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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   9706 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 3, 2025

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Who else up watching election results? As of the time of this writing Decision Desk has called all of:

  • The Virginia governor race in favor of Abigail Spanberger (D).

  • The Virginia lieutenant governor race in favor of Ghazala Hashmi (D and the first Muslim woman elected to statewide office).

  • The Virginia Attorney General race in favor of Jay Jones (D lmao).

  • The New Jersey governor race in favor of Mickie Sherrill (D).

  • The NYC mayoral race for Zohran Mamdani (D, projecting a majority of the vote too lmao).

  • Both statewide Georgia Public Service Commissioner races for the Democratic candidates.

Polls are still open in California so no word yet there on the redistricting ballot measure. In other Jay Jones news the house delegate who leaked his texts is on track to lose her re-election, as part of dems winning a trifecta in the Virginia government.

The county by county level results I've seen show pretty much all of the above running ahead of Harris and Spanberger even running ahead of Biden in 2020. Is this indicative of what we might see going forward? Dems had previously overperformed in special elections this year but this is the closest to a general until next years actual federal elections. If these trends hold up not a good sign for Republicans!

It seems like to me the Republicans pretty much threw in the towel for the VA governor with a nonserious candidate, and down the ballot suffered as well. Either way I do think Youngkin was expected to be a blip in the rapid slide of VA into the deep end. He was bouyed by some favorable short term issues but there was nothing that would stick past a news cycle.

In terms of using it as a bellweather, polymarket's numbers for 2028 are down for the democrats, so it seems that if anything the democrats very slightly underperformed compared to expectations. https://polymarket.com/event/which-party-wins-2028-us-presidential-election

Edit: actually 2026 numbers are down for republicans so it's bad news for them

Why did Youngkin not run again?

VA does not allow Governors to run again immediately. I think they can wait out a cycle though?

I feel like I should know this.

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