the Democratic vote grow again during his second term or whether the Democratic dip this year is the start of a new trend.
This is one of the few places where we saw the Democratic vote increase in 2024 over 2020. That has more to do with the explosive population growth in Chesterfield County than anything else. For Republicans, the danger sign is that the GOP vote here hasn't really changed much since 2012 (up 1,671 votes) while the Democratic vote keeps growing (up 32,362).
Roanoke is becoming less competitive
Roanoke has gone Democratic all but one year during this 1976-2024 time frame, the exception being the 1984 Ronald Reagan landslide over Walter Mondale. However, for much of that time, Roanoke was reasonably competitive. Since 2004, it hasn't been:
This makes Nick Hagen's election as the first Republican elected to the city council since 2000 all the more remarkable; I'll look more closely at that once we have all the provisional ballots accounted for.
Lynchburg is trending ... Democratic?
This is the chart that surprised me most, which shows the value of presenting the data this way. We think of Lynchburg as a conservative city, and the recent city council election that appears to have increased the Republican majority on council from 5-2 to 6-1 seems to verify that. When we look closer, though, what we see is that the Democratic vote in the Hill City is growing faster than the Republican vote. Four years ago, Biden became the first Democratic presidential candidate to carry the city since Harry Truman in 1948. This year, with the Harris vote down, Lynchburg was back in the Republican column. This chart, though, raises the question of how long it will stay that way. Since 1988, the Republican vote in Lynchburg has grown by 2,466 but the Democratic vote has grown by 7,893. In 1988, the Republican margin in Lynchburg was 7,044 votes. This year, it was just 1,617 votes. And four years ago, Democrats carried the city. Democrats should also be aware of this, though: That vote growth was a long time ago. Since 2008, neither party has seen its vote in Lynchburg change much: Republicans are up just 151 votes while Democrats are down 97. This is one of the places where we have to wonder whether this year's drop in the Democratic vote was the aberration or whether the 2020 vote for Biden was.
Lynchburg already has some of the most fascinating local politics in the state. If these trends continue, Lynchburg's politics seem destined to become even more interesting.
What's ahead in Virginia politics?
I write a weekly political newsletter, West of the Capital, that goes out Friday afternoon. This week I'll look at some of the political scenarios ahead, as well as look at some more numbers from this year's election. You can sign up for that or any of our other free newsletters below: