00:00.78
Sam Shirazi
Hi everyone, I'm Sam Shirazi and this is Federal Fallout the 2025 Virginia Elections. Today is the start of early voting in Virginia for the primary and I wanted to do a special bonus episode to celebrate it.
00:14.36
Sam Shirazi
But before turning to that, I did just briefly want to mention a recent piece of Virginia political news that is not related to the 2025 election. And that is that the 11th District Congressman Gerry Connolly is retiring due to his ongoing struggle with cancer.
00:35.45
Sam Shirazi
And I just wanted to wish him the best and thank him for the many years of public service to Virginia.
00:42.94
Sam Shirazi
And so I just wanted to make a note of that before talking about early voting in Virginia this year. Okay, so early voting is happening today, and it will continue all the way on until June 17th, which will be the actual primary date.
01:00.34
Sam Shirazi
So I just wanted to kind of quickly go over what's going on with the primary and what's going on with the early voting. So as I mentioned last week, and there was a lot going on on the Republican side with the lieutenant governor's race, but long story short, there will not be a statewide primary for the Republicans.
01:16.35
Sam Shirazi
Specific House of Delegates districts will have primaries on the Republican side. But it's not like there's a statewide race. However, on the Democratic side, there will be a statewide primary, both for lieutenant governor and attorney general.
01:31.37
Sam Shirazi
Plus, in a handful of districts, there will also be House of Delegates primaries. And I know I've been saying that I'll do a House of Delegates primary preview. I anticipate doing that at some point before the primary, that one.
01:46.05
Sam Shirazi
I'm waiting for the primary to get a little bit closer just because some of those races, it's a little unpredictable right now. I don't know who's necessarily favored. And I prefer to spend a little bit more time waiting and seeing what's going on in the House of Delegates primaries before commenting too much on it.
02:00.90
Sam Shirazi
But I did want you to know that there are certain primaries in certain House of Delegates districts, not a whole lot this year, considering that there are 100 House of Delegates districts, I believe there's only a less than 25 primaries, both if you combine the Democrats and Republicans. So not a whole lot of primaries this year in the House of Delegates.
02:21.12
Sam Shirazi
I think most of the attention is going to be on the Democratic side to the lieutenant governor and attorney general races. And remember that any voter in Virginia can decide to cast the ballot either in the Democratic primary or the Republican primary. There is no party registration in Virginia, so any voter can go and pick which primary they want to vote for. Obviously, Republicans, there's only a handful of districts that there are primaries, so most Republicans aren't going to have a chance to vote in a Republican primary.
02:51.58
Sam Shirazi
Every Democrat has an opportunity to vote in the Democratic primary because there statewide primaries. Everyone can vote for lieutenant governor and attorney general. And was kind of interesting question to think about. Are Republicans going to vote in the Democratic primary? I think that's relatively unlikely just because most Republicans aren't going to take the effort to go vote in the Democratic primary.
03:11.29
Sam Shirazi
I do think independents, particularly those who are either maybe more moderate or conservative, they might just decide they want to vote in the Democratic primary either because there isn't a Republican primary or because The Democrats are seem like they have a better shot of winning this year. So obviously if you're trying to influence who's going to be the next lieutenant governor or attorney general, you're going to be able to do that in the Democratic primary.
03:36.44
Sam Shirazi
Again, I don't think that's going to be a huge number of voters. You have to be pretty politically engaged to know that there's a primary and that early voting is happening. and I should note this generally about the primary is the turnout is going to be much less than the general election. I'm guessing we'll probably get a quarter of the general election turnout, on a good night and it's, it might even be lower than that. So I think, it's just something to keep in mind that realistically, most of the people who end up voting in these primaries are going to be politically engaged. And then the people who are going to vote early in the primary,
04:10.36
Sam Shirazi
early during the early voting session are going to be the most politically engaged people typically the least politically engaged people vote later or during election day the most politically engaged people vote on the first day of early voting and there there's you know always people who want to be the first person or or among the first people to cast a ballot and this year the voting is already starting in Virginia and I think that's why it's an exciting day today because We're to important elections this year. And these are the first votes that are really going to happen this year in Virginia for this primary.
04:43.05
Sam Shirazi
And they're happening on May second And you might be asking yourself, well, May 2nd, that's kind of early. The the primary is not until June 17th. So Virginia has 45 days of early voting. you know The Republicans sometimes discuss how this is like too much early voting. that It's too long of a period. It's among the longest periods of early voting in the country.
