Youngkin Moves Ahead of McAuliffe in Majority of Recent Virginia Polls

Reflections on Early Voting 

The Virginia Gubernatorial election depends on total turnout, and independents, not early turnout. 

Extrapolating election outcomes from partial returns is a very hard problem, and becoming harder in many ways

Unlike Trump who told followers to vote on elections day (a mistake), Youngkin encouraged people to vote early. 

Candidates should always seek early voting for their side.  Those votes cannot be changed or taken away. 

At the last minute, some people who waited might change their minds or not vote at all.

Virginia Polls 

Poll Discussion

Here are all of the Virginia Polls.

I am a fan of weighting momentum and more recent polls over earlier polls. 

Nate Silver posts polls by release date. The key date is the date the polls were conducted. 

I favor the recent polls of shorter duration as opposed to polls over a long period time like the Oct 9-21 poll by Virginia Commonwealth.

Most Recent Polls

  • Oct 29-31 Trafalgar: Youngkin +2 LV
  • Oct 27-31 Insider: Youngkin +2 LV
  • Oct 27-29 Echelon: Youngkin +3 LV
  • Oct 24-27 Fox News: Youngkin +8 LV, +1 RV
  • Oct 20-26 WaPo: McAuliffe +1 LV, +4 RV
  • Oct 21-24 Suffolk: Tie LV

Advantage Youngkin

The Fox News polls caused much discussion. +8 On Likely Voters vs. +1 Registered voters is such a huge discrepancy there may be a polling error or sampling outlier.

Mentally call the Fox outcome +2 or +2.5  for Youngkin if you like. 

That makes the 4 most recent polls approximately +2 for Youngkin. If we do the same for WaPo, the prior two polls are +2 for McAuliffe and a tie.

Trafalgar

Momentum 

There is a small but clear advantage to Youngkin in the most recent polls. 

Moreover, momentum is also increasingly Youngkin’s way.

Mish Call

Nate Silver has Youngkin +1. To pick a specific number to one decimal place, I have Younkin +2.2 .

However, these numbers are all within margin of error. I will not be surprised by anything.

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KidHorn
KidHorn
2 years ago
There were a lot more local political ads for Youngkin than McAuliffe in the last few days. Or at least it seemed that way to me. Even though democrats always raise a lot more money than republicans in the area. Wonder if some big money decided to hedge their bets at the last minute.
If Youngkin wins, it’s because of the Loudon County school board. They should all be fired for how they handled the skirt wearing bathroom rapist. Loudon county is the richest county in the country. Followed by a bunch of other nearby counties. Really dumb to piss off the middle class parents in NoVa.
astroboy
astroboy
2 years ago
Reply to  KidHorn
I think your comment sums things up entirely.
thimk
thimk
2 years ago
well as a political pundit once said : gain enough votes to overcome the loop holes. there is safety in numbers. Did orange man sit this one out ?
 No social media influence ?
AWC
AWC
2 years ago

