It was Goodnight in Virginia for the Democrats last night, but it was a very good night for Republicans as they swept all three statewide elections in blue Virginia. Glenn Youngkin defeated Terry McAuliffe by a small margin.
The latest count is 50.98 to 48.25 with a separation of almost 89,000 votes. As the votes were being counted there was a while with deja vu as the counting was not being done in Fairfax County, which contains 1/7 of all the votes in the state.
This is what happened in the swing states in 2020. They quit counting the votes until they had time to “find” enough votes to win.
McAuliffe had led in all the polls right up until the final week and then Youngkin took over. Youngkin led by over 200,00 votes throughout the evening until Fairfax County finally released their counts but McAuliffe came up short.
McAuliffe committed an unforced error as he insisted that parents had no business in deciding what their children could be taught in school.
In exit polling, education was the number one issue for the voters. Joe Biden’s plummeting poll numbers was also a millstone around McAuliffe’s neck.
In other Virginia races, Winsome E Sears beat out Hala S Ayala for the job of Lieutenant Governor and Jason S. Miyares defeated Mark R. Herring for Attorney General.
The huge wins in Virginia and the very close race in New Jersey does not bode well for the Democrats in 2022. These were two races that the Democrats were expected to win easily early on but Virginia turned red and NJ may as well once all the votes are counted.
In New Jersey with 87% of the vote counted, the Republican Jack Ciattarelli leads Philip Murphy by about 1,700 votes. Murphy has an excellent chance of pulling out a very narrow win, but on election day, Murphy led Ciattarelli by an average of 7.8%. The final tally will be razor-thin no matter who is declared the winner.
In Minneapolis, they had a referendum on whether to replace their police department with unarmed civilians. Rep Ilhan Omar led the charge there, but the referendum went down in flames.
Vote YES on 2! Minneapolis we got this, let’s go 💪🏽 https://t.co/NXAUgT2F0R
— Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) November 2, 2021
The measure was defeated easily by 56% to 44%.
