We are one week out from Election Day.
We know more about the dynamics of this year’s election than we did a week ago, but not nearly as much as we’ll know a week from now on election night.
Cardinal News will have all hands on deck for election night — and thanks to the generosity of readers, we now have more hands than ever. We believe that if you don’t count sports, we have the second largest newsroom in Virginia. On election night, we hope to bring you, for the first time, real-time results directly from the Virginia Department of Elections, along with my usual running analysis of the returns.
That’s still a long way off, though, in political terms. For now, here’s an overview of where things stand a week out.
1. What the polls say
Not much. There are lots of polls nationally and in other states. In Virginia, though, we have very little to go on. (That might actually be a good thing!) I discount all polls aligned with campaigns or other partisan sources. They may be absolutely right, but they still feel suspect. That leaves us with just three polls — one apiece in the 1st, 2nd and 5th districts, two from The Washington Post-Schar School, a third from Christopher Newport University. Those polls show Democrats Shannon Taylor and Elaine Luria slightly ahead of Republican incumbents Rob Wittman and Jen Kiggans in the 1st and 2nd, and Republican John McGuire slightly ahead of Democratic challenger Tom Perriello in the 5th. Those were also weeks ago now, so they feel akin to a sports score when we know one team is up by a field goal in the first quarter — but now it’s much further along in the game, and we haven’t heard any updates. Through their internal polls, the campaigns surely know a lot more than we do. That means we have to rely on other things to get a sense of how campaigns are going.
2. What the forecasters say
We do not lack for political forecasting sites, and they likely have access to more data — including internal polls shared by the campaigns. You can decide for yourself how much weight to ascribe to these forecasters, but here’s what the top ones say about the Virginia congressional races.
1st District: Shannon Taylor (D) vs. Rob Wittman (R-incumbent)
Cook Political Report: Toss-up
Sabato’s Crystal Ball: Toss-up
Inside Elections: Leans Republican
Decision Desk HQ: Leans Republican
Chaz Nuttycombe: Likely Democratic
(Nuttycombe is a Virginia-based analyst who runs State Navigate, but these are his personal forecasts.)
2nd District: Elaine Luria (D) vs. Jen Kiggans (R-incumbent)
Cook Political Report: Leans Democratic
Sabato’s Crystal Ball: Leans Democratic
Inside Elections: Toss-up
Decision Desk HQ: Likely Democratic
Chaz Nuttycombe: Solid Democratic
5th District: Tom Perriello (D) vs. John McGuire (R-incumbent)
Cook Political Report: Likely Republican
Sabato’s Crystal Ball: Leans Republican
Inside Elections: Likely Republican
Decision Desk HQ: Leans Republican
Chaz Nuttycombe: Tilts Democratic
These are the only three districts these forecasts see being in play (others are typically listed as solid D or solid R). You’ll see that Nuttycombe is more bullish about Democratic chances than other forecasters, so that’s something to keep an eye on.
3. What we know about how Virginia fits into the national picture
The Cook Political Report and Decision Desk HQ all see Democrats winning a majority in the House. Inside Elections is a little more cautious and sees Democrats winning more seats but has enough listed as toss-ups that it’s not forecasting a majority for either side yet.
If they’re right — and I make no judgment on that — then the only Virginia seat that Democrats may need to win a majority is the 2nd District. Any others would be “extras.” That means on election night, if we see Kiggans holding onto the 2nd District, that likely means there is no blue wave. If Luria wins, that likely means a Democratic majority but not necessarily a “wave.” It’s only if the 1st and the 5th start going Democratic that we can likely talk about a wave election. If the 1st goes blue, that’s likely a wave; if the 5th goes blue, then we might be talking about a tsunami. If other districts start to go Democratic, we might need to invent a new word, although the data thus far suggests the thesaurus is safe from revisions.
4. What we know about the early voting trends
Now we come to my favorite metric, because this is based on what has actually happened, not what someone thinks will happen.
Here’s what we can state as absolute fact: Through Sunday, more than 1 million votes have already been cast in Virginia. The 1,107,183 votes cast so far are 13.0% more than the 979,079 cast this time last year in the governor’s race.
Here’s what we think we know based on that: That means we’re probably headed for a turnout higher than the 54.3% turnout last year, higher than the 49.28% turnout in the Joe Biden midterms of 2022 but lower than the 59.5% turnout of the Donald Trump midterms of 2018. Ultimately, all that depends on how strongly people keep voting early this week and what the size of the day-of turnout will be. If this year is like last year, then about 28.5% of the total votes have already been cast.
