They say close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.
It certainly doesn’t count in elections.
The “no” side came close to winning in last week’s special election on a constitutional amendment to allow a mid-decade redrawing of congressional lines. The final margin was 51.68% to 48.32% — unofficially, at least, since the Virginia Supreme Court has blocked certification of the results until it rules on whether the election was constitutionally held.
Regardless of whether the election stands or not, the results still give us insight into Virginia’s political dynamics. We didn’t learn anything dramatically new, but the numbers do confirm trends we’ve seen before: The “no” side (essentially the Republican side, plus whatever independents and Democratic defectors joined them) generated a higher-than-usual turnout in much of rural Virginia. The problem is that rural turnout still wasn’t high enough.
Let’s take Scott County. It was one of six localities — all rural, Republican-voting counties in Southwest Virginia — that saw more people vote in this unique spring election than in last November’s election for governor. Of those six, Scott saw turnout increase the most, on a percentage basis. Scott always delivers a thundering margin for Republicans, and in this election, it delivered an even bigger margin than usual. With 88.52% of Scott County’s voters casting “no” ballots, the pro-Republican vote margin grew from 4,868 votes last fall to 5,836 votes this spring, an increase of 19.8%. And yet Scott County still underperformed.
The Department of Elections data shows that 47% of Scott County’s registered voters cast ballots last week, up from 45% last fall. However, that’s distinctly below the statewide average of 52%.
If Scott County had managed to hit the state average, another 836 people would have voted — and given Scott’s politics, virtually all of those would have been on the Republican side.
Those 836 uncast ballots in Scott wouldn’t have come close to making the difference statewide, where the margin was 103,963 votes, but the point is that, as hard as Republicans worked to win this election, they still left votes uncast.
Let’s take a look at this map, which shows the voter turnout for each locality in Virginia. It’s color-coded with the statewide average of 52% as the midpoint, so any locality that’s green had higher-than-average turnout, and any locality in pink had lower-than-average turnout. (Not my favorite color scheme, but this is what the software makes available.)
The green localities are concentrated in three Republican-voting parts of Virginia: up and down the spine of the Blue Ridge, the outer suburbs of Richmond and the counties along the Chesapeake Bay. (The main exception is Albemarle County, a Democratic voting locality that had a slightly higher-than-average turnout at 55%.)
The “no” voters in these localities can say they did their part, starting with Goochland County, which had a 65% turnout — although even there, you can argue that maybe Goochland didn’t do enough. That 65% turnout was down from 71% last year.
Now let’s look at the pink areas that had below-state-average turnout. They come in three basic areas: Southwest and Southside, which are strong Republican areas, and the urban crescent from Northern Virginia down to Hampton Roads, where Democrats are strongest.
As noted before in other columns, the Democratic turnout was off in this election. That’s one reason the final margin was so close. Although Democrats were the ones who were pushing this amendment, their voters were less than enthusiastic for some reason. The voters most enthusiastic — enraged might be a better word — were rural Republican voters who objected to a congressional map that chopped them up and parceled them out to Democratic-dominated congressional districts.
Unfortunately for the “no” side, some rural voters were more motivated than others. The Republican voters in the Shenandoah Valley, Richmond exurbs and Chesapeake Bay came in reasonably strong; their counterparts in Southwest and Southside let them down. For Republicans, this is an opportunity missed: Democrats had an off day, but Republicans couldn’t take advantage of that because their voters in Southwest and Southside didn’t turn out in sufficient numbers.
This election is done, but here’s the lesson for the future: If Republicans want to be competitive in future elections, they need to do two things operationally: They need to boost turnout in Southwest and Southside, and they need to be able to cut into Democratic margins in the urban crescent, particularly Northern Virginia. That’s how Glenn Youngkin led Republicans to a statewide sweep in 2021, but even his win was a narrow one (with a smaller margin than the “yes” side had in this election), and Virginia has likely become more blue since then. Virginia is not automatically Democratic, but it does lean that way.
A higher turnout in Southwest and Southside alone likely wouldn’t have made the difference for the “no” side in this election (there just aren’t enough voters in those places), but it would have narrowed the gap enough that a slightly better showing in the urban crescent might have tipped things.
If the so-called coal counties of Southwest Virginia had each generated a turnout of 50% (still below the state average, but easier to do the math for), that would have been an extra 10,036 votes. If the turnout there had been 55% (a reasonable figure that’s still below what many of those rural counties along the Blue Ridge or Chesapeake Bay had), then the coal counties would have added an extra 14,747 votes.
That’s still a long way from changing the outcome, but it does serve to reduce the number of extra votes that Republicans would have to extract out of harder areas, such as Northern Virginia.
Lynchburg is another lost opportunity for Republicans in this election. It had a voter turnout of 42%. Had that turnout been 50%, the Hill City would have supplied 4,848 more voters. Bump it up to 55%, and that would have been another 7,836.
Combine that with the most southwestern counties and that’s 22,583 additional votes possible for the “no” side — which, again, puts less pressure on Republicans in the urban crescent. The party still needs to improve its showing there, but each additional vote from rural Virginia helps make things easier for the party.
Now, this is all lovely theorizing on my part, but here’s the hard reality: The turnout in Southwest and Southside has always been lower than other parts of the state. Even in 2021, a winning year for Republicans in Virginia, those localities came in lower than elsewhere. That year, Buchanan County had the second-lowest turnout in the state (Democratic-voting Petersburg was lowest). Turnout rates are often linked nationally with education and income; Southwest and Southside come in low on both scales, so it’s not a simple matter for Republicans to drive up turnout there. They’re battling deep-seated social forces that lead to high turnout in Republican-voting exurbs such as Goochland County and low turnout in Republican-voting rural areas such as Southwest Virginia. (Democrats face the same forces in other ways — high turnout in the Northern Virginia suburbs, low turnout in central cities such as Norfolk and Petersburg.)
There is one tool that Republicans have to increase turnout in these low-voting rural areas, but they’re often reluctant to use it (and President Donald Trump routinely disparages it): mail voting. Perhaps that’s a principled stand, or perhaps it’s short-sighted and self-defeating. The reality is that Republicans have more to gain from mail balloting than Democrats do; Democrats are closer to maxing out their potential, Republicans are nowhere close.
Republicans didn’t need to get voters in Southwest and Southside to get to the polls last week; they just needed them to get to the mailbox. Because not enough did, they lost an election — and may continue to do so until they figure out a way to fix that.
I’ll have more to say about the special election, and other political news, in this week’s edition of West of the Capital, our weekly political newsletter that goes out on Friday afternoons. Sign up here:
