UPDATE 8:45 pm – With 55/59 precincts reporting in SD07, it’s now Rouse 19,153-Adams 18,739. Close, but “a win’s a win!” 🙂 Also, remaining absentees and provisionals should increase Rouse’s lead.
UPDATE 8:37 pm – Not Larry Sabato has called it for Rouse! (“830 projection- Aaron Rouse (D) has defeated Kevin Adams (R) to flip the 7th Senate District! New Senate will be 22 Dems and 18 Republicans.”)
UPDATE 8:31 pm – Per the VA Dept of Elections, with 52/59 precincts reporting, it’s now Rouse 18,208 – Adams 17,585.
UPDATE 8:21 pm – From Virginia Beach, it’s now Rouse 16,950-Adams 16,211 in VA Beach. Per umichvoter, “all absentees seem to be in from Virginia Beach Aaron R. Rouse – D: 4,283 Kevin H. Adams – R: 1,601”
UPDATE 8:19 pm – Looks like Chaz Nuttycombe is very close to having “seen enough,” LOL (“I think there’s about a 90% chance Rouse wins this ATM.”).
UPDATE 8:14 pm – In Virginia Beach, it’s now Adams 11,633-Rouse 9,941, still no early/absentee votes, which should skew strongly “blue.”
UPDATE 8:06 pm – With 40/59 precincts reporting, it’s now Adams 10,841-Rouse 9,089. Same caveat as earlier regarding the early/absentee votes…
UPDATE 8:03 pm – Per Not Larry Sabato, “Kings Grant precinct is still not in from Virginia Beach- very GOP leaning, so I expect Aaron Rouse will need to make up over 2K in election day margin with the early vote.” That’s definitely doable, given that there are at least 10k early votes which skew “blue.”
UPDATE 8 pm – Per the VA Department of Elections, with 39/59 precincts reporting in SD07, it’s Adams 10,603-Rouse 8,896…but again, no absentees reporting from VA Beach yet, and those should skew strongly Dem.
UPDATE 7:54 pm – Per the VA Department of Elections, with 36/59 precincts reporting in SD07, it’s Adams 9,839 (54.0%)-Rouse 8,388 (46.0%)…no absentees reporting from VA Beach yet, and those should skew strongly Dem.
UPDATE 7:47 pm – More results from Virginia Beach have it at Adams 9,691-Rouse 8,169 (again, these are presumably all election day votes, which will skew “red,” and not early votes, which will skew “blue”).
UPDATE 7:38 pm – Per Sam Shirazi, “Norfolk is done reporting expect provisionals and Republican Adams narrowly carries it Not a huge part of district This part of Norfolk is pretty evenly divided so can’t read too much into it Will come down to VA Beach. Per J. Miles Coleman, “The 3 Norfolk precincts are all in and Adams won them 51/49 — narrower than Kiggans’ 53/47 in 2019.”
UPDATE 7:35 pm – More results from Virginia Beach have it at Adams 9,219-Rouse 7,596 (again, these are presumably all election day votes, which will skew “red,” and not early votes, which will skew “blue”).
UPDATE 7:31 pm – More results from Virginia Beach have it at Adams 7,694-Rouse 6,126. As Ben Tribbett says, “Kevin Adams now up about 1600 in election day vote. We won’t know anything until early votes are counted here.”
UPDATE 7:28 pm – More results from Virginia Beach, Adams 6,458-Rouse 4,807.
UPDATE 7:25 pm – Ben “Not Larry Sabato” Tribbett has called HD24 for Republican Ellen Campbell and HD35 for Democrat Holly Seibold, both as expected.
UPDATE 7:22 pm – More results from Virginia Beach has Adams 4,192-Rouse 3,102 (presumably all election day, not early votes).
UPDATE 7:17 pm – It’s now Adams 2,919 – Rouse 2,278 in SD07 (note: that’s just looking at VA Beach results; there are a few Norfolk precincts as well…haven’t seen anything for them yet.)
UPDATE 7:15 pm – As expected, in deep-red HD24, Republican Ellen Campbell leads Democrat Jade Harris by a wide margin (77.7%-22.3%) with 11 of 44 precincts reporting.
UPDATE 7:12 pm – According to the VA Beach results site, Kevin Adams (R) leads Aaron Rouse (D) 1,368-1,123. Presumably, these results don’t include early/absentee votes, which should skew strongly “blue.”
There are three special elections today in Virginia, with polls closing at 7 pm. The elections are in:
- HD24 (Bath, Rockbridge, Buena Vista, Lexington), which is deep-“red,” and where the candidates are Democrat Jade Harris and Republican Ellen Campbell (the widow of former Del. Ronnie Campbell, who passed away on December 13).
- HD35 (Vienna/Oakton in Fairfax County), which should be safe Democratic, where the candidates are Democrat Holly Seibold and Republican Monique Baroudi. The special election is to fill the seat vacated by former Del. Mark Keam, who resigned in early September to join the Biden administration.
- SD07 (Virginia Beach as well as a small bit of Norfolk), which is “purple” (went for Northam in 2017, Youngkin in 2021, Luria in 2022) and where the candidates are Democrat Aaron Rouse and Republican Kevin Adams (note: this vacancy was created when former State Senator Jen Kiggans defeated former Rep. Elaine Luria for U.S. House in VA02 this past November). We’ll see what turnout is in this election, with early voting somewhere around 10k-14k (depending on how many additional ballots come in after election day…noon Friday is the deadline if the mail is postmarked today or earlier; these ballots should skew pretty strongly Democratic) and with election day voting (which presumably will tilt Republican) possibly as high as 20k, but we’ll see…
Of the three special elections, of course the race everyone’s watching is SD07, since that one’s VERY competitive AND since the State Senate is currently held by Democrats by just a slim (21-18) margin, and is the only thing stopping Glenn Youngkin from enacting his right-wing agenda and rolling back a lot of the progress we made in Virginia the past few years. If Democrats win the SD07 special election, they’ll have a 22-18 State Senate majority, which would provide some cushion, especially considering that it’s almost a certainty that State Senator Jennifer McClellan (D) will be heading to the U.S. House of Representatives in late February, which will lower the number of Democrats in the State Senate by one, until a special election is held for THAT seat.
With that intro, stay tuned for results from VPAP and the Virginia Department of Elections (see here for HD35, here for HD24 and here for SD07); also check this out. Oh, and here’s a link to the Virginia Beach election results page.
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