Here are the big things we don’t know: How big will that Election Day turnout be? How much of this higher turnout so far represents increased turnout overall and how much is simply voters shifting their preference from day-of to early voting? We don’t know that yet.
5. What we think we know about the early voting trends
Virginia doesn’t register voters by party so, unlike some other states, we can’t say “this many Democrats have voted” and “this many Republicans have voted.” However, State Navigate has been analyzing early voting trends and has been publishing daily updates of what it thinks the early voting electorate looks like. Through Sunday, State Navigate sees the early voters this year being 1.3 percentage points more Democratic than last year. That’s a more significant figure than it may seem. We know that early voters trend Democratic (Republicans still prefer the traditional Election Day). We also know that last year’s governor’s race in Virginia (the baseline State Navigate is using) was a Democratic runaway, so State Navigate is seeing an environment this year that is slightly more Democratic than the one that gave Abigail Spanberger a big win last year.
However, it does not see this shift happening uniformly, and here’s where things get more interesting — for both parties. State Navigate sees the strongest pro-Democratic shift in the 5th District. Last year, Democrats won the early voting there by 5.7 percentage points but lost the election there overall by 7.6 percentage points. This year, it sees Democrats winning the early voting in the 5th by 8.8 percentage points. Will that be enough to overcome the Republican turnout on Election Day? Nuttycombe, who runs State Navigate, thinks so, but we won’t know until we actually see that turnout. We do know that this Democratic advantage has been trending downwards, a sign that Republicans are finally starting to show up to vote early (although, again, we don’t know whether either side is simply cannibalizing their day-of vote).
The weakest pro-Democratic shift in the State Navigate analysis is in the 6th District, where Democrat Beth Macy is running a well-funded challenge to Republican incumbent Ben Cline in the state’s second-most Republican district. Last year, Republicans won the early vote there by 0.9 percentage points; this year, it’s running Democratic by 0.2 percentage points. That’s likely not near enough in a district that Republicans won last year by 17.4 percentage points.
For those skeptical of this analysis, there is some hard data we can point to: The 5th and the 6th show very different patterns. In the 5th, the early vote in Democratic localities is running strong (up 41.1% in Charlottesville, up 32.8% in Danville, up 22.8 % in vote-rich Albemarle County ), while the early vote in some Republican localities is pretty anemic (down 2.0% in both Goochland and Powhatan counties, down 1.0% in Amelia County). That’s the basic tale of the tape in the 5th: Democratic localities sharply up, but some Republican counties are running somewhat behind last year, which was a bad Republican year anyway. Next door in the 6th District, we see different trends. The Democratic localities, which started slow, are now running ahead of last year’s pace — Roanoke is up 13.1%, Harrisonburg is up 20.3% — but Republican localities are up, too, sometimes by even more. Page County is up 20.7%, Highland County is up 25.1%, although admittedly there aren’t many votes there.
In general, in the 6th, we see a turnout that is up at more consistent rates across the district, while in the 5th, it’s lumpy.
6. What the candidates are saying
While there are regional variations everywhere, most of these campaigns can be boiled down to these essentials:
Democrats are saying President Donald Trump’s policies have hurt the economy, with tariffs driving up the price of goods and the war against Iran driving up gas prices. They say the signature Republican bill, H.R. 1, aka the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” has led to service cuts at rural hospitals. Throw in some shots at corruption and big tech for data centers and artificial intelligence — that’s the Democratic pitch in 2026.
The Republican counterpunch is that Democrats are Democrats (polls show the party remains unpopular) and, in some cases, much more liberal than voters should want. Cline has ads that warn Macy will be “a more radical version of Spanberger” — potentially a potent line in a district that didn’t vote for Spanberger. Both Cline and McGuire, in particular, have warned that Democrats are on the side of socialism.
As is often the case, the two sides are talking past one another — and in the absence of actual debates, they get to do so. For Cline and McGuire, in particular, their political task is simply mobilizing Republican voters. If they can get those voters to turn out, they should be able to win in those red districts (Cline seems to be doing that; McGuire maybe not so much, based on the early voting numbers discussed above). Republicans are making a basic political argument for voters to stick with their traditional alignments, while Democrats are making a detail-oriented policy argument that Republican policies have failed some Republican voters.
7. What the candidates aren’t saying
The absence of some arguments is sometimes as telling as the arguments being presented. We don’t see Democrats labeling themselves as Democrats; their party ID is akin to poison with many rural voters. We also don’t see Republicans defending Trump’s tariffs. The Wall Street Journal recently published an analysis of campaign ads nationwide. It didn’t find Republicans saying anything about Trump’s signature economic policy of tariffs. If those tariffs were working, they’d be popular, and if they were popular, you’d think Republicans could be talking them up.
