Morning Distribution for Monday, December 6, 2021

A [FiveThirtyEight]( email [Morning Distribution]( Monday, December 6, 2021 Your daily briefing from FiveThirtyEight --------------------------------------------------------------- The Morning Story [Glenn Youngkin Campaigns In Final Days Of Virginia Gubernatorial Election]( [What 2021’s Biggest Upset Elections Tell Us About The Losing Parties]( By [Seth Hill]( and [Dan Hopkins]( 2021 was bookended by high-profile elections. In early January, traditionally GOP-leaning Georgia [sent two Democrats to the U.S. Senate]( in two runoff elections, tipping control of the chamber into Democratic hands. Less than 10 months later, on Nov. 2, blue-leaning [Virginia elected a Republican to statewide office]( for the first time since 2009. To be sure, the races in those two states were fought in very different contexts — and had very different outcomes. But even so, they shared a key feature, as our analysis of precinct-level data makes clear: The losing party lost the most ground on its own home turf. In Virginia, it was heavily pro-Biden precincts that delivered the governor’s seat to the GOP, while in Georgia, it was heavily pro-Trump precincts that sent two Democrats to the Senate. Why is that noteworthy? First, the results provide a valuable reminder that while voters tend to seek balance by [backing the party]( out of power, that balancing isn’t guaranteed. Voters’ support for the party out of power depends on both parties’ positions, candidates and rhetoric. Also, at a time when commentators have emphasized [geographic]( [segregation]( by party, our joint analysis of Virginia and Georgia found that both election outcomes hinged on reduced geographic polarization, with each party losing ground in its respective stronghold to the other. Let’s start with Virginia. To understand how now-Gov.-elect Glenn Youngkin defeated Terry McAuliffe in a state in which now-President Biden defeated former President Donald Trump by 10 percentage points in the 2020 presidential election, we compared McAuliffe’s vote share to Biden’s and Youngkin’s vote share to Trump’s in each election precinct. From left to right, we then plotted the change in votes from the 2020 presidential election to the 2021 gubernatorial election by how much a precinct supported Trump in 2020. Where the lines are flat in the chart, gubernatorial performance equals presidential; downward slopes mean that the gubernatorial candidates performed worse than their party’s presidential candidates, upward slopes better. The steeper the slope, the bigger the change those precincts provided to the outcome. [Read more]( --------------------------------------------------------------- Weekly Listen [Play]( [Politics Podcast: What The Supreme Court — And Americans — Think About Overturning Roe v. Wade]( [FiveThirtyEight] [View in browser]( [ABC News]( [Unsubscribe]( Our mailing address: FiveThirtyEight, 47 West 66th Street, New York, NY 10023.