In VA, we hold snap elections 30 days later, whenever an office becomes vacant.

The incumbent in the 37th Senatorial, wingnut Ken Cuccinelli, won his race for Atty Genl in the Republican sweep last November. That vacancy triggered a special for that seat, which our candidate, Dave Marsden, won narrowly a month ago. But since he was the incumbent in a Delegate district, the 41st, that was a subset of the Senatorial district, the vacancy created when he moved up set off another special for his old seat. This sort of cascading election series is typical here in VA, where, together with our practice of staggering state/local elections so that they occur in federal election off-years, means that we have 6 or 7 elections every year, whether we need them or not.

Our candidate, Eileen Filler-Corn, has now won by 42 votes, out of 11,528 cast. This is within 0.5%, so the state will pay for a recount, and the other side will probably ask for one, because the legislature has only twelve days left in session, and the recount would probably delay her seating long enough to deny our side Eileen's vote this session.

Our victory doesn't say anything new or unexpected about wider trends, because this one was expected to be close. In a normal year, we would probably win the district fairly easily. It was held by a Democrat, narrowly, this past November. He was the four-year incumbent, but 2009 was a very bad year for us, with many incumbents in not-really-marginal Delegate districts dragged down by the negative coattails of the top of the ticket in the governor's race.

In this special we just won, we no longer had incumbency advantage, but neither were we burdened with negative coattails. Turnout is always low in these specials, and that helps the Republicans. What balanced that out, and saved the seat for our side, was probably the ground game. The Democratic committee here in Fairfax County is much more active than the other side. We tend to swarm these specials from all over the county, because members from most of the county are not preoccupied with elections in their own areas, and are free to mob to the affected areas.

I IDed over 500 voters myself, so it's mathematically possible, if a stretch, to imagine that I personally roped in those 42 votes we won by. Gtomkins -- kingmaker!!!