How we did in Hampton Roads in November

The Virginia Public Access Project today updated their website with the party performance data for statewide candidates for the House of Delegates and Senate districts. A lot of red on that house map to the left (click to enlarge).

I took a look at the contested races in Hampton Roads where there was a Democratic candidate and compared their performance to that of Creigh Deeds as well as President Obama. The results for these twelve races are shown in the chart below (also click to enlarge).

A couple of notes:

• In the 89th House district, the only opponent was an independent candidate. Thus the incumbent Democratic candidate, Kenny Alexander, statistically out-performed even President Obama. So while technically a contested race, in truth, it was closer to being an uncontested race.
• In the 91st House district, the race was a 3-way one, with a strong independent candidate, Gordon Helsel. In fact, Helsel was so strong that he got a larger percentage of the vote (32.6%) than did Deeds (31%).

Three Democratic candidates – Sam Eure in the 91st, Gary West in the 94th and Matthew James in the 80th – performed worse than gubernatorial candidate Creigh Deeds. Only James managed to pull out a win in a heavily Democratic district. Winning Democratic candidates averaged nearly 10 points better than Deeds did, with Lynwood Lewis (100th) leading the way with a 23 point spread. Nearly matching the average of the winning candidates was Bobby Mathieson, who, as of this writing, lost by 14 votes.

For these contested races, Deeds averaged nearly 11 points behind the percentages posted for Obama.

More below the fold.

District 77, 79, 92 and 95 had unopposed Democratic incumbents while the remaining districts had mostly unopposed Republican incumbents. (The 85th had an independent candidate.) As you can see, some of those districts are inhospitable to Democratic candidates. Obama only one one of the Republican-held districts – the 84th, which is represented by Sal Iaquinto (and before that by Bob McDonnell).

Interestingly enough, when compared to Obama, Deeds did a little better in these uncontested districts, running a little less than 10 points behind.

So in Hampton Roads, Deeds ran, on average, 10.23 points behind Obama. This is better than what he did statewide, where his 41.25% of the vote compared to 52.62% of the vote for Obama in 2008 was 11.37 points behind. Given the historic nature of the 2008 race, I doubt if anyone expected that Deeds would be able to get the same numbers that Obama got.

One last chart.

This compares the performance of Deeds, Obama, and Tim Kaine (2005) across all of the districts in Hampton Roads. While the tendency may be to compare Deeds to Obama, it is interesting to note that there were areas of Hampton Roads where Kaine outperformed Obama, mostly areas we would consider Republican. Had Deeds done as well as Kaine – or as well as the winning Democratic candidates this year – the gubernatorial race would have been much closer.