I detest covering an election campaign like it is just some kind of horserace. Why? Well, all a horserace comes down to is which horse and rider make the fastest combination. An election, however, is about issues that matter. Those issues include economic decisions, public safety concerns, moral dilemmas, and so much more.

In an election, there is no audience. We are all participants. We don’t merely cheer for a horse and rider. We can campaign for our candidates and our issues. We pick the winner.

So, what is this post about? We are going to talk a little bit about how we can tell which horse won. Why? That’s because we cannot trust the news media. You and I are not the only people who can help candidates win an election. The news media can take sides and boost their preferred candidates too, and they do. So, when we can, we need to skip pass the news media and go to the source.

What is the source? In this case, the source is where the Republican Party of Virginia – RPV is reporting the results of its nominating convention.

Check out 2021 Nomination – Republican Party of Virginia. Now look for these two buttons (here is a picture).

The first button allows us to watch the people counting the vote. The second button allows us to view the tabulation of the results. That is, we see a spreadsheet that shows various tables. Click on the “Live Results Spreadsheet” button. That will bring up a spreadsheet that shows the results. At this point it gets a little bit geekish. To understand what you are seeing, play with the table. Since you cannot change anything, don’t worry about breaking the spreadsheet.

To see the latest results, you have to select the round that shows the latest results.  The picture below shows where you select the round you want. RPV has been moving things around. The choices were down at the bottom this morning. If you use your cell phone, the choices may be at the top. The spreadsheet will probably also display better if you install google sheets, in which case the choices will display at the bottom.

If you want to peruse the AG results, click through AG Round 1, AG Round 2, and AG Round 3. Jason Miyares won in AG Round 3. Glenn Youngkin, the latest winner (Glenn Youngkin Wins VA GOP Gubernatorial Nomination – Republican Party of Virginia), won in GOV Round 6 with 54.71 percent.

So, what is the point? It seems all the candidates have a following. Therefore, the winner needs to consider what issues propelled the other candidates into the race. To unify the party, each winner needs to take the issues his rivals campaigned on seriously. In fact. because it is taking so many successive rounds of counting for each winner to emerge, ranked-choice voting provides a fairly good indication of what issues most concern Republican stalwarts, and that is a good thing. This is information that the winners can use to focus their campaigns on issues people care about.

Generally, the Democratic Party finances its candidates better than the Republican Party finances its candidates. However, large numbers of people took the initiative to show up and vote at the Republican Party’s unassembled convention. If the winners can rally most of those people to actively support their campaigns, that support will hugely strengthen their campaigns.