Bedivere Bedrydant

In the words of Alex Jones, I'm kinda ret*rded, so I have no idea if this a weird thing to happen. Can only dive deeper... Well, as @AutistLvsMatter points out in tweet above, almost all those "lazy" voters were Biden voters...

Let's say that if you are a VA District 1 voter, your congressional vote will be in line with your presidential vote (if you vote for Congress). In other words, if you vote for Congress, then you vote either Trump & Wittman or Biden & Rashid.

What does this hypothetical reveal? It shows that 2,974 people voted for Trump but not for Wittman (257,906 - 254,932=2,974). That's 1% of Trump voters who could not be bothered to vote for Congress.

How about the Democrats? 276,430 people turned up to vote for Biden, but a piddling 181,228 voted for Rashid. That's 95,202 Biden voters who couldn't lend a hand to the Democratic congressional candidate - i.e. 34%! I may be kinda ret*rded, but that seems big.

But hold on - Wittman, the Republican, is an incumbent. So surely he has some sort of advantage, right? Republicans happily vote for him, some moderate Democrats cross over, and others don't bother. It's the incumbent advantage, right?

In 2016, 384,601 total votes were cast for Congress in this district. So let's compare that to how many votes were cast for President in the same district, and see if Democrats here in Virginia's First like to vote for President but don't care about Congress, as a rule.

399,081 presidential votes MINUS 384,601 congressional votes EQUALS... 14,480. So, 14,480 didn't vote for Congress even though they voted for President. That's 3.6%... which seems like a reasonable amount.

3.6% is reasonable. But 2020? 20% Not very reasonable... And why was it all on one side? 1% GOP, and 34% Democrat? And if we do the same hypothetical for 2016, in which people vote consistently within their party if they vote for Pres and Cong, what do we find?

Well, striking off all third parties (in both races), we're left with this: Trump: 212,402 Wittman-R: 230,213 vs Clinton: 163,522 Rowe-D: 140,785 In this scenario, Trump actually got FEWER votes than the GOP congressman.

But look at Clinton. 23K people voted for her, but didn't vote for the Democrat in Congress. That's a lot, 14%, but NOTHING compared to the 34% who voted for Biden this year, but didn't vote for the Democrat in Congress. That 14% actually goes down...

If we extend our hypothetical, and say that many progressives in VA CD-01 probably gritted their teeth to vote for Hillary, but down ballot registered their discontent and voted Green, that would explain the 12,866 people who voted for Gail Parker, the Green congress candidate.

After all, only 2,629 people in the district voted for Jill Stein, the Green candidate for president. So in the district there are clearly 2,629 diehard progressives who would rather takes votes away from Hillary and vote Green than defeat Trump.

But there are about 10K voters who aren't diehard Greens, and were willing to go along with the DNC insofar as beating Trump mattered. If those people did indeed mostly vote for Clinton...

...then the amount of people who voted for Clinton but did NOT vote for Congress drops down to a mere 3,000 or so people. In other words, approx. 2% of people voting for Clinton were too lazy to vote for Congress in 2016. Similar to Trump in both years.

Who is the outlier here? Biden. WTF is going on?