Rural white voters didn’t show up for Virginia’s election

What fueled Democrats’ victories on Tuesday? A quick analysis from the New York Times suggests this was a “suburban rebellion,” with moderates shifting from Donald Trump to Democrats. A look at the Virginia vote, however, suggests that votes in the most rural, conservative counties may hold the real story.

To analyze this, I looked at how well each candidate held on to their presidential votes from 2016. For example, in Alexandria, 13,285 people voted for Donald Trump last year, while 10,807 voted for Republican gubernatorial candidate Ed Gillespie this year. This drop-off isn’t surprising; it’s rare that a state election will produce the same turnout that a presidential one will. But it’s interesting to examine where Democrats and Republicans retained more of their presidential votes.

In the chart below, I look at the Gillespie votes as a percentage of Trump votes across all the cities and counties based on how urban they are. I do the same with the Northam votes as a percentage of Clinton votes. The lines shown are the moving averages.

Even while there wasn’t extraordinary variation in these figures, the lines suggest that Democrats did a better job turning out their voters than Republicans did, and particularly so in the more rural localities. There was little difference between the candidates in the most urban cities and counties.

I’ve put together a similar chart below based on the percentage of the locality that is white. Interestingly, it is in the whitest counties where Democrats did the best job holding on to their voters while Republicans did the worst.

Finally, here are the same statistics charted across the Democratic share of the presidential vote in 2016, used as a measure of how Democratic or Republican a municipality leans. Interestingly, the Democratic turnout relative to 2016 is pretty constant across the range, while Republican turnout was down significantly in the most conservative municipalities.

In full disclosure, I should note that these Virginia results are still preliminary, that they don’t necessarily reflect every election that occurred this week, and that we don’t necessarily need all that much explanation for what happened. The party of an unpopular president is generally going to fare poorly in off-year elections. Nonetheless, it’s worth thinking about just which groups of voters were most mobilized in the most recent presidential election and which failed to show up the next year. The analysis above suggests that Democrats did well because white, conservative, rural Republicans, — those who gave Trump his victory last year — simply didn’t show up this time.

Update: This post has been updated to reflect a previous coding error.