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Well, that was certainly decisive.

The polls in Virginia had not been closed an hour before pundits started calling the election for the Democrats. Not only were the three statewide candidates well ahead; Republicans in the General Assembly were being picked off rapidly as well. It’s hard to read the results as anything but a thumping repudiation of Donald Trump, the Trump approach, and the Republican Party that put him in the White House.

Granted: Democrats headed into Tuesday’s elections with a clear edge. The GOP had not won a statewide office since 2009, and the commonwealth was the only state in the South to pick Hillary Clinton over Trump last year. Virginians often choose a governor from the party not in the White House, and Trump’s deep unpopularity made that even more likely this year.

Those are serious headwinds for any Republican candidate, and polling consistently showed Democratic candidate for governor Ralph Northam ahead of Republican Ed Gillespie by an average of 3.3 percentage points. So the big night for Democrats did not come as a huge suprise.