Karl Rove reaches conclusions similar to mine. He writes:
Virginia is a blue state that Mr. Biden carried 54% to 44% in 2020. Last week Republicans won in seven House districts Mr. Biden carried in 2020 by up to 10 points and four Senate districts he won by up to 9 points. Democrats didn’t flip a single district Donald Trump took. These margins don’t fit with the notion that abortion draws large numbers of independents and Republicans to vote for Democratic candidates.
Rove also discusses the Kentucky election, which supports my argument that voters sometimes play against type when electing governors but almost never give full control of their states’ governments to the minority party. Democrats reelected Andy Beshear, while Republicans won everything else that was contested.
Beshear’s victory has been attributed to his opposition to the state’s pro-life law — but since voters in 2022, post-Dobbs, strengthened the Republican majorities in the legislature, that law is going to stay in place.
Update: Wonkette’s Robyn Pennacchia mostly just sneers at the analysis but offers this counterargument:
Rove and Ponnuru center their arguments on the fact that Virginia is a “blue state,” claiming that Republicans actually did okay based on that metric. Perhaps under normal circumstances that would be true, but these were not normal circumstances. Virginia has the fourth highest Muslim population in the country, a demographic that usually goes pretty strongly for Democrats (about 62 percent) … in large part for reasons of Karl Rove. Muslims lately are not entirely happy with the president. The fact that Democrats did well despite this is a fairly big deal.
The claim that Virginia has the fourth-highest concentration of Muslims in the U.S. is based on 2014 data. Back then, Muslims amounted to one percent of the state population. Even assuming, heroically, that the percentage has doubled since then, I don’t think even a large swing toward the Republicans–which may not have happened to begin with–could do much to explain the results.
There were, as always, a lot of influences on the vote. One thing we can say with confidence is that support for an expansive abortion right wasn’t enough to keep Republicans from winning in a bunch of Biden districts.