The Big Red Wave of 2021

Before we can fully understand why the gubernatorial elections turned out the way they did, it is helpful to look at what happened.

W hat happened on Tuesday to make Glenn Youngkin the governor of Virginia, and bring Jack Ciattarelli within two points of taking down supposedly safe incumbent Phil Murphy in New Jersey? Before we can fully understand why it happened, it is helpful to look at what happened.

Turnout

Let’s start with turnout. Votes are still being counted, particularly in New Jersey, and while that will not affect the final outcome, it is early to assess the final turnout numbers — especially in terms of comparing variations in turnout at the county level. Still, we can draw some preliminary conclusions.

In Virginia, by any measure, turnout was very high. Over 600,000 more people voted in the Virginia governor’s race in 2021 than in 2017. Terry McAuliffe got 170,000 more votes in defeat than Ralph Northam got in victory four years earlier. That’s not just a by-product of population growth in the state. If you compare the gubernatorial turnout to the number of people who voted in the prior year’s presidential election, Virginia saw 73 percent as many people voting — the highest ratio since 1989, when Douglas Wilder was elected the commonwealth’s first black governor following a lopsided presidential election. This was the first gubernatorial election since 1997 to clear 70 percent of presidential turnout. By contrast, turnout fell off very sharply in the 2009 race won by Bob McDonnell and the 2013 race won by McAuliffe, undoubtedly in both cases due to the number of Barack Obama voters who did not show up at the polls when Obama was not on the ballot.

We can take away one obvious conclusion: For all the Republican mockery of his tepid rally crowds and all the progressive complaints about his unexciting campaign and the supposed depressing effect of not passing the mammoth reconciliation bill, McAuliffe did not lose this race for lack of turnout of Democratic voters.

New Jersey may be a different story. A lot of people voted there, too; an increase of over 300,000 voters compared with 2017. Murphy also got around 30,000 more votes in 2021 than in his lopsided victory in 2017. But as of the current numbers, turnout fell compared with the prior year’s presidential race for the sixth gubernatorial election in a row. New Jersey had consistently high gubernatorial turnout between 1949 and 1997, at least relative to its presidential turnout, but that has ceased to be the case in this century.

That falloff, however, is partly a feature of growing presidential turnout. The New Jersey presidential electorate was 3.01 million people in 1976, 3.07 million in 1996, 3.19 million in 2000, 3.66 million (probably suppressed by Superstorm Sandy) in 2012, but soared to almost 4 million in 2016 and 4.57 million in 2020. The gubernatorial races have not kept up. Still, if Democrats want to talk about the complacency or apathy of their base, they should look at progressive Phil Murphy rather than conventional liberal Terry McAuliffe as the guy who failed to excite.

The Swing

Statewide, both states swung significantly from the Democrats’ easy victories in the 2017 gubernatorial races: an 11.3-point swing in Virginia, and a 12.7-point swing in New Jersey. Bear in mind that I use “swing” here to compare the margins of victory: Thus, a swing from a five-point win to a five-point loss is ten points, although that actually represents just 5 percent of the electorate switching sides.

Of course, a partisan reaction against the party holding the White House has been a longtime trend in New Jersey, and an extremely pronounced one in Virginia, where McAuliffe’s victory in 2013 was the only time since 1973 that the party holding the White House won the gubernatorial race in Virginia.

As you can see from this chart, the partisan swing of Virginia against the party in the White House was comparatively muted in 2013 and 2017; the 12.5-point swing in 2021 from the state’s own presidential vote was typical of the double-digit swings in every race between 1977 and 2009.

New Jersey’s swing against the party in power — 14.5 points this year — was actually muted in 2017, with Murphy merely duplicating Hillary Clinton’s margin of victory against Donald Trump. That was also true during the George W. Bush years. The state has tended to react more strongly against Democratic presidents in the post-Reagan era, with double-digit swings against the Republicans only once (in 1989) but against the Democrats now four times (1997, 2009, 2013, and 2021). Of course, the unique political talent of pre-Bridgegate Chris Christie made a big difference in the 2009 and 2013 races.

