The Campaign Update: Virginia Is Now A Red State Again

On Election Night 2020, Fox News famously called the state of Arizona for Joe Biden before the polls had even closed, even though no other news outlet or election forecasting service had done so and despite the fact that Donald Trump held a substantial lead in the official vote count. It was a controversial move that still haunts the news channel a year later.

By 10:00 ET Tuesday night, Fox could have easily called Virginia for Republican Glenn Youngkin in his race vs. Democrat Clinton bag man Terri McAuliffe, as it had become obvious that McAuliffe had no means of prevailing legitimately. Younkin held a roughly 200,000 vote lead in the official count at that time, and it was easy to calculate that a legitimate count of the remaining votes still outstanding would result in Youngkin winning by about 120,000. For whatever reason, though, Fox’s election callers chose to sit on their hands, leaving the hapless Bill Hemmer having to repeat the same nonsense over and over and over again for hours on end.

In the end, Democrats in Fairfax County managed to manufacture enough votes to reduce the final margin to 70,000 votes, so we now know that, at least in a gubernatorial race, the Ds are only able to dummy up roughly 50,000 votes or so in the dead of night in Virginia. That number will now become the GOP’s baseline for narrow victory in statewide races there.