Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe speaks to reporters before the start of the first day of the Democratic National Convention in July. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

A majority of Virginia voters approve of Terry McAuliffe’s performance as governor, but that positive rating is weaker and more partisan than what nearly all of his predecessors enjoyed over the past two decades, a new Washington Post poll finds.

Fifty-three percent of registered voters approve of the Democrat, and 33 percent disapprove.

With 17 months left in office, McAuliffe enters the home stretch of his four-year term with big goals in health care, economic development and felon-rights restoration still uncertain or unmet.

Yet his most high-profile aim — delivering his critical swing state for close friend and political ally Hillary Clinton in the presidential election — appears to be on track, with The Post’s poll finding that the former secretary of state has a wide lead over Republican Donald Trump in the commonwealth.

[Trump’s unpopularity fuels wide lead for Clinton in new Virginia poll]





“People aren’t really paying attention to Richmond, given the two-ring circus that is the presidential campaign,” said Steve Farnsworth, a professor of political science at the University of Mary Washington.

Voters’ opinions of McAuliffe, a former Democratic National Committee chairman, fall more sharply along partisan lines than usually is the case for Virginia governors, the poll finds. Yet their views on some of his policy moves are more nuanced.

For instance, Virginians are upbeat about the economy, but few say it has improved much since McAuliffe entered office, even though he has made economic development a priority. And by a wide margin, voters support the governor’s now-thwarted effort to restore voting rights to more than 200,000 felons. But they are about evenly split on whether he was motivated by altruism or politics.

McAuliffe came to the Virginia governor’s mansion after a career as a prolific and sometimes controversial fundraiser for Clinton and her husband, former president Bill Clinton.

He won the governorship — his first elective office — in a tight 2013 race against an equally polarizing figure, then-Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II, a darling of religious and tea party conservatives.

Partisan warfare continued after the election. Republicans in control of Virginia’s House and Senate have blocked most of the governor’s legislative priorities, including expanding Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. So McAuliffe sometimes has turned to executive orders to get around the legislature and has focused on economic development, something he can largely pursue without General Assembly input.

Restoration of felon rights

In April, McAuliffe issued an executive order to restore voting rights to more than 200,000 felons who had completed their sentences and were no longer under supervised release. He said he wanted to move the state away from a policy he characterized as a last vestige of Jim Crow laws because it disproportionately affected black citizens. Republicans, accusing him of trying to bulk up Democratic voter rolls ahead of the presidential election, said he had exceeded his authority by awarding clemency en masse instead of on the usual case-by-case basis.





GOP legislative leaders filed a lawsuit and won in the Virginia Supreme Court, which invalidated McAuliffe’s order in July.

McAuliffe has had better luck in the court of public opinion, with 61 percent of Virginia adults saying they support his executive order and 37 percent “strongly” so. Thirty-four percent oppose it, with 21 percent doing so “strongly.” Support is highest among Democrats (82 percent), African Americans (87 percent), younger adults (73 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds). Six in 10 Republicans oppose McAuliffe’s effort to restore felons’ voting rights, while 61 percent of independents say they support it.

But Virginians are closely divided on McAuliffe’s motivations for the move; 45 percent say he did it because he thinks it is the right thing to do, while 42 percent say he did it because it would help Democrats win elections. More than 7 in 10 Republicans say McAuliffe’s action was an effort to boost his party’s chances, while more than 7 in 10 Democrats say the opposite.

The economy

For the most part, Virginians feel good about their economy, giving it higher marks than they did in a poll conducted three years ago, before McAuliffe took office. More than 7 in 10 rate the state’s economy as “excellent” or “good,” up from just over 6 in 10 who said the same in 2013.

Even though their outlook on the economy has grown sunnier, Virginians do not seem to connect that to the governor. Fewer than 25 percent say the economy got better under McAuliffe; 59 percent say it has remained stable, and 12 percent say it has worsened.

The good feelings are more intense as you get closer to the District, with 86 percent in the inner and outer D.C. suburbs giving the economy high marks. That compares with 65 percent in the rest of the state — and a low of 57 percent in the Southwest, where rural towns and counties continue to struggle with high unemployment.

About twice as many African Americans as whites say the economy has improved during McAuliffe’s term, 38 percent compared with 19 percent.

In fact, Virginia’s economy has continued to strengthen from the dark days of the Great Recession, although not uniformly across the state. Virginia’s unemployment rate for July was 3.7 percent, significantly lower than the U.S. rate of 4.9 percent and down more than half a percentage point from the same month a year ago, according to data released Friday by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Virginia’s economy tends to be stronger than that of other states, in part because of its huge amount of government contracting business. When the federal government tightens its purse strings, as it has in recent years, Virginia feels the pinch.