Where It Happened

Where did the voters turn against the Democrats? Was this just a matter of fired-up voters in Trump areas? Joe Biden seems to think so. In fact, there was a big movement in the Republican direction in just about every corner of Virginia and New Jersey — red and blue, urban and rural, big counties and tiny ones. Virginia is a bit complicated because it has 95 counties plus 38 independent cities, which makes the counties look redder than they are. Compared to the 2020 presidential race:

• Youngkin flipped seven counties and four cities that voted for Joe Biden: Prince Edward, Stafford, Northampton, Chesterfield, Montgomery, James City, and Surry Counties, and the cities of Radford, Hopewell, Virginia Beach, and Chesapeake. The counties are mostly adjacent to the bluest parts of the state in Northern Virginia or the Richmond area. Radford is a competitive island in the red west of the state, but the vote-rich Virginia Beach area by the southeast Atlantic coast includes both Chesapeake city and Northampton County.
• Fifty-four of 95 counties and 28 of 38 cities saw a double-digit swing in the Republican direction, the largest being an 18.3-point swing in Radford.
• Ninety of 95 counties and all 38 cities saw at least a five-point swing in the Republican direction.
• The remaining five counties that swung only modestly to Glenn Youngkin — Carroll, Grayson, Bland, Dickenson, and Buchanan Counties — were all won by Donald Trump by margins of at least 58 points, so there was not much more blood left to be squeezed from those stones.

We can also compare Youngkin’s victory to Ralph Northam’s win in 2017.

The shifts are different, but the basic story is the same:

• Youngkin flipped five counties and four cities that voted for Ralph Northam, which overlap with the places flipped from Biden: Northampton, Montgomery, Surry, Prince Edward, and Chesterfield Counties, and the cities of Radford, Chesapeake, Virginia Beach, and Hopewell.
• Sixty-four of 95 counties and 13 of 38 cities saw a double-digit swing in the Republican direction compared with 2017, the largest being a 20.8-point swing in Radford and a 20.7-point swing in Bath County.
• Ninety-two of 95 counties and 31 of 38 cities saw at least a five-point swing in the Republican direction.
• Three counties and six cities swung only modestly to Glenn Youngkin compared with 2017. Henrico and Albemarle counties got slightly less blue; James City County remained slightly red. Smaller swings were in solidly blue cities (Petersburg, Charlottesville, Fairfax), one solid-red city (Colonial Heights), and two cities that were competitive in both races (Hopewell and Staunton).
• In just one city, Emporia, McAuliffe performed better than Northam. Notably, Emporia also had the second-largest swing toward Youngkin compared with the presidential race. Thus, the city clearly has a fair number of Gillespie-Biden-Youngkin voters, or at least voters who sat out Trump.

New Jersey has fewer and larger subdivisions than Virginia, being divided into 21 counties.

• Ciattarelli flipped four counties won by Biden: Atlantic, Cumberland, Morris, and Gloucester Counties. Three of these are smaller counties in the southern, less urbanized part of the state. Morris County is a textbook example of the kind of suburban county that Trump alienated; Mitt Romney won it by nearly ten points, and it’s Christie’s home county, which he won by 29 points in 2009 and by 40 in 2013.
• Eighteen of 21 counties saw a double-digit swing in the Republican direction compared with 2020, the largest being swings of more than 18 points in Somerset, Atlantic, Morris, and Cumberland Counties.
• Twenty of 21 counties saw at least a five-point swing in the Republican direction compared with 2020.
• In just one county, Hudson (dominated by Jersey City), Phil Murphy performed better than Biden, stretching the Democratic margin from a 46.2-point win to a 47.4-point win. Perhaps not coincidentally, with Jersey City, Hoboken, and Weehawken, Hudson County tends to have a lot of young, new residents and refugees from New York City. It’s the most densely populated county in the state.

• Ciattarelli flipped three counties won by Murphy in his first race: Cumberland, Gloucester, and Atlantic Counties.
• Thirteen of 21 counties saw a double-digit swing in the Republican direction compared with 2017, the largest being eye-popping swings of more than 20 points in Cumberland, Atlantic, Salem, Gloucester, and Passaic Counties. Passaic is one of the suburban counties along the border with suburban New York.
• Eighteen of 21 counties saw at least a five-point swing in the Republican direction compared with 2020. Mercer County had a smaller swing.

Notice what is missing: Not one county or city in Virginia or New Jersey was flipped to the Democrats from 2020 or 2017.

This was a big red wave. It washed all over two states that have been blue for a while. It proved that the enduring dynamics of politics — persuasion of swing voters, reactions against the party in power — have not somehow been rendered irrelevant by polarization, Donald Trump, changes to voting procedures, January 6, or any of the other factors that we sometimes hear cited as reasons why “everything is different now.” The more things change, the more we see which things remain the same.