While it might be rivaled, or even surpassed, by the shocking upset win of Doug Jones in early December, Election Night 2017 was still a hell of an enjoyable ride for the Democrats. It was an evening that saw the Democrats seize one governorship with ease (New Jersey), reclaim control of a state legislature via special election (Washington), and, perhaps most surprising of all, sweep all the statewide legislative offices in Virginia, while also returning to parity in the state legislature. The final triumph was the most stunning of all, given that the GOP began Election Day 2017 with a 66-34 majority in the state House of Delegates.
Over a month removed from what was indisputably a glorious election night for the blue team, two competing narratives have developed as to the genesis of that wave. In one corner, progressives argue that the key was to spike turnout in deep blue enclaves, a variation on the classic “rally the base” theme. Meanwhile, others have pointed out that suburban voters who historically have favored the GOP proved to be persuadable, and the Virginia landslide can be owed in part to those persuadable voters.
At the risk of appearing spineless and indecisive, a longer look inside the numbers tells us that those two competing theories both have some merit. Let’s take that deep look into the results to understand how both turnout and changed minds brought home the win for the Democrats.
KEY TO THE DEMOCRATIC WAVE, PART ONE—A BLUE TURNOUT SURGE
Every election, we in the community of election junkies promise not to spend Election Day getting sucked in by tweets and other reports involving turnout (and, it’s worth noting, we usually fail and get sucked in, anyway).
But, buried in that avalanche of turnout anecdotes on November 7, there were some real nuggets. Turnout, we were told midday, was absolutely insane in two Democratic enclaves: Falls Church in Northern Virginia, and Charlottesville downstate (unlike most states, Virginia has a number of cities which record their elections separately from the counties that surround them).
As it happened, neither of those were idle anecdotes. Falls Church wound up with a turnout ratio that was among the best of the state—turnout in 2017 was a whopping 78 percent of the presidential turnout. Charlottesville, meanwhile, wound up with a turnout that was 73 percent of presidential turnout. More importantly, however, the turnout for Charlottesville in 2017 was nearly 132 percent of the gubernatorial turnout four years earlier.
And, in many ways, that latter metric is more meaningful as we seek to understand the midterm/off-year dynamic.
To make our comparison, let’s look at the larger counties and municipalities of Virginia, measured as localities with a 2017 turnout of 10,000 voters or more—a total of 54 cities and counties.
If we just look at 2017 turnout through the lens of how it compared to a year earlier, we see a modest difference between “red” and “blue” territories. Of the 19 counties and cities that had turnout at or above two-thirds of the Clinton/Trump turnout, Republican gubernatorial hopeful Ed Gillespie carried 10 of them, and Democrat Ralph Northam carried nine of them. In fairness, Northam did marginally better with the 10 best turnouts in that group (he carried six of the top 10).
Viewed through that lens, it’s hard to make a case for “turnout surge.” But the key is to compare it to the last GUBERNATORIAL election, in order to get a true apples-to-apples turnout comparison. And there, lo and behold, the blue team measures out substantially better. There were a dozen counties and cities where 2017 turnout was 120 percent or more of the 2013 turnout. And the Democratic nominee carried 11 of those 12 counties.
On a certain level, that makes complete sense. The liability for Democrats has long been finding a way to avoid the peril of turnout drop-off in non-presidential years. In 2017, whether driven to the polls by Trump angst, or inspired by local causes (especially, in this case, the enormous number of competitive downballot races run by Democrats), the drop-off was comparably light. And that, in no small part, played a role in the Democratic success on November 7th.
Size matters, as well. Five of the localities that saw 2017 turnout levels north of 120 percent of 2013 rates were places that saw Ralph Northam win by margins exceeding 40 percent:
County name |
2017 northam margin |
2017 turnout |
turnout increase (as a % of 2013 turnout) |
charlottesville city |
70.7% |
16,445 |
131.6% |
alexandria city |
57.6% |
52,187 |
126.6% |
norfolk city |
48.4% |
53,653 |
126.5% |
arlington county |
60.8% |
85,214 |
126.2% |
richmond city |
64.3% |
71,258 |
121.7% |
And that’s not even taking into account Fairfax County, which saw Northam defeat Gillespie by a 37-point margin, and saw turnout at nearly 123 percent of the McAuliffe/Cuccinelli race. To put that in perspective, that means there were nearly 70,000 more voters in Fairfax County this year than there were in 2013.
