Echo Project #3: Virginia’s General Assembly
This month we've been publishing Echo V2 projects one after another, starting with Alaska's Senate race and then Nebraska's. Today we're back with the third in the series: Virginia, where we asked voters how they see their state legislature and where they land on a proposed merger between Dominion Energy and Florida-based NextEra.
Virginia let us show another side of Echo. We ran five questions across three sends, and this time we matched every respondent back to the voter file. That let us label each quote by age and senate district and break the findings out district by district, something a traditional focus group can rarely do. In all, 132 Virginians gave substantive answers in a matter of hours.
What we heard:
This is qualitative work, not a poll, so we listen for themes and the language voters use, not percentages or who is ahead. Views on the General Assembly split along party lines, but two subjects ran through the whole conversation without being prompted. The first was the cost of living, described not in the abstract but through specific taxes, the car tax, the grocery tax, and the gas tax, alongside rising electric bills. The second was energy: data centers and Dominion came up as often in the affordability question as in the merger question itself, usually tied to who should pay for the grid.
On the merger, many participants were skeptical of out-of-state control and worried about rates rising later, while a sizable group said plainly that they did not know enough yet to take a side. And when we asked how people decide their vote, party and, for many, President Trump were the deciding factors, though even strong partisans often added that they wanted checks and balances rather than any single party in full control.
Because we matched to the voter file, we could go a step further and show what each senate district was saying on its own, from the districts where the car tax and data centers cut across party lines to the ones asking for a candidate focused on local needs rather than national fights.
These are the kinds of threads Echo is built to surface: the reasons behind a view, in a voter's own words.
The same fast deliverables
Like every Echo project, Virginia ships with a one-page summary, a deep-dive memo, and a full verbatim spreadsheet. This time the memo also carries a section breaking the findings out by senate district. The whole project closed in less than a day from topic finalization to full results.
Want your own Echo project?
We're publishing new projects all month and deploying more every day, from testing creative to gathering rapid feedback as a race shifts. If you'd like to field your own, we'd love to talk.
Reach out anytime at ken@pantheoninsight.com.
Click here to download the Virginia General Assembly Echo Project One-Pager
Click here to download the Virginia General Assembly Echo Project Memo