Episode 22: What did this election tell us about 2020 Virginia?
Election Day has come and gone, but the election process still continues. And while it looks like Joe Biden has the presidential election mostly secured in an election that bucked the polls, a whole host of state and local races in Virginia were also on the ballot, as well as a state Constitutional amendment for redistricting reform.
This week, Nathan Moore sits down with producer Aaryan Balu and Mary Garner McGehee, host and producer of Charlottesville Soundboard, for a roundtable discussion on this year's election and what it means for Virginia going forward.
Episode Transcript
Nathan Moore: This is Bold Dominion, a state politics explainer for changing Virginia. I'm Nathan Moore.
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As of this recording, we do not yet know the winner of the race for president, whether it'll be Joe Biden or Donald Trump. We're recording this the day after election day and several states are too close to call--and still counting votes. But we have a pretty good idea of how Virginia voted. Going into the 2020 presidential election and US congressional elections, a lot of us here in Virginia were asking if Democrats' statewide winning streak would strengthen.
Four years ago, Hillary Clinton beat Trump in Virginia by five points. When all is said and done. It looks like Joe Biden is gonna beat Trump by about nine points, maybe more. So what's that say about politics in Virginia? We've got a great show lined up for today, and it's a joint episode with Charlottesville Soundboard. So I'm going to introduce the host and producer of that show, Mary Garner, McGehee. Hey, Mary Garner.
Mary Garner McGehee: Hey, Nathan! This is my first Bold Dominion appearance. I'm so excited.
NM: Yeah! And my first Soundboard in a long term.
MGM: Yeah.
NM: What's your one sentence take away from the election in Virginia?
MGM: This is not the sexiest post-election story, but I think Virginia was really on the forefront of making voting safe and accessible during this pandemic. This is going into sentence number two, but we had 45 days of early in-person voting and hopefully that means that we don't see too many election-related COVID cases.
NM: Cool. We're also joined by Aaryan Balu. He is the producer of Bold Dominion, Aaryan, thanks for being our guest, this time on the other side of the microphone.
Aaryan Balu: It's always fun. The last time I did it, I cut myself out for sounding like a fool.
NM: Well, what's your 10 second takeaway from the election in Virginia?
AB: Uh, I started this thinking I was gonna say, you know, I wish it were a little more interesting. But seeing how things are going in the more "interesting" states, I'm glad things are safe and relatively uncontroversial here.
NM: We'll take that as a go. So today, I guess we're just gonna start with the election night results, right? And the polling going into it. You know, the popular sites--y'know, Politico and 538 and 270toWin, all these sites put Biden as like a really, really odds-on favorite. You know, like 91%, 92% chance of winning with really comfortable margins in a lot of states. Turns out a lot of those states don't have as comfortable of margins in reality, as we thought. I mean, what do we know about why the polls seemed kind of off this time around?
MGM: I mean, the thing that I've seen going around a lot, which I think, you know, rings true to the voices that I hear on the podcast that I listen to, and what I've been reading in the newspapers and stuff is that really representation in journalism and media has a really long way to go. And if your newsrooms don't reflect the communities that you're reporting on, your polls and your stories going into Election Day might not be as accurate as they could be.
AB: And I mean, in fairness, if there was ever going to be a year where the polls missed something, 2020 makes a lot of sense for that. I mean, 2016, things were messed up--mainly, I think they identified, it was under-counting those who were non-college educated white voters. They said they corrected for that. But who knows what other kind of factors kind of went into making the misses that we had this year. I was not a polls "truther." But now I don't know if I can ever look at polls the same way.
NM: Let's zoom in on Virginia a little bit here, where we did see Biden beat Trump pretty handily. Not quite the eleven or twelve points that was predicted, but still about nine, maybe nine and a half. Virginia counties and regions across the state did change their vote some--we saw up in Northern Virginia, Central Virginia, the counties around Richmond and Charlottesville all the way up to Stanton actually went even more blue this year. Meanwhile, the counties in southwest Virginia, parts of Southside Virginia actually went even more for Trump than they did in 2016. What's the story here?
MGM: I have a real theory about this. And I think part of it is that, you know, as housing prices in places like Charlottesville and Richmond go up so rapidly, it's really pushing a lot of people into now-suburbanizing areas that used to be a lot more rural. And I think a lot about--I talked about Fluvanna County all the time, I grew up in Fluvanna County--and Cameron Webb, Dr. Cameron Webb, who was running as a Democrat in the fifth district, won, very narrowly. Fluvanna County in this race this year. And you know, that's a place--it's about halfway between Richmond and Charlottesville, where that's been growing a lot that a lot of people move to if they can't afford to live in Charlottesville. And so I think that one side-effect of rising housing prices in places like Charlottesville and Richmond is that it's turning the places around them more blue as people who want to live in those urban areas can't afford to and so they move farther out and change the communities that they move into.