“ If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.”  E. Goldman 

Tony Bennett
Tony Bennett
2 years ago
Reply to  AWC
So true … shades of George Carlin.
Having said that, if Youngkin wins it will boost Manchin mightily and be Titantic moment for Pelosi / Biden.
Captain Ahab
Captain Ahab
2 years ago
If democraps run true to form, this is when 10 men will come forward accusing Youngkin of sexually abusing scouts 30 years ago.
StukiMoi
StukiMoi
2 years ago
Reply to  Captain Ahab
The real problem is that there exist those dumb enough to bother having an opinion, at all, about whether he did or not.
Captain Ahab
Captain Ahab
2 years ago
Reply to  StukiMoi
For the vast majority of voters, their ‘opinions’ are regurgitated from social media.
Business Man
Business Man
2 years ago
I will very much want to see the totals for “Early voting” and “Drop-box voting” in this election.  If it is indeed 2 to 1, or greater and in McAuliffe’s favor, I and many others will have great suspicion on the legitimacy of this election.
I don’t trust random pieces of paper appearing in a box somewhere, with no accountability or knowledge of who put them there.  It is simply the easiest way to cheat like hell.
TexasTim65
TexasTim65
2 years ago
Reply to  Business Man
You can only put so many ‘extra’ votes in there.  There is a risk because if you put too many in there you exceed the number of legal voters if there is a high turnout.
shamrock
shamrock
2 years ago
Anecdotally, my dog walk route last year had about 20 biden signs and 0 trump signs.  This year it’s 10 or so youngkin to 1 mccaullife.  Complete flip.
Tony Bennett
Tony Bennett
2 years ago
A Republican has not won a state wide office since 2009.
Biden beat Trump 54% to 44%.
Eddie_T
Eddie_T
2 years ago
Not hard to see why McAuliffe is on the verge of losing, with his Woke virtue-signaling political correctness. He’s his own worst enemy.
I just wonder if Youngkin’s calculated distancing from Trump continues if he wins, or if he rushes back into the fold of the coup-fomenting “Trump Campaign”.
Tony Bennett
Tony Bennett
2 years ago
Reply to  Eddie_T
If he wins he’ll be darling of Republican Party (for now) … and keep distance (but not too far) from DJT.
Youngkin 2024
?????????
tbergerson
tbergerson
2 years ago
I will not be surprised by anything.
I will not be surprised if there are 50,000 ballots injected for McCauliffe that all have the same mark on them made in the same way and injected into totals by the radically left SoS 2 days after the election.  The very objectionable McCauliffe hired the very objectionable lawyer that is connected with the Deep State and can make such things happen.
Eddie_T
Eddie_T
2 years ago
Reply to  tbergerson
Don’t stop. Don’t stop believin’. 
Maybe monkeys will fly out of my *ss and the 2020 election will be announced for Trump….any day now, I’m sure.
I’m so tired of the “stop the steal” retreads that get posted here every day.
Business Man
Business Man
2 years ago
Reply to  Eddie_T
The problem is that you can’t have your cake and eat it too.  You can’t “liberalize” voting to the point where it becomes akin to voting for your favorite MLB player to be an All-Star.  As a kid I would grab a stack of ballots at the entrance of Wrigley Field and vote for all my favorite Cubs.  “Vote early and often” wasn’t just for Chicago politicians, but for Chicago baseball players, too.
So you either get early voting with drop boxes and strict procedures to verify voting and clean voter rolls, or you can liberalize Election Day only  voting with less stringent restrictions, but no early voting and drop-box voting without bona fide reasons (military, health, etc.).
Elections are very delicate things, and you should care just as much as Republicans about the perception of them.
But Democrats want it all, because they know that it allows for cheating at the margins and ballot harvesting.  Maybe they don’t directly endorse cheating, but many people sure suspect that it’s happening.  When you see evidence of the same ballot and hear stories of Democrat organizations going door to door at senior citizens housing with pre-marked, ready-to-go ballots to “help” it does not inspire pride in our system.
The truth is that both Democrats and Republicans stand to lose a lot if the public routinely believes that elections are Cheat-a-thons, rather than a sacred aspect of Democracy that require serious diligence to keep them honest.  Other countries dye ink on their fingers, which is both symbolic and practical.  We scream that Republicans are racists because they just want a voter ID to verify who they say they are.
You can continue to poo-poo the “stop the steal” or recognize that if you really care about integrity and “mandates” for your side, you have to convince the other side that you are playing fair.  Dismissing concerns as you liberalize elections to the point of endorsing long held fraudulent processes will not get you what you want.
And don’t give me this “there is no evidence of…”  The truth is that the Courts did not hear almost all of the cases on the last election.  So the evidence was not heard.  In the cases where evidence was presented it was near impossible to verify which ballots were whose, simply because of confidential balloting.  Without the jacket that ballots came in, how can we know who owns it?
There is much to do in this area, and everyone would be better off if we acknowledged that.
Eddie_T
Eddie_T
2 years ago
Reply to  Business Man
You (and all the rest of the crowd who shows up here daily to cast aspersions on our political process)  have NO evidence of any substantial fraud in ANY election. All you have is a willingness to believe deliberate lies and a tendency to repeat bad information.
The courts threw the “stop the steal” cases out because they were all spurious. No court is going to reverse any election conducted in modern times, run by fairly careful state governments and carried out in a lawful manner, which means every election you ever got to vote in or will ever get to vote in.
The only possible thing you can be angling for here, imho, is to try to make the dumbest people more suspicious of the process and unwilling to accept the kid of election results you don’t happen to like.
Trump is like a pathetic WWF wrestler, as far as his tactics. “I won the Championship Belt but Evil Joe cheated me, I say. He stole it from me! I demand  a rematch!” 
Some people actually watch wrestling and believe their chosen gladiator heroes, whom they live through vicariously. No matter how obvious it is that it’s all a show. The “stop the steal” crowd is no better than they are.
dbannist
dbannist
2 years ago
Reply to  Eddie_T
Eddie, you are wasting your time.

I’m the reddest most conservative voter you will ever meet.  I’m also very logically brained, evidence oriented.  

I haven’t seen even one tiny piece of evidence that widespread voter fraud occurred for 2020.  It didn’t happen.  I’ve beat my head against the wall trying to reason with other red voters.  They just do not accept reality as it is.

In the end, all that matters to them is that DJT lost and nothing, not even truth, will shake them from that.

