Election Day 2017: Virginia, New York, New Jersey, and others go to the polls

When a Virginia elections official pulled a name out of bowl on Thursday, he didn’t only hand Republicans a 51-49 majority — the tiebreaker will also make it a little harder for the state to expand health coverage to 400,000 low-income Virginians.

Virginia Democrats won the governor’s seat on Election Night and very nearly swept to a shocking takeover of the state House. But they fell short after recounts and Thursday’s tiebreaker in the race between Republican David Yancey and Democrat Shelly Simonds (both got 11,608 votes) left the GOP hanging onto a bare majority.

Virginia settled the outcome of a tied House of Delegates race that would determine control of the chamber in a random drawing Thursday — and Republicans won.

In accordance with state law, once a recount determined that the race between Delegate David Yancey (R) and Shelly Simonds (D) is tied at 11,608 votes for each candidate, the outcome was settled by the state’s board of elections with a random drawing.

A recount for Virginia’s House of Delegates ended up in a tie, leaving the future balance of power in the body up to a random drawing next week that will involve slips of paper, film canisters, and a giant bowl.

The Virginian-Pilot reports that the drawing is scheduled for Wednesday, December 27, to break the tie between the incumbent delegate, Republican David Yancey, and Democratic challenger Shelly Simonds, who are fighting for a seat in Virginia’s 94th District.

Election Day 2017 was a women’s march through the voting booths.

Sheila Oliver won New Jersey’s lieutenant governorship on Tuesday night, becoming the first black woman ever elected to the post in the state . Women won a record-high number of seats, 28, in Virginia’s House of Delegates — nine of them Democratic challengers who unseated incumbents. Charlotte, North Carolina, voted in its first black woman mayor, Vi Lyles. A runoff will decide the mayoral race in Atlanta — but either way, a woman will win.

Republicans unfazed by Democrats’ landslide victories in the Tuesday elections are taking away entirely the wrong lesson, says one reflective Virginia Republican lawmaker.

“Look at the numbers in Virginia,” says Rep. Tom Garrett, who is among the House’s archconservatives in the Freedom Caucus and whose district covers Charlottesville and the surrounding area.

Local ballots in Virginia, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and 11 other states were filled with first-time candidates — 20- and 30-somethings who had never held office before — as Democrats swept to victory on Tuesday. For Amanda Litman and Ross Morales Rocketto, founders of Run for Something, that was the point.

Litman, a former Hillary Clinton campaign staffer, and Morales Rocketto, a political operative, launched their organization on Inauguration Day in 2017 with the mission of pushing young progressives to enter state and local elections and supporting them in their campaigns.

If the much-watched Virginia gubernatorial election offered a road test of a certain form of “Trumpism without Trump,” then Maine’s ballot initiative on Medicaid expansion was another one.

Presenting a pure question of a big-government economic redistribution scheme divorced from any questions about candidate personality or culture war politics, the ballot initiative was a roaring success, passing with what looks to be about 60 percent of the vote. In the Democratic stronghold of Portland, it ran 5 points ahead of Hillary Clinton and secured 81 percent of the vote. But it also carried inland towns like Ellsworth and Dover-Foxcroft that Donald Trump won.

The 2017 elections went quite well for Democrats. The party won the Virginia and New Jersey governor’s races, far outperformed expectations by picking up at least 15 seats in Virginia’s state house, and won a special election that gave them control of Washington’s state Senate.

All this, however, was effectively an appetizer when compared to the real main event: the 2018 midterms.

Barrier-breaking candidates won races across the country on Election Day this year. The results were a parade of “firsts” from New Hampshire to North Carolina to Montana as women, people of color, and LGBTQ candidates became the first to win elections in their respective contests.

Cities in Minnesota and Montana elected their first black mayors, and Charlotte, North Carolina, elected a black woman as mayor for the first time. Virginia elected its first Latina and Asian-American delegates. Transgender candidates won races in Virginia, Minnesota, California, and Pennsylvania.

Ashley Bennett had never run for office before. But when a local politician made a sexist joke, she decided to try to unseat him.

John Carman, a Republican member of the Atlantic County Board of Chosen Freeholders, a county legislative body in New Jersey, posted a meme on his Facebook page in January making fun of the Women’s March. “Will the woman’s protest be over in time for them to cook dinner?” it read, according to Amy S. Rosenberg at the Philadelphia Inquirer.

The polls were wildly off in the Virginia election.

Democrat Ralph Northam had a lead over Republican Ed Gillespie throughout the race — but a lead that notably tightened to 1 or 2 points by Election Day. Pundits and pollsters were all in agreement: Virginia’s polls were leaning toward Northam, but the race was a toss-up.

Phil Murphy’s victory in New Jersey’s gubernatorial race on Tuesday means Democrats now control the state government, from the legislature to the governor’s mansion. And that’s good news for one policy issue: marijuana legalization.

Murphy ran on legalizing marijuana — not just for medical uses, which is already legal in New Jersey, but recreational use as well. He proposed legalizing pot for anyone who is 21 or older.

A funny thing happened on the way to Ralph Northam getting elected governor of Virginia: He improved on Hillary Clinton’s margin of victory in an already-blue state despite running a campaign that struck most observers as somewhere between lame and disastrous. And even more striking is how he put his coalition together — he just did better than she did.

