It didn’t take long for former president Donald Trump to take credit for Glenn Youngkin’s victory in Virginia’s gubernatorial race. At 9 p.m. — before most outlets had called the race — Trump’s political action committee released a statement on his behalf, thanking his “BASE for coming out in force” to support Youngkin. “Without you,” the statement added, “he would not have been close to winning.” Twenty minutes later, a follow-up: “Thank you to the MAGA voters for turning out big!”
2021 Election: Complete coverage and analysis ArrowRight
This has been one of the central questions about national politics in the wake of Trump’s ouster last November. Was the surge in turnout among Republican voters in 2020 a function of loyalty specifically to Trump? After all, without him on the ballot, Republicans got wiped out in 2018, in part because Republicans weren’t as motivated as Democrats to vote. Would the same thing happen in 2021 and 2022?
There were signs that it wouldn’t. For one thing, Republicans did fairly well down-ballot in 2020. Democrats took the Senate by the most narrow possible margin and only barely held the House, despite expectations that they’d do better. The party’s stumbles were mostly at the presidential level, something that Trump predictably tried to spin as somehow proving that fraud had occurred (which, of course, it didn’t). Either those results was a function of new Trump voters showing up and adding their down-ticket votes to those of the Trump-skeptical wing of the GOP — or the results were a demonstration of how Trump was hampering the party by creating a focal point of Democratic anger. For Trump, eyeing 2024, it’s useful that people think the former is the case.
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With Youngkin’s win on Tuesday night, though, we got strong evidence that the reality is nearer to the latter. Combined with the closer-than-expected results in New Jersey’s gubernatorial race, the two races show significant vitality for the post-Trump GOP, even in blue states. There are a lot of factors to consider, starting with the unpopularity of President Biden. Tuesday was the first test Biden faced, too, and — as was the case in both New Jersey and Virginia in 2017 — voters clearly showed up in part to express displeasure with the newly elected president. More broadly, Biden’s unpopularity crystallized at perhaps the worst possible time for his party, with enormous energy (stoked heavily by right-wing media) surging as the election neared.
Looking at preliminary results in Virginia by county (as of late Tuesday night), you can see how universal the state’s shift to the right was. In every one of the state’s 133 counties and cities, Youngkin outperformed Trump’s 2020 margins. In 132 of the 133, he did better than his party’s 2017 nominee, Ed Gillespie. This could change as votes are counted, but there’s still a clear uniformity to the results.
Consider what this means. Youngkin did better than Trump in every county. Part of that is almost certainly that 2020 Joe Biden was more appealing than 2021 Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic gubernatorial candidate. But part of it, too, was that Youngkin managed to have broader appeal than Trump himself. As Echelon Insights’s Patrick Ruffini put it on Twitter, the results showed that “rural America will show up big for someone not named Donald Trump.”
In fact, rural counties in Virginia (using definitions created by Pew Research Center) backed Youngkin by 40 points in the aggregate, 10 points more than they did Trump. Trump counties overall shifted to the right by 11 points since last November; Biden counties shifted to the right by 12. On every metric, the county-level shifts were consistent: the most White and the most Black counties shifted to the right; the most educated and most urban counties did, too. McAuliffe did worse than both Biden and the winning Democrat in 2017, Ralph Northam, in every place that he won, save one.
This was in part a function of the imbalance in who came out to vote. Turnout was up 15 percent relative to 2017 in counties Biden won — and up 34 percent in counties Trump won. In urban counties, turnout was up 17 percent relative to 2017. In rural counties, it was up 30 percent. Compared to 2020, the shifts were more modest but still noticeable. Turnout in Biden counties was down 31 percent relative to last year while it was down only 24 percent in counties Trump won.
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The combination of turnout shifts, and shifts in voting meant that the change in vote totals by party consistently skewed to the Republican’s advantage. For example, in 25 counties and cities, McAuliffe received fewer votes than Northam while Youngkin got more votes than Gillespie. In zero counties and cities was that pattern reversed. In counties where McAuliffe got more votes than Northam, he averaged about 13 percent more votes. In those same counties, Youngkin beat Gillespie’s total by an average of 42 percent.
Again, this is not only about Trump. Youngkin was very careful in how he incorporated the former president into his campaign, doing his best to avoid engagement while he tried to keep Trump’s base engaged. The shift in New Jersey relative to 2020 suggests that the unique dynamics in Virginia, particularly the focus on schools, were likely not the central factor in the election results across both states. It’s more likely that the results offer a referendum on Biden and his party.
In other words, the safest assumption at this point is neither that Trump’s absence hampered the GOP nor that his lackadaisical engagement boosted Youngkin. It’s that Biden may be playing a similar role for Republicans to the one that Trump did in energizing Democrats from 2017 through 2020. It’s more likely that the partisan divide Trump helped widen may, for his party, be his most useful legacy.