Business Man
Business Man
2 years ago
Reply to  dbannist
How do you define “widespread voter fraud?”  
It’s funny, because it used to be called just “voter fraud.”
The addition of the qualifier does not inspire confidence, especially when you have no objective definition of “widespread.”
Captain Ahab
Captain Ahab
2 years ago
Reply to  Eddie_T
Were you in all the courtrooms to know all the cases where ‘spurious’? This was a mindless statement on your part, with assumptions that are truly frightening in their naivete.  This prime assumption is ‘a lawful manner’.  With Covid ‘raging’, state officials and governors radically changed rules without legislatures.
Did any court properly assess even one an election claim? I think you’ll find the cases were dismissed for lack of standing or procedural reasons. No discovery! This is key Eddie_T. When filing an election dispute, the case is largely based on a few observers and statistical incongruities. It is impossible to show unlawful elections without access to the actual votes, machines, tallies, video tapes, etc.
When an election was thoroughly studied (Maricopa County) there were sufficient anomalies to void the election.
Captain Ahab
Captain Ahab
2 years ago
Reply to  Business Man
From what I have observed on this blog, all Eddie_T cares about is his ‘energy’ portfolio.
Your points are excellent, by the way.  There is only one way to stop people querying the election outcome. Arizona did it.
As each election case fell apart (after the election), it was clear that no court in the land wanted to be responsible for opening Pandora’s Box, even when there was enough to enable discovery.  It is discovery that worries the democraps. We know what they are capable of–we saw it on wikileaks in 2016.
Meanwhile, ‘they’ wonder why conspiracies continue. The same will be true with Jan 6. The upcoming Fox news report (Tucker Carlson) has them worried. There is only one way to prove him wrong–release all the tapes, every last one, on a public website.  Chances of that happening–0.0%
Captain Ahab
Captain Ahab
2 years ago
Reply to  Eddie_T
The mass media, Facebook, and Twitter stole the election: the prime example, the denial of Hunter Biden’s laptop, which a) exonerated Trump for pressing Ukraine to investigate the Biden’s, and b) demonstrated that Joe Biden was corrupt.
Eddie_T
Eddie_T
2 years ago
Reply to  Captain Ahab
MSM. Facebook, Twitter, Hunter Biden’s laptop……if only people knew the truth, nobody would have voted for such a corrupt grifter.
Ot maybe Biden was elected because Trump was so obviously a FAR worse grifter who would have gladly ended our democracy to hold on to power. But don’t stop. Don’t stop believin’.
tbergerson
tbergerson
2 years ago
Reply to  Eddie_T
Maybe Trump had some thoughts along those lines.  Maybe he didnt.  But the difference between the left and the right is this.  If Trump had actually DONE anything, people on the right would have rejected his actions.  But when Biden is a fascist, the left cheer him on.  As long as its “their guy” they dont care if he is a fascist.  Only if its the “other guy”.
Eddie_T
Eddie_T
2 years ago
Reply to  tbergerson
Maybe Trump had some thoughts along those lines.  Maybe he didnt. 
It looks pretty clear that he did, at this point. Him and his group of hand-picked sycophants, that is. 
I wish you were right, but the truth is that the more support Trump got from the lunatic fringe of the Republican Party, the more the rank-and-file were willing to buy into his lies. All the evidence shows that.
 If you think I like Biden, you’re mistaken. But compared with Trump, he is not much of a threat to our political system.
Captain Ahab
Captain Ahab
2 years ago
Reply to  Eddie_T
So, if someone asks questions contrary to the democrap party line and the sycophant MSM, they are ‘lunatic fringe’?’
 Saying it does NOT make it true. Your posting lacks credibility and is only opinion, not ‘TRUTH.’
Far worse is your ‘pretty clear’… that he had thoughts… THOUGHT CRIMES, Eddie_T! This says a lot about you, nothing good.
The ‘fact’ (yes, fact)  is the only serious investigation of the election was in Maricopa County, Arizona. Enough questions were raised that any thinking person should be disturbed.
Captain Ahab
Captain Ahab
2 years ago
Reply to  Eddie_T
You’re in denial, the direct result of MSM propaganda. Only a true village idiot believes Trump would not relinquish the Presidency if the vote went against him. Example, Pelosi declared that Trump might start WW3 with nukes to save his job. Utterly false with NO proof that he even contemplated such a thing. She needs to be impeached, and imprisoned.
shamrock
shamrock
2 years ago
Reply to  Eddie_T
Trump was behind by 7-9 points in the polls and only lost by 3.  I wonder who stuffed the ballot boxes right?
Captain Ahab
Captain Ahab
2 years ago
Reply to  tbergerson
Sounds a lot like Maricopa County. I wonder why?

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