AB: One thing--so, I mean, on the face of it, I'll say this much, right. This was as policy-free and election as I think we can get. It was really, you know, Trump's whatever personality-driven everything versus the "soul of the nation" message from Joe Biden. And the people who care a lot about the aesthetics, the norms, all of those aspects of politics are the people who are firm--like they've all gone to Biden. People who don't care so much about that kind of thing--I don't think either of those is inherently better than the other--but they have to be convinced by something. And I don't think there was enough of a message from the Biden campaign to affirmatively convince a lot of people who were on the fence or voted for Trump to move over to their side.
NM: It was definitely a--Biden was a safer choice. I mean, it certainly wasn't a Bernie race, right? I mean, that didn't stop the Trump campaign from trying to call Biden a socialist--
AB: Same playbook they would have done against Bernie.
NM: Yeah, I mean, it's laughable, really, but yeah, Biden was--what is he four? It's, you know, some technocratic solutions to social problems, and really more than anything, just to "return to normal," whatever that means. Versus Trump is just, you know, 'Hey, help me throw some more bricks through windows." This is a hypothetical question. And maybe, maybe it's too much. But if the Democratic Party actually embraced, you know, economic progressivism in a serious way for a couple, three election cycles, would you start to see more support in rural areas? Because that rural/urban divide is a real deal. And I think the resentment that a lot of rural people see towards city people, or rather have towards city people is a real deal. You know, they see the wealth concentrated there. They see, you know, things that they don't identify with. I mean they like their little towns and they like their lifestyle there, but, you know, I think there's a pretty real perception that a lot of the decisions that get made are in the cities, and they're not to the benefit of rural places. What would it take to change that?
AB: I mean, I think it would work, right? I think that people fundamentally will vote for--this is again, hypothetical abstract--people fundamentally vote for the person who they think will be in their best interest. And, you know, economic progressivism doesn't--I don't think it's a left/right issue as much as sort of a good for everybody, right, working class solidarity and message. So I think you'd see a lot of that.
The counterpoint is, obviously, then you have the economic side, versus where Democrats or Republicans currently have clearly divided themselves, which is the culture aspect of things. You know, where do you stand on Roe v. Wade? Where do you stand on guns? That's where you're probably going to get people who, you know, might vote against their economic interests in favor of their cultural interest. I think personally, that, you know, if you give people a clear, unambiguous, "this will be good for you economically," they'll be willing to overlook cultural issues that they have with the other party.
NM: Aaryan, it's funny to hear you say that it doesn't even feel like a left/right issue, because I feel like economic issues are the only left/right issue. Everything else is kind of, you know, different flavors of it.
AB: I think--maybe when I said left/right...Democrat/Republican is different from left/right. That's, that's what I mean, moreso, is the difference between parties. You know, both parties, the establishment agree, typically on policies that work against, you know, economic progressivism, the working class, right? That's where they agree, and where they have their disagreement is the culture side, which I think is important, but less important.
NM: Yeah, I mean, yeah, I'll give a give props to intersectionality, of course, and the need to look at how race and gender and sexual--rather, LGBT status all intersect with class in really important ways. But yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, you know, people meeting their basic needs, and then some and thriving does seem like a really key thing that neither party is actually doing much of right now.
MGM: So the roots of the American Civil Rights movement are incredibly connected to socialism in the south and Mississippi and Alabama, in Georgia. In the 1920s, the first people to become involved with what would be the American Civil Rights Movement, were socialists. And by socialist, I mean, what we would think of today as Democratic Socialists, in that they believed in democracy, they believed in representation, and they believed in economic justice. They believed in economic equality, economic opportunity. You know, if you read Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" in high school or college, that was the brand of American socialism that they were associated with. You know, they were living in the Jim Crow South and economic justice was the goal--in addition to racial equality, obviously.
