Behind the numbers: What Virginia voters were telling us

It was apparent going into the primary that Deeds would be the stronger candidate to face the uncontested Republican nominee, former Attorney General Bob McDonnell, in the general election; he didn’t carry any of McAuliffe’s baggage (as fundraiser for the Clintons and supremely lucky investor in Global Crossing) or Moran’s (brother of a possibly-under-investigation congressman, Northern Virginia liberal).

There are also interesting patterns of support. Setting out the results in the major metro areas as defined by the Census Bureau, the numbers make a certain amount of sense.

Break the state down by NoVa (the Washington metro area), Tidewater (the Virginia Beach metro area, though oldtimers like me tend to think of it as centered on Norfolk, which now has a much smaller population than Virginia Beach), metro Richmond (with a reputation for being heavily Republican which these days is not much deserved) and the rest of the state (call it rural Virginia, which it isn’t quite, but it includes the Northern Neck and the two Eastern Shore counties, plus everything—Southside Virginia, the Shenandoah Valley and the southwest Virginia mountain country—west of the three big metro areas which have spread far into the now exurban countryside). Here are the percentages for each candidate in those three regions.

Deeds, from rural Bath County, romped home in rural Virginia, and his endorsement from the Washington Post helped him win a near-majority in Northern Virginia, with Moran running second in his home territory. Tidewater and metro Richmond voted almost identically: two areas, I am guessing, influenced as much as anything else by television advertising and mainstream media content. You can get a little more granular if you want to (why did Moran carry a lot of small counties around Richmond?), but what’s the point? The big picture is pretty clear.

The more important question, I think, is turnout. We’re at the end of a decade in which we’ve seen giant and unusual increases in voter turnout. Turnout increased from 105 million in 2000 to 122 million in 2004 and 131 million in 2008. Increased turnout in states not seriously contested but targeted in 2008 played a key role in Barack Obama’s victory (the biggest turnout increase in any state from 2004 to 2008 was 20% in North Carolina, which Obama carried by 1%). Increased turnout helped Republicans in the 2002 and 2004 elections; it helped Democrats even more in the 2006 and 2008 elections.

So how to gauge the Virginia turnout? Well, it’s a little hard. Democrats haven’t had a primary for governor in Virginia since 1977, when turnout was 493,108. The turnout yesterday of 320,369 (there’s a few more precincts still to count) is 35% below that level, but the Virginias of 2009 and 1977 are so politically different that it doesn’t make much sense to compare them. The better benchmark, I think, is the February 12, 2008 Virginia presidential primary, in which 986,203 people voted and Barack Obama won by a 64%-35% margin over Hillary Clinton—his biggest percentage victory in a primary after the District of Columbia, Georgia and Illinois (you can throw in the U.S. Virgin Islands if you want to, but only about 2,000 people voted there).

Yesterday’s primary turnout was 68% lower than  the turnout in the February 2008 presidential primary. Only one-third as many Virginians, who are not limited by party registration, chose to vote in this contest as did in the Virginia primary held a week after Super Tuesday, when Obama and Clinton were neck-and-neck in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.

This low turnout is reminiscent of the low turnout—and especially low turnout of Democratic voters—in several special elections for the Virginia House of Delegates and to fill vacancies in the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors earlier this year. Turnout was down less in Northern Virginia (64%) than in Tidewater (down 70%) and metro Richmond and rural Virginia (down 69%), but it is clear that this hotly contested race didn’t engage voters nearly as much as the Obama-Clinton race a year ago.

McDonnell has been leading all three Democrats in polls, and while I expect Deeds will get a bump out of his primary win, the turnout levels suggest that he’ll have a hard time duplicating Obama’s performance in November 2008. I expect him to be a strong candidate in Northern Virginia, but not perhaps as strong as liberal Democrat Tim Kaine was against the culturally alien Republican Jerry Kilgore from the far southwest in the 2005 gubernatorial race.

I expect that Deeds will also run pretty well for a Democrat in rural Virginia, though it doesn’t look like he can elicit the kind of black turnout that Obama did in rural Southside counties which contributed significantly to his 53%-46% victory in the state. The numbers from Tidewater (the area McDonnell represented in the legislature) and metro Richmond tell me that Deeds has nothing special working for him there.

Overall, the turnout suggests to me that the balance of enthusiasm in the Virginia governor race is not working nearly so strongly for Democrats, and may not be working for them much at all, as it was in the fall of 2008. Creigh Deeds, Terry McAuliffe and Brian Moran were not able to bring nearly as many Virginians in a commonwealth of 7.8 million people to the polls as Henry Howell and Andrew Miller were in a commonwealth of 5.1 million people 32 years ago. In this decade Americans have been voting with their feet as much as anything else, and in these numbers I don’t see anything like the footfall we saw for Barack Obama six and 15 months ago.