Virginia's governor's race remains a dead heat in polls, but Democrats lead in early voting
Source: CNBC
By Annika Kim Constantino
Virginia gubernatorial candidates Terry McAuliffe and Glenn Youngkin remain neck-and-neck in polls ahead of next week’s highly competitive race for governor, but Democrats lead in early voting.
McAuliffe, the former Democratic governor who is seeking a comeback, leads his Republican opponent Youngkin by one percentage point in a Washington Post-Schar School poll released Friday.
McAuliffe hit 49% among likely voters polled while Youngkin was close behind at 48%, well within the poll’s margin of error of four percentage points. The poll was conducted from Oct. 20 to 26.
This shows a tighter race than the previous Washington Post-Schar School poll from mid-September, which found McAuliffe leading by three percentage points.
Glenn Youngkin, left, and Terry McAuliffe campaigning in Virginia.
Anna Moneymaker | Getty Images; Win McNamee | Getty Images
Read more: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/29/virginias-governors-race-remains-a-dead-heat-in-polls-but-democrats-lead-in-early-voting.html
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Even if the obvious inference is they opened the ballots and publicized the interim results.
Even if it corrupts the elections.
I suppose what the repurtor wanted to say was along the lines of "most of the early mail-in ballots returned were from (D) majority area codes." That would have been inappropriately factual, and not confuse inference with fact. Hardly New journalism. (Which is homophonous with "nude journalism."
This is their model based on the areas from which the votes came (blue strongholds vs red strongholds), analyses from past years/cycles, party registration, interviewing people on the ground, lots of data, etc. The caveat is that it provides no absolutes nor does it predict final outcomes.
Just a peek at what this particular outfit infers from early-voting trends. In this case, the suggestion is that Dems have banked significant numbers of the early vote, 54%-30. Which also means it will all come down to the GOTV efforts for Tuesday. Will there be a MAGA surge? We don't know. Will the Dems have rousted enough low-propensity voters and made sure they get to the polls? We don't know. Has there been a lot of crossover voting? We don't know that either.
But if TargetSmart is correct in their analyses, then the Dems enter Tuesday with a clear advantage bc those early votes are like money in the bank.
We shall see. Pretty soon as it turns out.
The being said, I suspect all the recent howling of fraud from Republicans is partially due to these early-vote analyses, probably from their own in-house calculations. Youngkin was encouraging his voters to vote early. If these numbers are accurate, they didn't really listen.
Btw, I voted by mail for the first time in my county elections. My husband and I were accustomed to in-person, early voting in TN, something not available in PA. So, we went for the mail (drop box) route. Requested my ballot, received it in 5 days. We filled it out and delivered it to the nearest drop box. Little more than 24 hours, we were notified the ballots had been received and recorded.
Easy-peasy!
This may be old hat for a lot of people but I could not believe how quick and efficient it all was.
Good luck, Virginia! We're all rooting for you.
