District 85 is being contested by a Democratic candidate this cycle. The seat is currently held by Republican Rocky Holcomb. Holcomb gained this seat in a special election contested by Democrat Cheryl Turpin. Cheryl came within 362 votes of turning this long-standing red district blue. In the last general election, the Republican ran unopposed.
The above snapshot is based on the last general election in 2015. District 85 is comprised of 17 precincts in Virginia Beach. The last time this race was contested was in 2013 and drew 19,622 with the Republican getting 11,041 votes. That is a good sign, it shows that the republican can expect to gain about 2,000 votes if challenged. Given the energy on our side, and a well planned and executed campaign we can easily pick up 3,000 more votes or more compared to the last contested general election race.
The graphic below is a plot of the Republican vote totals in the precincts. Frankly, these are soft numbers across the board. That said, the dots below the line would be precincts to seriously review first, that means they underperform the average performance for the Republican last race:
This is just a quick snapshot on some of the analysis that can be done simply based on publically available data. There is a deeper analysis that can be done for sure.
You can request a file from the Secretary of States office by contacting Vanessa Archie at vanessa.archie@elections.virginia.gov or at (804) 864-8908. Ask what it would take to obtain the Vote History List for District 67, let her know you are a candidate or working on the campaign if you are a member of the campaign committee.
Let's Turn Virginia Blue in 2017.
Note: My name is Donald Braden. This was posted to my blog on my website The Full Slate Project last evening.