What Last Night Really Meant

 

(All polling data obtained by NBC News) 

     If you're wondering about the huge crates being shipped to Republican Senate and Congressional officers on Capitol Hill, I can tell you what they are. They're full of bicarb.

     Republicans aren't as stupid as they always let on. They read the same tea leaves as the Democrats, crunch the same numbers. They read the same writing on the same walls as we do. And trying to manipulate exit poll data is about as efficacious as massaging a statue. And the exit polls from the gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey are eerily similar.

     The pollsters, amazingly enough, read the tea leaves correctly in the run-up to last night's elections. Their only failing was in hedging their bets and making the races look closer than they really were, particularly in New Jersey. In the last week of the election, the pollsters were claiming that Abigail Spanberger was only 10 points up on Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears.

     She won by nearly 15 points.

     They were especially conservative in predicting the governor's race in New Jersey. They were saying that Mikie Sherrill was neck and neck with Republican Jack Ciattarelli.

     Sherrill won by over 13 points.

     Ironically, the most closely-watched race, the New York City mayoral race, actually imparted some troubling news. Even though he won decisively, Zohran Mamdani only got, with over 90% of the precincts reporting, about 1,036,051 votes. New York City's five boroughs boast somewhere between 4.5 million and 5 million registered Democratic voters, meaning Mamdani only got 20-25% of the democratic vote.

     Despite him beating Cuomo by nearly 9%, that's hardly a mandate. Yes, one could say this was an off-year election and that voter turnout is especially moribund. But that doesn't square with the hoopla that was manufactured over Mamdani's campaign. Bottom line, he's not nearly as popular as the so-called pundits made him out to be. When he runs for re-election in four years, he's going to have to bring a lot more of those non-voting people to his side if he's going to remain competitive.

      Even with New York City's rising Independent and unaffiliated demographic, there still weren't enough to pull Cuomo's considerable fat out of the fire. Plus, the exit poll splits are noteworthy:

 

     Only half of men and women voted for Mamdani. Fewer than half of white voters went for him, with lukewarm results resulting from all major racial demographics. Only among his fellow Asian community did Mamdani do well, beating Cuomo by a nearly 2-1 margin.

     Yes, Mamdani won resoundingly and decisively last night (and he'd done it despite Schumer and Jeffries refusing to endorse him and Gov. Kathy Hochul only giving her late and lukewarm endorsement). But the fact that he'd only won a small fraction of his party's vote is something to which his office in City Hall should pay close attention.

     The Governor's races showed very interesting exit poll results.

     The fact that both races were indisputably won by Democratic women is good enough but the breakdown across gender and racial lines is worth examining. Let's look at Virginia:

 

 

     A quick, careless look at the map across Virginia's 95 counties would give one the impression that Winsome Earle-Sears would've crushed Spanberger instead of losing by nearly 15 points. However, everyone knows that cities, especially in places like the capital of Richmond, skew Democratic. Earle-Sears won in largely rural counties, where voters are less numerous. So, no surprise there.

     The interesting numbers are to be found, again, in the racial and gender breakdowns.

     Earle-Sears actually won the male demographic by three percentage points. By this, we can reasonably infer that white male Republicans went for Earle-Sears while only 48% went for Spanberger. 53% of white voters actually went for Earle-Sears while Spanberger only got 47%. 

      But here's where it got surprising: 93% of the African-American vote went for the white Democrat. They overwhelmingly voted against a candidate of their own race. In fact, Spanberger did decisively well in all racial demographics except her own. In other words, Spanberger won big in all the major counties and among those who are likeliest to be harmfully impacted by Trump's policies. 

     The results were similar in New Jersey.

 

     Predictably, Sherrill won the major urban counties such as Essex and Bergen. Yet, as with Virginia, Sherrill lost the male vote by 1%. She lost the white vote by 5%. But look at the non-white demographics. Sherrill took 94% of the African-American vote, with solid margins in the Hispanic-Latino and Asian vote. Again, those populations most vulnerable to Trump's insane policies.

     The takeaway we can infer from these results is that, even though white males went for the Republicans in these races, there aren't enough of them to sway an election one way or the other (unless their engagement numbers go up). It's tempting to see in these results a repudiation of Republican policies and Republican candidates. And it would be even more reckless to ignore the fact that these off-year elections occurred at exactly the same time that the GOP has shut down the government, that people have already lost most if not all their SNAP benefits, their health insurance premiums are about to double or triple and Mike Johnson is keeping the House on a permanent vacation.

     Naturally, Trump is saying these Republicans lost because he wasn't on the ballot. But if his influence was all that, then his endorsements would've been more efficacious. Yes, I think we can infer that last night's elections could represent a bellwether of things to come in a year. Yes, we won a few elections last night.

     But now it's up to the Democratic Party as a whole to show the American voters that they deserve the chance to run the legislative branch.