Tuesday’s winner in Virginia could predict a Trump win in 2020

The first statewide electoral test of America’s Trump-era political alignment comes Tuesday in Virginia, and its results may say more about the state of the Democratic Party than of the GOP. Election night watchers trying to project the national meaning of this race can make their judgments only after they take a crash course in Virginia’s political geography.

Late polling indicates the governor’s race in the Old Dominion appears to be surprisingly close. Democrats expected to win easily at the outset of the contest because there’s not much that’s “old” about the dominion anymore. Three decades of growth and in-migration in the Washington suburbs of Northern Virginia have transformed the state from reliably red to almost-always-blue.

Democrats have won three of the last four gubernatorial races, the last four U.S. Senate contests, and the last three presidential contests here in a breeze. In addition, the one-term governorship, chosen in odd years, almost always goes to the party opposed to the newly elected president, and with a polarizer like Donald Trump sitting just across the Potomac River, that dynamic would seem to make the outcome inevitable in 2017.

{mosads}Trump is perhaps less suited to Virginia’s gentlemanly political bent than the tribe of Republicanism he defeated; coarseness and confrontational politics are alien to the political brands that best succeed in Virginia. Given the long-term trends and the short-term motivator, this race should be a blowout for the Democrats, right?

It should have been – and if it’s not on Tuesday night, smarter Democratic strategists will quietly, but rightly, freak out.

The race likely boils down to the margins in three types of localities: the exurbs – not suburbs – of Northern Virginia, the downstate suburbs, and Old Virginia.

The war is over in the suburbs of Washington. Arlington, Alexandria, Fairfax County and Falls Church are now reliably, and massively, Democratic. And shiny new Loudoun County, diminishing as the state’s political bellwether, is heading that way too. These jurisdictions along the Beltway and Dulles Toll Road are filled not just with commuters but wealthy commuters, with more university degrees on the wall than school-aged children in the house. Democrat Ralph Northam will roll out of these five localities with a lead of 20-plus percentage points. The Republican nominee, Ed Gillespie, will be happy to just do better than the GOP’s 25-point deficit here four years ago, and hopefully not too much worse than Gillespie himself did in pulling 39 percent here in his failed 2014 Senate run.

The exurbs of Washington are a different story. Three high-growth counties along the Virginia Railway Express commuter train lines – Prince William, Stafford, Spotsylvania – straddle Washington’s commuting orbit but are filled with people who come there for cheaper housing, lower taxes and public schools. It is nearly impossible to concoct a Gillespie statewide victory that does not have him in the low- to mid-50s in these three counties combined. The last time Republicans won a close statewide race, the attorney general’s race in 2005, it was keyed by Bob McDonnell’s 55 percent among these long-distance commuters.

The downstate suburbs surrounding Richmond, Norfolk and Roanoke are equally critical to Gillespie’s chance of an upset. Trump won these jurisdictions by 5 points, but he ran worse than any Republican in recent memory there, and observers on both sides will be watching to see if Trump’s problems with upscale college-educated neighborhoods are contagious to other GOP candidates.

These counties and cities – Virginia Beach, Chesapeake, Roanoke and Chesterfield counties – will be the most closely watched by national Democratic strategists who hope to engineer a takeover of the U.S. House next year. They have pinned their hopes for a House conquest nationwide on suburban districts that were reliably Republican in the pre-Trump era but disapprove of the president now. Democrats want to lose these places in Virginia by a combined margin in the single digits; Trump won them by just five in 2016. Late polling has shown Gillespie creeping toward a double-digit lead in these places; he will need it.

Northam will also need the reliable 30-point edge in the cities with significantly black populations in the eastern third of the state – and most observers expect him to get it. 

While Gillespie tries to defy Trump’s drag in the metropolitan cul-de-sacs, he will need to piggyback on the president’s bulging populist coalition in the remainder of the state, which can be called Old Virginia. The bulk of the state’s town-and-country geography now makes up just 35 percent or less of the gubernatorial vote – down from 38 percent three elections ago. That dwindling share puts pressure on the GOP nominee to run up ever-higher margins with these conservative voters, and Trump showed the way, winning these locales 61 to 35, an eight-point bump over Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s performance in 2012. Late polling has shown Gillespie with a 14-point advantage in these places – perhaps a hangover from his poor performance in the spring GOP primary there. He will need that gap to widen, even if some of those Trumpian populists cast wary ballots for him, in order to win.

The two-toned push and pull of this rural electorate and the suburban voters who are crowding them out politically has been the challenge both gubernatorial candidates have faced. 

Both candidates epitomize Virginia’s more cautious approach: Gillespie is a lifelong political staffer and lobbyist who matches the Bush-era pachyderm prototype; Northam is a drawling graduate of Virginia Military Institute and a low-key statehouse player, a liberal by anyone’s reckoning, but not an angry one.

Ideologues in both parties have found fault with their own standard-bearers, more for the temperature of their temperaments than for their policy pronouncements. In the America shaped by Trump and the opponents his rise has radicalized, the political dials only turn to scalding hot. 

For Gillespie the challenge has been more urgent because Northam begins with a natural cushion – one he has tried to swell by linking his opponent to the president to the exclusion of other strategies. If Gillespie pulls off the upset, he will have done it by proving Trump’s new coalition can be kept intact where it helps the GOP without becoming a concrete life preserver in the suburban waters where the president lags.

Brad Todd is a Virginia-based Republican strategist and ad-maker and the co-author of a forthcoming book on the impact of the Trump coalition on American politics.