To allow for even more perspective, take all of the larger localities that voted for Ed Gillespie. There were 33 of them, and their combined turnout saw only about 71,000 more voters hit the polls in 2017. In other words, all of the turnout increase in the red counties/cities in Virginia were essentially offset by Fairfax County alone.
key to the democratic wave, part two—the burbs
Advocates for the “blue-trending suburbs” argument need to look no further than the 500-or-so square miles laying just to the west of Fairfax County.
Loudoun County, prior to last year, would have to be categorized as a prime example of a purple county. It had elected Republicans steadily at the presidential level until 2008, when Barack Obama carried the county by a modest margin (54-45). Four years later, Obama’s re-election actually fared marginally worse (52-47) in Loudoun.
Downballot, for the most part, Loudoun has been reliably red. Republicans controlled the bulk of the state legislative seats in Loudoun until 2014, with the sole exceptions being two state Senate seats with significant population outside the county.
Real blue-tinted cracks in Loudoun began to appear during the 2014 cycle, and prior to the 2017 cycle, the Democrats had managed to seize a total of four seats with at least some coverage in Loudoun. Even after the 2015 elections, however, the GOP still held a narrow edge in the seats held in Loudoun County, with six legislative Republicans to just five legislative Democrats.
Then, 2016 seemed to provide a sea change in voter opinion, a movement echoed in suburban and ancestrally Republican-leaning counties from coast-to-coast. Obama had carried Loudoun County by single digits, but Hillary Clinton managed to win the county by a robust 17-point margin (55-38).
As 2017 approached, the question loomed: was Clinton’s monster win in the county, doubling up even Obama’s best margins there, a sign of a legitimate blue shift, or would the county recede back to purple status in a non-presidential election? After all, Terry McAuliffe had only won the county by a comparably modest four points, and Mark Warner narrowly lost the county in his (barely) successful 2014 re-election effort.
2017 provided a definitive answer to that question: Ralph Northam managed to actually exceed Hillary Clinton’s margins here. Whereas Ed Gillespie carried Loudoun in his 2014 Senate bid (49.0-48.5), he lost the county 59-39 to Northam in November.
The carnage extended downballot. Of the four GOP state delegates from Loudoun, three tasted defeat on Election Night, with two of them (Jim LeMunyon and Tag Greason) defeated by double digit margins.
A similar GOP drubbing took place in a neighboring NoVa suburban county: Prince William County. PWC is a slightly different case than Loudoun—its evolution roughly a decade ago into a diverse and well-educated electorate led to a blue shift at the federal level long before the Trump/Clinton cycle. Indeed, Hillary Clinton’s 21-point win here was only marginally better than the 15-16 point Obama wins here in 2008 and 2012. In non-presidential statewides, the county has been a little more conflicted: McAuliffe and Warner both carried for the Dems in 2013/14, but by modest margins (three points for Warner, and eight points for T-Mac)
The thing about Prince William County, however, has long been the disparity between how the county performed in statewide elections and how it performed downballot. To this day, for example, the county board of supervisors (led by the execrable Corey Stewart) has an overwhelming GOP tilt. And before the election last year, the GOP held a six to two edge among delegates whose districts include (in part or in whole) Prince William County.