And that's a part of the narrative of the Civil Rights movement that we've really erased, despite the fact that, you know, when, when Martin Luther King was assassinated, he was working on the poor people's movement. You know, he was organizing sanitation workers. And we've never seen in the 20th century in the United States--I don't think before either but we'll say 20th century--cross-racial class solidarity. And in the 1920s, there was like this critical point, right? Where poor white farmers in the South, white sharecroppers, had the opportunity to join up with their black neighbors and fight for economic justice in the South. And instead, you know, white politicians and plantation owners and, you know, rich white people in the South, pitted those two groups further against each other. And what we saw over the course of the 20th century was that, like, poor white people comprised some of the most violent opposition to the, to the Civil Rights movement, because if you don't have economic prosperity, like at the end of the day, the theory goes like "whiteness pays," right.
And so, you know, there are already a lot of Progressives in rural areas. And there's also a long history of, you know, government support in rural areas. Like, a lot of white farmers in particular got a lot of government support during the New Deal. And, you know, I had cousins who worked for the CCC in the Agricultural Adjustment Agency--my grandfather worked for the Agricultural Adjustment Agency, like all of these were New Deal programs. To this day, my parents' internet and electricity comes from a co-op. Like, those are progressive things. But also, you know, a couple years ago at Thanksgiving--I have a bunch of cousins who work at the Walmart distribution center in Fluvanna County, and they couldn't come to Thanksgiving dinner, because that's like the busiest day of the year at Walmart. So I was talking to some of their parents. And they were like: "Oh, my gosh, like, the way that Walmart treats the employees is so terrible. Like, you know, they'll change their schedule on them at the last minute. And like, we don't have internet, so I'll drive all the way to the Walmart in Louisa only to find out that my schedule has been changed. And they make them work on the holiday stuff like that." And then at the end of the conversation, they were like: "Man, if only the owners of Walmart knew about this, then I'm sure they would fix it." Like they seem like decent people, like, if only they knew about it. So I think that there's like, a really, really deeply rooted like, sense of individualism and trust in capitalism and corporate institutions, at the same time, that there is a long-seated dependence on government intervention. And some government intervention is seen as an entitlement, like support for crops. But then, like, other stuff can easily be pitted as overreach.
And I think, in a lot of rural communities, too, that our suburbanizing, you know, places like Nelson and Fluvanna County and Louisa and like around here. I mean, there's a huge cultural divide between people whose families have been there for many, many generations and people who are moving in recently. Huge.
NM: Side-by-side, different populations almost.
MGM: Yeah.
NM: I want to turn things back a little bit to Virginia's congressional races, including the Fifth district of the US House of Representatives. Now this race was interesting on its own terms because the incumbent, Denver Riggleman, was kicked to the curb by his own party. The Republican Party held a caucus this year and largely seems to have rejected Riggleman for the frankly ridiculous reason that he officiated a same-sex wedding of one of his staffers.
AB: Bigfoot erotica is cool, but gay marriage is not.
NM: I mean, you know what's funny about Denver Riggleman--I've been in, like, large group gatherings with him once or twice. He's an affable guy. And I'll tell you, honestly, the Bigfoot erotica thing was sort of one of the more endearing things I found about him. By the way, I'm not personally into that for anybody listening. But yeah, so the Republicans kicked him to the curb. That meant that the race was between former Liberty University wrestling coach Bob Goode as the Republican and UVA doctor and health policy wonk Cameron Webb as the Democrat. Bob Goode won by five and a half points. So now there's a hardline self-described "Biblical Conservative" going to Washington from the Fifth district.
There's two things I wanna talk about this, guys. One is that it's pretty similar vote turnout to 2018, when Democrat Leslie Cockburn lost. She lost to Denver Riggleman by about six and a half points. This year Dr. Webb lost by five and a half points. So the needle moved a little bit, but really not that much, even with a strong Democratic candidate. And frankly not a real great or inclusive Republican one. Why did the needle not move much?
MGM: I have two theories on this one. This is where I had some fun looking at the elections.virginia.gov results that they put up on their website for this year. And then also the Charlottesville Voter Registrar Office, on their main voting page has voter turnout statistics going back to 1975. So one of my theories is that, you know, turnout is already pretty good in Charlottesville and Albemarle. Like you said in 2018, when Cockburn ran, 67% of active registered voters turned out. In 2016, it was 77%. We don't have numbers back for this year, but those numbers are significantly higher than national averages. And really, the Charlottesville Albemarle area is like the Democrat voting area in the Fifth district. So you're definitely trying to turn out some voters in other places.
I mean, like I said, this year Fluvanna County, went for Webb. I think the first time a Democrat has won any county-wide election in Fluvanna County under the label of a Democrat during my lifetime. But there's, you know, only so many Democratic voters in Charlottesville and Albemarle and almost all of them are already voting. So there's not a whole lot of headroom there, I think, is one reason why. And it's a gerrymandered district. So that's one reason.