05:04.21
Sam Shirazi
There have been some bills to reduce the number of days of early voting. Obviously, that was not going to go anywhere with the Democrats being in control of the General Assembly. So I don't anticipate that changing anytime soon.
05:16.53
Sam Shirazi
And part of the reason there's 45 days, so to give you a little brief history of early voting in Virginia, prior to Democrats controlling the General Assembly after the 2019 elections, early voting, you actually needed what's called an excuse to early vote. So this was typically...
05:32.72
Sam Shirazi
You're you work outside of your county or you're sick or you're ill or you have a disability. Those types of things were the excuses you needed to early vote. And so realistically, I mean, not a lot of people qualified for that.
05:47.33
Sam Shirazi
I think in 2008, the Obama campaign kind of started trying to encourage people to early vote within the law, within those excuses, if if someone qualified for the excuse. But it still was not a huge amount of early voting during most of the 2010s. And then once the Democrats changed the law, first there was 2020 with COVID, and then there was the permanent change to early voting.
06:08.87
Sam Shirazi
Anyone in Virginia can early vote for any reason. You don't need a reason. You just show up with your at your early voting location. And if you're on the rolls, you can go ahead and early vote.
06:19.66
Sam Shirazi
And I think it's kind of changed the way campaigns are done in Virginia because now there's a much more emphasis on early voting. The Democrats traditionally, and I think I would still say, have an advantage in early voting. But Glenn Youngkin in 2021,
06:34.16
Sam Shirazi
kind of started emphasizing early voting. The Trump campaign in 2024 pushed early voting, at least in person, more. And so we saw that early voting voting has been picking up in Virginia over the last five years, and it's just changing how the campaigns are trying to reach out to voters.
06:51.75
Sam Shirazi
And, you know, how what does the mechanics of early voting look like? So typically, there are Two basic ways to early vote. There is early voting in person and then there's early mail voting.
07:05.90
Sam Shirazi
And I would say Republicans certainly prefer to vote in person either early voting or on Election Day. Democrats are more open to voting either in person or by mail. And I will say still the vast majority of people who vote by mail either in a primary or a general election are going to be Democrats. So it's just the reality that Republicans are more comfortable voting generally in person.
07:30.96
Sam Shirazi
So the early voting locations, it really depends on your county or city. Most counties or cities have one location, and that's typically the office of elections, which is usually where most of the county offices are located.
07:45.23
Sam Shirazi
Some of the larger counties, like Fairfax is a good example, has a lot of satellite voting locations because obviously you have a big county in Fairfax County, over a million people. You can't just have one early voting location.
07:56.18
Sam Shirazi
So usually Fairfax County and other larger counties in Virginia have more than one early voting location. Sometimes those counties will have weekend voting for early voting, prior starting in in the beginning part of early voting.
08:12.45
Sam Shirazi
But under Virginia law, every single county, the two Saturdays before the election, will have in-person early voting at least one location. And so that's the law that counties don't have to offer early voting every weekend, but at least the two Saturdays before the election, there has to be in-person early voting.
08:33.26
Sam Shirazi
And then besides the in-person early voting, there is also absentee or mail voting. And that can either be specifically for one election where a voter requests a mail ballot for this specific election, or there's the permanent absentee list, and I'll talk about that in a second, where voters will sign up for this optional list and receive a absentee ballot every single election.
08:56.01
Sam Shirazi
And they have the option of choosing to get either the Democratic or Republican primary ballots, or they choose not to vote in the primaries. And that'll get mailed to their house.
09:08.13
Sam Shirazi
And in terms of the mail ballots, there's a few options in terms of returning them. Obviously, you can mail them back. There are also Dropbox locations that voters can return them to.
09:18.74
Sam Shirazi
And voters also have the option on Election Day of just going to their local polling location and turning those ballots in that they can also turn them in at the early voting locations. And, you know, that you hear sometimes concerns about the Postal Service and, you know,
09:34.08
Sam Shirazi
either mail ballots getting lost or delays in having them returned. And so I think, you know, it's always a good idea to make sure you have enough time if you're deciding to mail back your ballot.
09:45.60
Sam Shirazi
ballot and make sure you have enough time that it can get processed. Or you obviously you can either go to a Dropbox or turn it in in person if you really want to make sure that your ballot is received. And so typically what you see in early voting is you have a, don't call it a surge, but you you have a lot of people voting at the beginning, either in person or by mail because they they've gotten the mail ballot, they fill it out, they send it back. or the people who are really excited to early vote, probably the political nerds who are listening to this podcast, they like to go vote early.
