Hello there, I'm Chuck Todd and this is the Chuck Todd cast. We have less than a week

until the Virginia Governor's race comes to a conclusion with former Governor Terry

McCullough locked in a pretty tight race with the Republican Glenn Youngkin. The race

of course kicks off the next year of midterms coverage, if you will. This for me is sort

of like the opening game. Think of it as, you know, the first game of the midterm season

you know, it matters, but it won't tell you who wins in the end. So we're going to be

looking closely though for any indication about where voters are drifting. So join me

today Larry Sabito, the director of the UVA Center for Politics, Editor in Chief of the

Crystal Ball, and Aving and Zops, the editor and publisher of Inside Elections. And by

the way, I'll be hosting the Meet the Press election night special on NBC News now on

Tuesday night. We hope you'll join us. It's election night coverage for people who care

about election nights more than they care about political activism. So with that, Larry and

Nathan welcome back to the Toddcast. So I think Nathan would agree with me that we're

going to talk Virginia. Let's talk with the grand pu-bot of Virginia political analysis.

First, Mr. Sabito. I was eavesdropping. You guys were already chatting before we got

in and it's something I tend to, in many ways, this was the closeness of

this race, Larry. Feels like something you fully expected in January of this year. Explain.

Absolutely. The reason we expected it to be close and I think most people who study elections

did is because a Democrat has great difficulty being elected governor in a year when there's

a Democratic president. There's only been one exception now. Fortunately for Terry McAuliffe,

the exception was Terry McAuliffe in 2013, though with great difficulty. He only beat a

very controversial Republican candidate, Ken Kuchinelli, by two and a half percentage

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