And then this one is a guess, definitely. And it's hard to know where people stand ideologically from a binary vote for Bob Goode or for Cameron Webb. But I looked at the percentages in all 23 counties in the Fifth district, and only three of them had less than a 10-point spread. So that means in the other 20 counties, either Webb or Goode won by more than 10 points. So we had only three counties where it was even close. And so that kind of makes me think that you've got two pretty entrenched groups of voters who know what kind of candidates they're looking for. In many cases, probably vote for the same party every two years when this comes up. And the differences year-to-year from a strong candidate and a weak candidate, you know, maybe don't affect people's decisions all that much. When you combine the fact that the Democratic area already has really strong turnout, and also it seems to be a pretty polarized district.
NM: I would say, even polarized is one word, but it's also gerrymandered like all hell, right?
MGM: Oh, yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's the that's the as Charlotte Woods from Charlottesville Tomorrow always puts it--that's the dragon rising out of North Carolina in the room here. The dragon in the room.
NM: So instead of gerrymander, this will be the Gerry-dragon.
MGM: Yeah, yeah.
NM: Yeah. So I mean, this district is the size of New Jersey, right. And it stretches from the North Carolina border all the way up to the DC exurbs, you know, Warrington area. I mean, there's very, very little culturally similar between, you know, like South Boston and the DC suburbs. They're both within the state boundaries. That's about it. And so, you know, I think, really, you look at this district, and it very blatantly and obviously, has been designed for a comfortable Republican majority.
Hey, that's a good segue, though the constitutional amendment passed. There was a constitutional amendment on the ballot this year, actually passed by about a two-to-one margin. And it would change the way we decide where the district lines go. So historically, the way each legislative district is drawn in Virginia, is that the General Assembly draws up the maps and approve them. It's based on census data that comes in every 10 years. So whichever party is in charge gets an enormous say in how the lines are drawn.
Both parties have practiced gerrymandering over the 20th and 21st centuries. That's where they pack lots of votes from the opposing party into just a few districts and then leave their own districts with nice, comfortable, six, seven, ten-point margins, essentially drawing the district lines to pick the voters they want so they'll stay in power. And I think that's really how you end up with District Five, which, you know, has that absurd shape like a dragon rising from North Carolina. But yeah, I mean, it's built to create a Republican victory. I think that gerrymandering is how you end up also with this fun fact: Virginia last elected republican to statewide office in 2009. But until 2019, two-thirds of our Congressional delegation was Republicans. For a long time. It was seven Republicans and four Democrats in the in the delegation to the US Congress. And then in 2018, the election of Abigail Spanberger, Elaine Luria, and...the Northern Virginia district...?
AB: Jennifer Wexton.
NM: Yes! Jennifer Wexton, thank you. And Jennifer Wexton up in Northern Virginia, you know, basically flipped it from seven to four to four to seven. So now there's going to be a bipartisan redistricting commission. Peter Galuszka actually had a quick little comment about that...
Peter Galuszka: The not-so-great news about the new amendment is: first off, there's no guarantee that minorities are going to be in any of the committees at all. None. And you got eight coming from the General Assembly and eight from senior citizens, there's still a great deal of indirect General Assembly control over who gets picked. And so that's going to be a problem. Because I mean, you know, Virginia legislators are very good at playing games. So you know, you can only hope that that it's better. It's like is I think we talked about once--a half a loaf is better than no loaf. And that's about where we are. I know a lot of people were so upset about the amendment and the way the controls are and the way it was written that they really wanted it gone.
NM: What do y'all think? Is the new congressional amendment the new way we draw lines? Is it gonna make the difference?
AB: This was one of the most mind--like mind-boggling issues, absolutely the most complex issue on the ballot, I think, this year. I did an interview with Brent Tarter, who literally wrote the book on gerrymandering. He said he was voting yes. And right up until I walked into the ballot box, my brother and I were debating this and I was flip flopping. Because it's...it's really hard, right? Because this would have been the year--this IS the year that redistricting reform would do something, because the lines are getting drawn next year. The question of whether this proposed committee has teeth? I don't think it does.
I mean, you could see this from the way that the Democrats in line who were kind of handing out sample ballots, were saying vote No. The republicans are very much saying vote Yes. But even that is a little complex, because I know Sally Hudson, who we've had on the show, Democrat and progressive, she probably voted yes for the amendment. So it's, it's tricky. I'm not a huge fan of it passing, I'll say personally, just because I think there's the potential that the districts are gonna be--it's gonna go to the Virginia Supreme Court anyway.
