Conventional Wisdom Overstates the Lessons of Virginia’s Election Results

I agree with Charlie’s take on the Virginia election results. Conventional wisdom holds that Tuesday’s results show that the Dobbs decision and the abortion issue have amounted to a political earthquake in Virginia. The actual data tell a different story.

Virginia is a state that Joe Biden won by ten points in 2020, and Republican governor Glenn Youngkin won by two points in 2021. When Youngkin won, the Republicans took the House of Delegates by a 52–48 majority; and now, after redistricting, it appears Democrats will hold a 51–49 majority. That’s a loss that will likely have real policy consequences, but it is not the “epic failure” for Youngkin that Fox News host Brian Kilmeade describes. 

On Tuesday, Virginia Republicans picked up a senate seat, leaving Democrats with a 21-19 majority. In the five closest state senate races, the results in three contests were almost identical to the results in the Youngkin-McAuliffe 2021 gubernatorial election: 

In the other two battlegrounds, Democratic state senate candidates improved by about six points relative to McAuliffe’s performance in 2021. But even those races do not suggest a good national political environment for Democrats. In Senate District 31, based in Loudoun County, the 2023 Democratic state senate candidate was able to match the performance of Democratic House candidate Jennifer Wexton in 2022. In Senate District 27, based in Fredericksburg, results were still four points worse for the 2023 Democratic state senate candidate than the 2022 Democratic U.S. House candidate:

These results suggest that Virginia GOP’s proposed 15-week abortion limit was not the electoral albatross for Republicans that many in the media claim it is. An October Washington Post poll found voters in Virginia — again, we are talking about a Biden+10 state — were evenly split on enacting a 15-week limit. Yes, Republicans were hurt by ads falsely claiming they wanted a complete ban without any exceptions and falsely claiming they want to jail women.

But the results in Virginia point to a political environment closer to 2021 than 2022. And for all the handwringing about 2022, recall that House Republicans still won the national popular vote by three percentage points. “Republicans won 13 districts President Biden won in 2020,” Youngkin advisor Dave Rexrode wrote on Twitter. “Republicans won seven districts where the Congressional Democratic candidate won in 2022.” 

As National Review’s editorial on the victory for a pro-abortion amendment in Ohio observes, pro-life Americans obviously have a huge problem on up-or-down ballot measures. Advocates of a right to abortion are poised to run the same playbook in every state that allows referendums. But in the 2022 midterms, pro-life candidates who were mainstream Republicans fared well, and the slight improvement for Democrats between 2021 and 2023 in Virginia is not evidence that the issue is toxic for a typical pro-life conservative Republican.