There is not a lot of evidence that the state’s economy has diversified under McAuliffe, said Vinod Agarwal, an economist at Old Dominion University in Norfolk. But that’s not necessarily a knock on the governor.

“Whether any governor or politician comes in and wants to diversify, all they can really do is motivate people’s thinking,” Agarwal said. One of the problems in Virginia, he said, is that cities and counties operate under a patchwork of laws that limit their ability to cooperate and leave them with competing motivations.

He gave McAuliffe credit for attacking that issue by working to promote regionalism around the state.

The rosy overall economic numbers mask some weaknesses in Virginia. Although unemployment is low, workforce participation is down as more people drop out of the job market. And many of the jobs that have been created are part time or lower paying, Agarwal said.

What’s more, the recovery has been uneven. Hampton Roads, with its dependence on the military and government contracting, still is struggling to make up ground lost to federal budget cuts. The region is about 10,000 jobs short of its employment levels of 2007, before the recession and financial crisis, Agarwal said.

As for McAuliffe’s overall grade for economic performance, though, Agarwal thinks it’s too soon. “It takes a much longer time than we think” for things to get done, he said. “I think for a report card, we have to wait another four or five years.”

Popularity and polarization

McAuliffe’s 53-33 approval-disapproval rating lags behind what voters thought of Republican Robert F. McDonnell (58-27), Democrat Tim Kaine (66-25) and Republican James Gilmore (70-20) in Post polls conducted in year three of each governorship. The Post did not poll at a comparable point in the terms of Democrat Mark R. Warner or Republican George Allen but did so in the fourth and final year of each. In those surveys, Warner’s approval rating was 76-22, and Allen’s was 67-26.

Among registered voters, approval of McAuliffe is markedly higher among Democrats (77 percent) and independents (53 percent) than among Republicans (27 percent). The 50-point gap in approval between Democrats and Republicans is larger than the partisan gap for McDonnell (41 points) and Kaine (24 points) in their third years, and Warner (18 points) and Allen (39 points) in the fourth year of each of those governors.

Only Obama has ratings that are more polarized along partisan lines than McAuliffe’s, with 92 percent of Virginia Democrats approving of the president and just 14 percent of Republicans, a 78-point gap.

Among independents, McAuliffe’s approval is 53 percent, below what McDonnell (63 percent) and Kaine (66 percent) drew in their third years in office, and what Warner (77 percent) rated in his fourth.

McAuliffe’s approval rating varies along racial, educational and regional lines. He receives higher approval among nonwhite voters (68 percent) than whites (46 percent). African Americans are especially likely to approve of him, at 76 percent.

A greater proportion of more-highly educated Virginians approve of the governor. Sixty-two percent of college graduates approve, compared with 50 percent of those with some college education and 47 percent of those with a high school degree or less.

McAuliffe enjoys 65 percent approval in both the heavily blue Washington suburbs and in Hampton Roads. That support falls to about half in the Northern Virginia exurbs and Richmond area and to 38 percent in the deeply red, rural Southwest.

Guns

McAuliffe ran for governor bragging about his “F” rating from the National Rifle Association, taking an unusually strong stance for gun control in a state with rural hunting traditions. Early this year, he shocked gun-control allies by striking a compromise with gun rights Republicans and the NRA.

The deal greatly expands the rights of holders of permits for concealed-handgun carry in exchange for tighter restrictions on gun ownership by domestic abusers and voluntary background checks at gun shows. McAuliffe has said that the overall deal was a good compromise that advanced the cause of gun control, an issue that remains popular with Virginia voters if not the state’s GOP-controlled legislature.

[Five things that (kind of) explain McAuliffe’s gun deal with Republicans]

The Post poll finds 57 percent of Virginians favor stricter gun control laws, with 40 percent opposed, a slightly wider margin than in 2012, when voters favored stricter laws by 53-44, but similar to the level of support in 2007 (58-38).

Nearly half of Virginians live in households with guns, and 56 percent of them oppose stricter gun laws. Just 41 percent of those in gun-owning households support stricter laws, support that rises to 74 percent among those in non-gun households.

The Washington Post poll was conducted Aug. 11-14 among a random sample of 1,002 Virginia adults interviewed on cellular and landline phones. The margin of sampling error for overall results and among the sample of 888 registered voters is plus or minus four percentage points.

Scott Clement contributed to this report.