MGM: I think one of the biggest, like theoretical conversations happening on the left right now is: do we ask for the ideal, or do we get what we can as we go? You know? But I think that this amendment is a really good example of that, where like, it's a step towards having a less partisan way of drawing the boundaries. But it's not the commission that the people who are really against gerrymandering would want.
NM: So overall takeaways. The November 3 elections have taken place results are still... [incoherent/indecisive groan], but Virginia's count is pretty well, almost done. what's the say? What do we know?
MGM: Yeah, I think one thing that's, that's been really interesting to watch under the first four years of the Trump administration is how states like Virginia have been a testing ground for policies that, you know, weren't able to go through at the national level. So, you know, I hope that however, things go down that Virginia continues to try new exciting, bold ideas at the local and at the state level. So that's my spot of hope.
NM: So if Virginia is really blue nowadays, what kind of blue we're gonna be? What's it gonna look like in the future?
MGM: I think it's fair to say that, you know, Virginia is a tempered blue. Charlotte calls it Indigo. So it's, it's blue with some bright red pockets. And then also, you know, if you look at the primary results, the Democratic primary results, Virginia went pretty strongly for Biden. Not a lot of support for more progressive candidates. So even though Virginia is like, now widely considered to be pretty solidly Democratic, I think it's a long way from becoming a progressive state. And I think that we've seen that in the policies enacted by the Democratic leaders, you know. So up in DC, you know, just a little bit to the north of Virginia, they have a $15 an hour minimum wage now and here in Virginia, when we decided to raise our minimum wage, we're doing it pretty slowly, a few cents every year, until we get up to a higher level and I think that that's just a good example of, you know, the difference between you know, a solidly blue state like New York or California and a solidly blue state like Virginia.
NM: Aaryan, I know you had noticed some polling of people and how it sort of tends to differ from the priorities of...
AB: Oh, yeah. Oh, man, I could talk about this for days. Last night, election night, Fox News put out a poll--Fox News, mind you--put out a poll that showed kind of the priorities nationwide of a lot of Americans. And there was over 70% of respondents were in favor of government health care, more money being spent on green energy, and a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. All of these positions are super popular nationwide. But the election that we just had, is easily the most substance-free one we've had in...certainly, as long as I can remember, which, to be fair, is not very long. And so it just strikes me as...the lane is wide open, for somebody to take any of these policies, especially maybe healthcare during a global pandemic, and just running away with a majority of people who need help, and would like someone to listen to their needs.
NM: Yeah. I mean, it's funny, Aaryan, you and I have talked about this offline a little bit. It's the kind of thing that today's GOP doesn't really seem equipped to do. You know, the idea of the government being involved in programs that help people on a wide scale. You know, the rich people that run it are not into that. And meanwhile, the Democratic Party sort of had those roots, but it's been a generation since they really made that the front and center part of the priority. So where does it come from? You know, I mean, I think, you know, third party history in the United States over the last 50 100 years has been a story of, you know...well, they're mostly failure to be honest. So, you know, how do you build the coalitions within one of those two parties to make it work?
AB: Yeah. I mean, they thought...people thought that's what Donald Trump would do in 2016. He had some of the rhetoric of somebody who was you know, looking at for working class people and those kinds of economic messages. He has since governed either incompetently or as a straightforward Republican, which, I mean...
NM: So if the lane's wide open, I guess, see if the Democratic leadership will come on board, huh. pass the torch to new leaders?
AB: I certainly hope so.
NM: All right. Well, Mary Garner and Aaryan, thank you so much for our little chat-fest today about the elections nationwide and also here in Virginia. I appreciate you being on the show.
MGM: Thanks for having us.
AB: Yeah, it's been super fun.
NM: And Aaryan, now you got to go edit this.
AB: Yeah. That's less fun.
NM: Mary Garner McGehee coordinates digital audio projects at WTJU you and she's the host and producer of Soundboard. You can find it in Apple Podcast, Spotify, and all over the place. Aaryan Balu is the producer of Bold Dominion. Thanks also to some journalists we heard from today, Charlotte Woods from Charlottesville Tomorrow as well as Peter Galuszka who spoke with us via Skype. My name is Nathan Moore, and I'm the host of Bold Dominion. You can find this show online at BoldDominon.org. Go ahead and subscribe--it's just a click away. Keep washing your hands and wearing masks and I'll talk with you again in two weeks!