Virginia's General Election Is Next Month-- And It Is REALLY Important

Aaron Blake had a wake-up call for Democrats this morning in his Washington Post column and thishock of glancing at those two maps above sum it right up. Democrats, he wrote, need to give up their 2016 comfort blanket-- Hillary won by 3 million votes-- because if the two campaign were based on winning the electoral college rather than the popular vote, they both would have used different strategies and there's no telling who would have won.

[I]t's totally unknowable whether Clinton actually would have won if our system went by the popular vote. That's because the campaigns were run according to the system we have-- the electoral college-- and were focused heavily on the handful of states where those votes were actually at-stake. If we had the popular vote, both sides would have campaigned in and tailored their messages to the three-fourths of the country that they barely acknowledged:

An electoral-college election involves making explicit appeals to and advertising in around 10 or 12 out of the 50 states. It means Trump didn't campaign or advertise in California or Massachusetts or Washington state and that Clinton didn't campaign in Oklahoma or even Texas (despite polling within single digits there). They knew it would be wasted effort to try to turn a 30-point loss in those states into a 22-point loss, or a 14-point loss into an eight-point loss.

For example, if Trump shaved 10 points off his 30-point loss in California, turned his 22-point loss in New York into a 15-point loss, and added just six points to his nine-point win in Texas, he'd have won the popular vote. And that's just three really populous states out of the many in which neither side really tried.

Does it seem unlikely Trump would have won a popular-vote race? Perhaps. But it's impossible to know, because the campaign would have been run completely differently. We simply don't even know that Clinton would have won if our system was the popular vote, because it's a massive hypothetical.

The most important thing for Democrats, though, is not to believe that all is well and that they were simply robbed by a bad system or a fluke. That's because they are currently in their worst position since the Great Depression in state legislatures and governor's seats. There are more than twice as many Republican governors as Democratic ones, and there are more than four times as many states with total GOP control (26) as total Democratic control (6).

The maps for regaining House and Senate majorities are also both pretty daunting-- in the Senate because 30 out of 50 states are red, and in the House because of natural sorting and GOP-controlled gerrymandering. All the GOP has to do in each chamber is hold states and districts that clearly favor them.

If Democrats don't win back state legislatures or some key governor's mansions in 2018, they'll again be shut out of the redistricting process after the 2020 election, and they'll face another decade of really tough state legislative and congressional maps. And even if they do get a seat at the table, the country has sorted itself in a way that's more conducive to Republican control.

Democrats are two election cycles away from another potential post-census disaster, but the popular vote is telling them that they really, actually won in 2016-- that they're really, actually the majority party in the United States. That's highly deceptive at best, and dangerously comforting at worst.

Virginia will be electing a new governor on November 7-- just over a month from now. Also up for election: all 100 seats in the state's House of Delegates. Right now there are 66 Republicans and 34 Democrats in that body. The Democrats need a net of 17 seats to win. And you know how many GOP-held districts voted for Hillary last year? 17. How many Democrat-held districts voted for Señor Trumpanzee? ZERO. And some of the Democrats running are decent progressives, like Danica Roem, Chris Hurst, Kimberly Anne Tucker, Hala Ayala, David Reid, Jennifer Foy, Lee Carter, Elizabeth Guzman, Bill Bunch, Angela Lynn, Flo Ketner, Steve McBride, Stephanie Cook, Cheryl Turpin, Djuna Osborne, Natalie Short, Tracy Carver and Kathy Tran (NOT Kellen Squire). When Jacqueline Smith won the election for Prince William County Clerk in June, Republicans started freaking out that they could lose a substantial number of seats. Polling in the gubernatorial race bodes well for Democrats holding onto the governor's mansion. The most recent poll-- last week from the Washington Post-- shows Democrat Ralph Northam considerably ahead of Republican Ed Gillespie-- 53-40% among likely voters and 48-38% among registered voters.

And right after the poll was released, Gillespie got a big wet kiss-- a kiss of death from Señor Trumpanzee. "[H]e has now roiled the race by jumping in directly and attacking the Democratic nominee through his preferred method: a nighttime tweet." Unhinged!

Coming four weeks before Election Day, it marked the president’s first foray into the race, which is the nation’s marquee statewide election this year and is being closely watched by the national parties as a hint of what may come in the 2018 midterms.

While Trump has endorsed other candidates in special elections this year, none of those endorsements has taken place in a true swing state that could test the president’s political strength or his effect on the GOP agenda on the state level.

Virginia has posed a particularly tricky challenge for Gillespie, who has struggled to energize Trump supporters without alienating moderates and independents. He needs those voters to overcome a Democratic base that is united behind their candidate, Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam, and motivated to vote on Nov. 7.

Trump is deeply unpopular in Virginia, the only Southern state that Hillary Clinton won last year.

The president’s tweet immediately set off speculation about whether Gillespie, a longtime establishment Republican who ran the Republican National Committee and worked for President George W. Bush, had turned to the man who has upended the traditional GOP for help.

Gillespie said he neither sought the president’s endorsement nor asked him to tweet on his behalf.

“I’m not going into conversations between the White House and the campaign or the RNC and the campaign,” Gillespie said during an interview with The Washington Post on Friday. “We talk to folks all the time. But we did not request a tweet, and I didn’t know a tweet was coming. It came as a surprise to me.”

But then, potentially concerned he might be seen as repudiating Trump, he added: “Just to be clear, again, I didn’t ask him not to endorse. I assumed that given that I’m the Republican nominee and he’s the Republican president, that he was endorsing me.”

Northam's campaign generated over $100,000 in small dollar donations within 24 hours of the Trump-tweet. Gillespie immediately dove under his bed and tried to make believe the whole thing never happened. Tomorrow morning, we're going to look at another crucial gubernatorial race, the primary to determine which Democrat-- and which kind of Democrat-- takes on Republican billionaire Bruce Rauner in Illinois next year.