What surprised me in the election results last week

I may have predicted all of the winners, but there were still some surprises in the Virginia legislature.

Hey y’all,

This is a very busy time for me in the semester so I’m sorry I’m only just now writing this piece. I have a lot I want to say on last week’s election results, takeaways, narrative-combating, etc. But I wanted to start with what surprised me the most in the election results for the House of Delegates and State Senate.

Yes, I predicted all 140 winners in the General Assembly here in Virginia, but there were still some seats where at least in my book I missed the mark in some way or another. Some candidates overperformed and underperformed my expectations.

I created a spreadsheet at the beginning of the year that I used for everything Virginia this year: 2019-2022 election results (which paid subscribers also have access to), polls gathered, and my expected margin of victory. I was considering posting them in the final prediction piece but with how often I was changing them I decided against it. I last updated these expectations on Sunday when I was finalizing the ratings. I have added what my expectation was for SD-30, which I did not write down in the sheet but mentally I was expecting a 7 or 8-point victory for Roem. I’ve decided to put 8 in here.

So with that let’s examine where these overperformances/underperformances were based on the election results and my expectations, and why. Any district where I underestimated a party by less than 2 points won’t get a write-up as I feel pretty good about my margin prediction for that district.