8. What the candidates are doing
Realistically, most voters never meet the candidates except indirectly through advertising, so this may be the least important category of all, particularly at this stage of the campaign. In an unusual turn of events, the Democrats in the 5th and 6th districts have more money than the Republican incumbents in those two mostly rural Republican districts, so both Perriello and Macy are advertising heavily.
By heavily, here’s what I mean: Over the course of the campaign, Macy has outspent Cline 3.3:1 on television and 7.8:1 on radio in the 6th District, according to a compilation of media buys. Democrats can’t say their message isn’t being heard. I’ve not been able to find comparable data on broadcast spending for the 5th District; however, based on Federal Election Commission reports on overall spending, Macy has outspent Cline by 49.9% overall while Perriello has outspent McGuire by 48.5%.
While Democrats are flooding the airwaves, there’s one consistent theme on the Republican side: They’re stumping with former Gov. Glenn Youngkin. Whether this is Youngkin laying the groundwork for another gubernatorial run in 2029 or simply the former governor fulfilling his duty as the party’s titular leader is hard to say and may not matter. He’s a big draw for Republicans and a rallying point for a party that polls show is lethargic this year. Over the weekend, Youngkin held four events with McGuire — in Danville, Forest, Powhatan County and Charlottesville. While Youngkin has appeared with lots of Republican candidates this year, this 5th District swing might be the most important: The Republican vote is clearly down in the 5th District, which has put Perriello in a position to score an upset if those trends continue. McGuire is also the least-funded of the vulnerable Republicans in Virginia this year, while Perriello has almost twice as much cash left to spend. (“A magic faucet,” Youngkin called it over the weekend.) If McGuire holds on, Youngkin may deserve part of the credit for helping to boost Republican turnout in what otherwise seems a sluggish year for Republican voters.
Nationally, it’s clear that Republicans feel they are on the defensive and Democrats on the offensive, without consulting a single poll, just the travel schedules. Trump was in Mississippi and Kansas on Monday, with events scheduled Tuesday in Texas and North Carolina; all these are red states. By contrast, the top Democratic surrogate, former President Barack Obama, spent the weekend in a swing state (Michigan) and a red state (Ohio). We see a variation of this in Virginia: On Tuesday, Sen. Ralph Warnock, D-Georgia, will be campaigning in the state. Where will he be? Charlottesville and Lynchburg, two places where Democrats need a big turnout if Perriello is going to upset McGuire.
9. What’s happening that we can’t see
Campaigns are like icebergs: There’s a lot under the surface that we can’t see. We can’t see, for instance, the get-out-the-vote campaigns that both sides are mobilizing for Election Day (or at least should be mobilizing). For Democrats, this means getting college students to the polls; those votes could be especially critical in some districts. For Republicans, that means a different set of voters.
G. Elliot Morris, who runs the data-focused newsletter Strength in Numbers, posted over the weekend that generating a big day-of turnout will be critical for Republicans, given their low numbers in the early voting: “We don’t know if the early vote will be predictive bc all Reps could just be waiting to vote until Elec Day. What this means in practice is that to win, the GOP will have to have the most successful EDay mobilization operation in modern history — and that it’s completely stealth.” As you can tell, he’s skeptical that’s happening, but the reality is, we just don’t know.
10. What’s going to happen that we can’t expect or predict
Given the popularity of early voting, an October surprise is less meaningful now than in the past. If a campaign is planning an October surprise, they may be too late; they should have done this before now.
What we don’t know — what not even the campaigns know — is whether anything in the world will happen that might have an impact on the vote. Trump might say something unexpected. Some horrendous thing could happen somewhere. A portal to another dimension could open up. We just don’t know.
What we do know is that more than 1.1 million votes have been cast, and the rest — whatever that number might be — will be cast either through the rest of this week or next Tuesday. Then we’ll know what happened, and I can write a column offering 10 reasons why it turned out the way it did.
Still aren’t sure who you’re voting for? Check out our Voter Guide; we sent an issues questionnaire to every candidate across Virginia. You can see who replied, and what they had to say by looking up your county or city. We have separate pages for each one.
Want even more politics? Then sign up for West of the Capital, our weekly political newsletter that goes out on Friday. I’ve been updating the early voting trends (and more) each week in the newsletter. This week we’ll also ask readers to vote on the name of their favorite precinct.