10:17.62
Sam Shirazi
and And so you see kind of a large amount of people voting early at the beginning of early voting. Then there's this lull during the 45-day period where yeah there's a trickle of people early voting, but not to the same extent as you saw at the beginning.
10:31.72
Sam Shirazi
And then at the end, there's like a surge of early voting because everyone realizes there's an election. And so usually the last two weeks or so, there's an increase of early voting kind of exponentially.
10:43.68
Sam Shirazi
more people voting and then obviously election day you have the most people voting and and you know people there's a variety of reasons people like to vote on election day as opposed to early voting some people just like election day they don't like voting early some people they don't realize there's an election and then all of a sudden they realize oh it's election day so I should go vote and then I'd i'd say the most practical reason is some of these larger counties more so geographically large Even if they don't have a large population, there's only maybe one early voting location because the county just doesn't have that many voters, but it's big. It's a big geographically rural, diverse county. And so you don't necessarily have the necessity to have a lot of early voting locations.
11:31.35
Sam Shirazi
And so what happens is people prefer to just vote at their local polling place because that might be a one mile drive versus 10 mile drive to the early voting location. Okay, so what does this all mean for the actual primary? And I'm going to focus more on the primary dynamics in this podcast.
11:50.87
Sam Shirazi
Obviously, I'll probably do an early voting podcast for the general election when the time comes and what that will look like. But I think the primary is interesting because I mentioned the permanent yeah permanent absentee list at the beginning.
12:03.37
Sam Shirazi
And if you remember, I said that the vast majority of people who are on the permanent absentee list are Democrats. And the reason for that is just Democrats feel more comfortable voting by mail.
12:14.34
Sam Shirazi
And so you've had a bunch of people sign up for the permanent absentee list since it was introduced a few years ago. But the vast majority of them pick the Democratic primary in terms of which primary they would rather vote in.
12:29.38
Sam Shirazi
So I looked at the numbers for the March 2024 Democratic primary for president, so over a year ago, and just for that primary, there were
12:42.41
Sam Shirazi
217,000 Democrats signed up for the permanent absentee list. And so if you've if you think about the permanent absentee list is growing, it's been over a year since then.
12:52.80
Sam Shirazi
and I'm sure someone has the exact number. I don't have the statistics at hand, but I'm guessing you know we're 220,000 Democrats on the permanent absentee list And so all those people, whether they know there's a primary or not, will be getting an absentee ballot in the mail.
13:08.39
Sam Shirazi
And I think that's going to be a real interesting part of this election, both for lieutenant governor and attorney general, is how are the campaigns reaching those people? Because 200,000, 220,000 people, that's a lot of people getting mail applications. And, you know I don't know how many people are going to end up voting in the Democratic primary for absentee lieutenant governor and attorney general.
13:32.60
Sam Shirazi
If I had to guess, it's probably over 300,000. Just depends how much enthusiasm there is, how many people are engaged this year. we could see even more. We could see up to 400,000.
13:45.22
Sam Shirazi
And a good chunk of that is going to be from the permanent absentee list. Now, not everyone on the permanent absentee list is going to return their ballot. And I'm guessing for an election like this, it's actually going to be a little less than a general election because A lot of people, they get the ballot in the mail, you know, primary for Lieutenant Governor Attorney General. They might not be super engaged.
14:05.17
Sam Shirazi
They forget about it. They end up not sending their ballot in. But usually there's at least a 50% return rate. So going to have at least 110,000 voting. in all likelihood, just on the permanent absentee list on the Democratic side.
14:19.67
Sam Shirazi
And that's a lot. That could be up to a quarter or more of the entire pool of people who are voting in the Democratic primary. And obviously, people who get mail ballots, you know, it's kind of how do you reach those voters? I'm guessing the campaigns will try to reach them through mailers because they're already getting stuff in the mail, including their ballots. So it might be a good idea to send them a mailer.
14:42.58
Sam Shirazi
The other interesting thing is, These people are typically going to vote, at least a good chunk of them, early in the process because these ballots go out you know roughly today on May 2nd.
14:55.46
Sam Shirazi
And you know it takes a few days for them to go through the mail. But next week, people are going to be getting these mail ballots. So we're probably going to get over 200,000 ballots being delivered to mailboxes next week in Virginia.
15:07.17
Sam Shirazi
And A good chunk of those people are going to fill them out pretty quickly and send them back. It's similar to the early voting dynamics where there'll be a lull. Some people will just sit on it.
