In recent weeks, Virginia has released records of who voted in the 2021 election. At TargetSmart, we are able to match that information up with each voters’ previous vote history, demographic information and other commercially available data to gain a better understanding of the electorate. While we never know who someone voted for, we know who voted.
Now that all the data is in, here’s what we know:
The senior vote surged. By a
lot.
Turnout among voters age 75 or older
increased by 59%, relative to 2017 while turnout among voters under age 30 only increased by just 18%. Notably, turnout of all other age groups combined (18-74), which would likely include parents of school-aged children, only increased by 9% compared to 2017.
These are massive changes in the electorate in an election that was far from a blowout: Youngkin won by just 2%.
- Voters age 65 and older are an estimated 15.9% of Virginia’s population according to the census, yet accounted for 31.9% of all ballots cast in 2021.
- 348,314 more seniors (ages 65+) voted in Virginia’s 2021 gubernatorial election than in the 2016 presidential election.
- The Virginia market with the largest increase in senior vote share (ages 65+) from 2017 to was Charlottesville (67% increase), followed by the spill Raleigh-Durham market (48% increase).
- Notably, turnout among voters of color also surged in 2021 compared to 2017: African-American turnout surged 13%, Hispanic turnout by 17.5% and Asian-American turnout by 37%. (An earlier version of this analysis compared final early vote data from 2017 to 2021. That error has been corrected.)
So what does this all mean? Did outraged parents swing the election? While it’s certainly possible that education motivated large swaths of the voter mobilization, there was not a surge in parent-age voters compared to seniors.