All of that changed in November. While T-Mac and Warner carried the county by modest single-digit margins, Ralph Northam carried PWC by an outsized 61-38 margin. And the Republican presence in the House of Delegate seats was almost completely extinguished: a six to two GOP edge became a seven to one Democratic edge, with the lone GOP seat in the county (Tim Hugo’s HD-40) only staying in Republican hands after a recount confirmed his victory by less than 100 votes.
key to the democratic wave, part three—trumpism doesn’t transfer
One of the reasons why Ed Gillespie’s swoon in the suburbs was particularly troublesome for the GOP is because it showed that the suburban movement away from Donald Trump had proved transferable to the Democrats, in general. Republicans, no doubt, had hoped that his collapse in typically GOP-leaning suburbia was a phenomenon limited to their boorish and ill-mannered standard bearer. 2017, if nothing else, proved that maxim wrong.
Even in the most disappointing outcome for Democrats in 2017 proved that Hillary’s suburban surge was transferable. Jon Ossoff’s narrow defeat in GA-06 in June’s special election was one heck of a lot closer to the Trump-Clinton result in November of 2016 than it was to any of the other recent results from the district.
Of course, part of how Trump managed to cobble together an electoral college victory (that wasn’t Russia-related) dealt with the existence of other patches of electoral real estate that sharply veered his way.
The problem for Republicans—the “Trump surge” areas do not, on the surface, appear as transferable as the “Clinton surge” areas.
Consider this little bit of evidence: of the larger municipalities in Virginia, the 10 where Trump outperformed Romney the most at the margins snapped back some to the Democrats. At best, they held essentially even for the Republican nominee in 2017.
But for the 10 counties where Clinton outperformed Obama the most at the margins, there was no similar “snap back” away from that surge. A few critical counties even saw Northam improve upon the Clinton surge (notably, that aforementioned increased edge in Loudoun County). Indeed, the only one of the 10 large municipalities where Gillespie even did better than Trump on the margin was Alexandria City, where Northam’s margin of victory was a mere 0.4 percent behind Clinton’s. Both won the city, it should be noted, by roughly 58 points.
CATEGORY |
# OF COUNTIES
(NORTHAM>CLINTON
BY 3+ PTS)
|
# OF COUNTIES
(GILLESPIE>TRUMP
BY 3+ PTS)
|
TOP 10 “Trump surge” counties
|
5 |
1 |
TOP 10 “CLINTON SURGE” COUNTIES |
4 |
0 |
So, to put the above table into perspective: half of the counties which sharply veered to Trump in 2016 snapped back to the Democrats in 2017. But none of the counties which sharply veered to Clinton in 2016 snapped back to the GOP. In fact, the best they could hope for was stanching the bleeding by holding steady to 2016 margins.
A similar “bounce-back effect” for Democrats occurred in the other gubernatorial election in the 2017 cycle. In New Jersey, Donald Trump ran at least 10 points ahead of Mitt Romney on the margin in five counties: Cape May, Cumberland, Gloucester, Ocean, and Salem. In 2017, GOP nominee Kim Guadagno ran, on the margin, nearly 10 points behind Trump. To put it another way, the Democrats gained back roughly two-thirds of the advantage that Trump had carved out.
LESSONS FOR 2018
If these electoral phenomena hold out for the 2018 cycle, it could represent a total nightmare scenario for the Republicans. The turnout disparities could be a disaster in critical statewide elections (the bulk of gubernatorial seats, for example, are up in 2018), while there are literally dozens of key House seats in suburban areas not terribly dissimilar from Loudoun County or Prince William County. For example, there are no less than four potential winnable races for Democrats in California’s Orange County, another place that saw a sharp shift away from the GOP at the presidential level between 2012 and 2016 (from Romney 52-46 to Clinton 51-42).
The bottom line is simple: base turnout could be the key to victories across the nation, as it undoubtedly drove a big part of the Democratic success in Virginia in 2017.
That said, the playing field also seems to have shifted, in that a lot of historically red territory might be more amenable than ever to Democratic overtures. What’s more—the early evidence is that some of those ancestrally blue working class patches of turf that flirted hard with Trump don’t seem terribly interested in a long-term relationship. If both of those tendencies that we saw in the (admittedly smallish) sample size of 2017 elections hold up, it could be a LONG 2018 for the Republican Party.