15:17.98
Sam Shirazi
And then at the end, you'll see this surge of people also returning their mail ballots. But I would say, you know, you're going to get tens of thousands of people filling out these mail ballots pretty early on in the process for the permanent absentee list.
15:30.70
Sam Shirazi
And so those are votes being cast. you know They're in the system. They're banked. People can't change their minds. And so I think it's important for the campaigns running in the primaries to think about that, to think about the fact that these people are casting their ballots and you can't change them once you send it in. So I think all that is is pretty interesting to look at the start of early voting, not just the fact that people are voting today, but how does how does that look mechanically, which ballots are being cast, which ones are being counted.
16:03.20
Sam Shirazi
You know, we obviously won't get the results until June 17th, but the votes are being sent in and counted, you know, starting today. So it's it's going to be interesting to see how that all shakes out.
16:17.03
Sam Shirazi
So if you're interested in early voting, I encourage everyone to you know look up the information for your county. I will say it's the hours and the locations. you know it It can be county specific and city specific. So just make sure you know where you're going to early vote.
16:31.92
Sam Shirazi
You don't want to show up on a Sunday and the early voting location isn't open. Just make sure you know there are some locations that are open on Sunday, but they tend to be pretty rare. And so you just want to look on your local election website.
16:44.58
Sam Shirazi
If you're not sure what that is, you could just Google the county you're in, you know election office, and and it should come up. And some of the offices have that information on their website. If it's not on the website, you can always call them during business hours. I'm sure they will be happy to talk to you about how to cast your ballot early.
16:59.75
Sam Shirazi
And again, my my only pitch is I'm not going to tell you who to vote for, but I really hope that if you are interested in either the Democratic primary or if you're in a location that has a Republican primary, that you decide to go vote in these primaries because I think they really are important.
17:16.84
Sam Shirazi
You know, we tend to just focus on the general election, but, you know, the the people who are going to be elected to these offices, at least on the Democratic side for statewide offices, they need to be win these primaries. And even on the Republican side for these delegates districts, you know, some of the delegates are going to be picked in the June primary.
17:40.81
Sam Shirazi
And I guess I should just mention that both on the Democratic side and the Republican side, some of these House of Delegates seats are very red or very blue. And so almost certainly whoever wins the primary is going to be the next delegate in these districts.
17:53.15
Sam Shirazi
So I think it's important that you know you do your research, you know what's on your ballot. I will do a subsequent follow-up podcast, probably separate ones, both on the Lieutenant Governor Attorney General race on the democrat Democratic side. And then I will do one on the House of Delegates primaries for the seats that have them, because I really do think it's important to think about the primary and not just focus on the general election as much as we all you know care about who's going to be the next governor.
18:20.82
Sam Shirazi
That's obviously very important, but we also should probably care who's going to be the next Lieutenant Governor. the next attorney general, possibly on the Democratic side, we should care about some of these delegate races. And I just think generally as a good rule of democracy, you know you you could probably tell I'm the type of person that's going to be voting in every election.
18:39.70
Sam Shirazi
I encourage everyone, whenever you have the the chance to cast a ballot, to do it, because I think it's important to make your voice heard and to participate in a democracy. I'm going to preach to you and I'll get off my high horse, but I'm sure if you're listening to this podcast, in all likelihood, if you're going to vote, you're going to do that. So I appreciate that. But keep in mind, a lot of your less political friends, they might not know that there's a primary going on.
19:05.10
Sam Shirazi
Frankly, they might not know there's a state election this year. So I do encourage you to talk to people, let them know about what's going on in Virginia elections. That's part of the reason I do this podcast is to educate people, inform people.
19:16.08
Sam Shirazi
And I will say, you know, even among pretty well informed people, most of them are paying attention to what's going on in D.C. And obviously that's important. But they're not really closely following what's going on in state politics.
19:28.31
Sam Shirazi
And again, they might not know that there's a primary on June 17th and that early voting is starting on this Friday. And so the more you you can do as an individual to educate people, I think the more we have people engaged in the political process, it's good for democracy. It's good for people to make their voices heard.
19:45.17
Sam Shirazi
So yeah I'm happy that you all are listening to this podcast. And if you feel like it's an interesting podcast, feel free to share it with other people. Feel free to write reviews, which always helps the podcast. And I really thank everyone who's been listening and I've gotten good feedback.
20:01.46
Sam Shirazi
So anyways, go out there and early vote if that's what you want to do. And you know I will join you next time on Federal Fallout.
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