Talk Elections

I've closely followed the past three presidential elections, and one of the most common sayings that I've heard early on all three election nights is "OMG Virginia looks so bad for the Dems". Yes, that's because NoVa is so late to report, but people, even a lot of 'pros', are still to grasp this. John King on CNN was still saying that Trump had a great chance of winning when it was pretty much tied at about 80% reporting, with the big bulk of the remaining vote to come from NoVa. As it turned out, Clinton won pretty solidly, and the VA polls were pretty accurate.

VA is the complete opposite of PA. PA has a yuge Democratic counting bias, while VA has a yuge Democratic counting bias. In the 2016 PA early returns, Hillary was at like 70% statewide, in 2008 I remember watching the election night coverage and it had Obama leading in literally every county in the PA early vote. Obama won PA by 10-11 points, but came nowhere close to winning every county in the final results. Late into election night 2008 as well, Obama was ahead in NC by 10,000 votes, while the supposedly much more winnable VA had McCain ahead there until very late.

Downstate has counties with small numbers of precincts. NoVA has hundreds of precincts of which the data has to be sent to Richmond to verify usu via email or phone after 7PM and that is why it takes so long.

Networks have to play the game to a certain degree when it comes to results that are coming in. We are political junkies with a vast understanding of how things work, but the anchors have to keep the interest of those who aren't familiar. It is better for ratings to give the perception that elections are happening in "real time" even though there are a lot of foregone conclusions that we know are coming.

Atlas freaks out over obvious things all the time. I'd say the hyperbole is even worse here.

Are you telling me that an entire state is also a moderator?

On a serious note, Virginia is a swing state and it's better to take everything with a grain of salt until all of the results are in.

On election night last year, there was an article published by the NY Times titled Don't be Fooled by Virginia (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/opinion/election-night-2016/dont-be-fooled-by-virginia) which explained how the (unique) nature of Virginia reporting its results will inevitably result in the Republican candidate taking an early lead, only to be overtaken by the Democratic candidate near the end.

Nonetheless, if this trend persists, I would still avoid calling Virginia for the Democratic candidate until such time the Democratic candidate actually overtakes the Republican candidiate.

In the 2018 Senatorial race in Virginia, this normal pattern was broken, as Tim Kaine was projected as the winner as soon as the polls closed. Kaine won by 16%, so this isn't that surprising. However, if Biden wins Virginia by low double digits this year (and I think he has a strong chance of doing so), we could very well see the networks immediately calling the race for him when polls close.