He did better in the suburbs of Washington, DC, but also better in the small cities of Richmond and Norfolk and in their suburbs. But he also did better in the small swath of Appalachia that cuts through Virginia. And he did better in the small, rural part of the state that constitutes the Southern end of the Delmarva Peninsula. The New York Times’s excellent map of the vote switch shows that Northam didn’t literally do better in every single precinct, but he did do better in the clear majority of them and in most regions of the state.

No Democratic candidate was second-guessed in recent weeks more than their now-victorious nominee in the Virginia governor’s race, Ralph Northam.

Northam’s campaign was called uninspiring. He was deemed to have no charisma. Liberals excoriated him for hedging in response to Ed Gillespie’s anti-immigrant attacks. Even though he consistently led in polling averages for the race all year, pundits assumed that, like Hillary Clinton, he was about to blow it.

Democrat Danica Roem will be the first openly transgender state lawmaker in America, after winning a decisive victory for a seat in Virginia’s House of Delegates on Tuesday night.

Roem beat 13-term incumbent Del. Robert G. Marshall, a conservative Republican who authored a bill to restrict transgender people from using the bathroom corresponding to their gender identity (the bill never passed, ultimately).

Ed Gillespie was the quintessential establishment Republican: senior adviser to President George W. Bush, chair of the Republican National Committee, founder of a bipartisan lobbying firm. He was also the GOP’s nominee for governor in Virginia, and he was losing.

Then he embraced Trumpism. He began running bizarre, fearmongering ads about Hispanic gangs and sanctuary cities. The polls narrowed, Democrats panicked, Trumpists began celebrating. Two days ago, Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s former chief strategist, told the New York Times that Gillespie had “closed an enthusiasm gap by rallying around the Trump agenda … in Gillespie’s case, Trumpism without Trump can show the way forward.”

Simply put, election night 2017 was a fantastic night for the Democratic Party.

First off, the party won convincing victories in the two marquee governors’ races. In Virginia, Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam quieted pundits by defeating GOP operative Ed Gillespie. And in New Jersey, financier Phil Murphy defeated Chris Christie’s Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno to retake the governor’s mansion for Democrats.

As part of a larger wave of Democratic wins on Election Day 2017, Democrats picked up two seats in special elections held for Georgia’s House of Delegates.

Deborah Gonzales won House District 117 with 53 percent of the vote and Jonathan Wallace won House District 119 with 56 percent of the vote. Both seats are in the Athens area and both were vacant, hence the special elections. But not only were the two seats previously held by Republican incumbents, they were uncontested in the 2016 elections.

Maine will become the 33rd state to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, extending coverage to as many as 89,000 low-income residents.

The Associated Press and NBC News projected the victory late Tuesday.

President Donald Trump is using his newly acquired 280 characters on Twitter to give live analysis of the Virginia state election: Republicans lost because they didn’t embrace him enough, the president tweeted.

Democrats swept the Virginia governor’s race Tuesday with a big win from Ralph Northam, and are on track to take over the Virginia House of Delegates — what polls suggested would be close to impossible. It’s a significant loss for Republican gubernatorial candidate Ed Gillespie, who was within a 2-point margin in the polls leading up Election Day.

A Virginia politician made history Tuesday night, becoming the first openly transgender person to be elected to the Virginia House of Delegates. Danica Roem, 32, defeated Republican incumbent Robert Marshall in the 13th District.

Roem, a journalist, won a surprise victory in the Democratic primary in June. She took on the ultra-conservative Marshall, who has been in office for more than 20 years and who has taken anti-LGBTQ stances. For instance, he proposed the state’s (ultimately failed) “bathroom bill” that would have required transgender people to use the public restroom that corresponds with the sex on their birth certificate.

Chris Christie is out.

Democrat Phil Murphy, a former Goldman Sachs executive and Democratic Party operative, has won the New Jersey governor’s race, beating out Republican Kim Guadagno, who is currently serving as Christie’s lieutenant governor.

Despite all the hand-wringing, Ralph Northam didn’t blow it. And it seems that neither did his fellow Virginia Democratic candidates Justin Fairfax for lieutenant governor and Mark Herring for attorney general. Dems also won the New Jersey governor’s race in a landslide, and seem to be in position to pick up a bunch of seats in the Virginia House of Delegates.

Off-year gubernatorial elections are only weak predictors of future midterm results, but tonight’s outcome is yet another sign that the GOP really is in electoral peril. Donald Trump’s flukey, narrow win in the 2016 presidential election did not inaugurate some crazy new era in which the rules don’t apply and nothing matters. If you have an incumbent president who’s unpopular, backed by a Congress that’s pursuing an unpopular agenda, you’re going to be in trouble.

Democrats have just won what is likely the most important election in 2017 — and gotten a positive signal about their possible electoral fortunes in the Trump era.

Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam, a Democrat, defeated Republican Ed Gillespie Tuesday, with the election called around 8:15 pm by CNN and MSNBC.

Update: Democrat Phil Murphy has defeated Republican Kim Guadagno in New Jersey’s Governor’s race, according to projections from multiple news outlets.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s time in office is up.