Republican candidate for governor Winsome Earle-Sears didn't just get fewer votes than the Democratic candidate, she also got the fewest votes of any Republican running statewide. The Republican candidate for Lieutenant Governor, John Reid, got 55,000 more votes than Earle-Sears. And Republican candidate for Attorney General Jason Miyares got 128,000 more.
"Usually for the Virginia Republicans, the governor does best and the rest of the ticket kind of follows, wins by a bit less of a margin," notes J. Miles Coleman at the University of Virginia Center for Politics.
One of the biggest vote differences in recent memory happened in 2013. That was when the Democratic candidate for lieutenant governor Ralph Northam got about 140,000 more votes than the Democratic candidate for governor, Terry McAuliffe.
David Ramadan at George Mason University explains Northam’s sweeping victory this way.
"It helped quite a bit for him that he was running against a far, far, far right candidate who, if you remember, used to go around from one campaign stop to another carrying an axe and talking about axing the government. So that would have been the outlier."
Democrats also had another vote disparity in the election results this year. In the wake of the texting scandal, Democratic candidate for attorney general Jay Jones got about 170,000 fewer votes than Abigail Spanberger, the party’s candidate for governor.
This report, provided by Virginia Public Radio, was made possible with support from the Virginia Education Association.
