Virginia

Mark R. Warner won the Senate race for the Democrats, 61.6% to 38.1% over Republican Bert Mizusawa, in a state Kamala Harris carried by 5.8 points. There was no race for governor: Abigail Spanberger won that office in November 2025, and a Virginia governor serves four years.^{1, 2} Democrats took Republican-held U.S. House seats in the First District, where Shannon L. Taylor beat Robert J. “Rob” Wittman by 2.9 points, and the Second, where Elaine G. Luria beat Jen A. Kiggans by 9.0. The delegation now has eight Democrats and three Republicans.

Warner’s margin was 17.7 points wider than Harris’s in 2024. The Senate race drew 82% as many votes as that presidential election and 120% of the 2022 total. Warner drew 96 votes for every 100 Harris won, and Mizusawa drew 67 for every 100 of Donald Trump’s. The U.S. House vote, all districts added together, went from D+3.8 to D+19.7.

Virginia’s part of the Washington area, which casts 35% of the vote, moved furthest: 19.2 points, from D+24.6 to D+43.7. The Virginia Beach metro area moved least, 15.3 points, and still went from D+12.2 to D+27.4. The smaller metro areas went from R+18.0 to R+1.0, close to even, and the small towns and rural counties from R+33.3 to R+16.6.

Spotsylvania County, in the Washington area, is the largest of the 11 counties and cities that voted for Trump in 2024 and for Warner this year. It went from R+8.6 to D+11.9 on 63,057 votes. The widest swing among large localities was in Prince William County, in the same area: 25.4 points, to D+43.3. Loudoun County, also in the Washington area, moved 21.9. Fairfax County, the largest locality, went from D+35.0 to D+52.6, and Virginia Beach city, which Harris carried by 2.6 points, went to Warner by 18.6. None of the state’s 133 counties and cities moved toward the Republicans.

Control of state government was not at stake. Democrats came out of the November 2025 election holding the governorship and both chambers of the General Assembly, the Commonwealth Times reported then, and neither chamber was up for regular election this year.¹ Our count has the Senate at 21 Democrats to 19 Republicans and the House of Delegates at 63 to 36. Overriding a veto takes two-thirds of the members present in each house, a margin neither party holds.³

The election did not change who draws the maps or who runs the voting. Under the constitution as the state publishes it, a sixteen-member Virginia Redistricting Commission draws congressional and legislative districts, the General Assembly votes on its plans without amending them, those bills are exempt from the constitution’s section on the governor’s veto, and the Supreme Court of Virginia draws the districts if the process fails.⁴ The Department of Elections is headed by a Commissioner of Elections, whom the governor appoints to a four-year term subject to confirmation by the General Assembly. This year’s results are unofficial until they are certified on December 7, WHRO reported.^{5, 6}

On November 10 Spanberger and the Democratic leaders of both chambers presented an agenda for the 2027 session. It includes a medical debt forgiveness program run with nonprofits, support for housing near transit, investment in solar and more transparency in the approval of data centers, Radio IQ reported. “These proposals are the next step in our work to create a stronger, safer and more affordable Commonwealth,” Spanberger said.⁷

An amendment the General Assembly has passed becomes part of the constitution if a majority of those voting on it vote in favor, and all three questions cleared that line.⁸ The General Assembly had referred them largely along party lines, according to Cardinal News.⁹ Question 1, approved with 62.9% in our count, adds a state constitutional right to reproductive freedom. VPM reports that it allows abortion through the second trimester, lowers barriers in the third, and protects contraception and fertility care.¹⁰ Patch reported that the Department of Elections has scheduled the amendments to take effect January 1, 2027.¹¹

Question 2, approved with 57.9%, repeals the constitution’s definition of marriage as between one man and one woman. VPM notes that the vote changes nothing in the immediate term and that the amendment also writes Loving v. Virginia into the constitution. Question 3, approved with 56.9%, restores voting rights to people convicted of felonies when they are released from incarceration and creates what VPM calls a fundamental right to vote.¹⁰

In Newport News, Mayor Phil Jones won a second term with 70% of the vote, WHRO reported.¹² In Roanoke, Democrat Raekwon Moore led a seven-candidate field for City Council with 16,408 votes on election night, and after late ballots were counted fourth place was separated by five votes, according to the Roanoke Rambler.¹³ Virginia voters did not choose high-court judges or county prosecutors this year. Justices of the Supreme Court of Virginia are chosen by a majority vote of each house of the General Assembly.¹⁴ County voters elect commonwealth’s attorneys every four years counting from November 1995, a cycle that falls next in 2027.¹⁵

Republicans kept three of the five U.S. House seats they held. The closest was the Fifth District, which Trump carried by 12.0 points in 2024 and John J. McGuire III held by 1.6. The Associated Press called the race two days after the election with 98% of the vote counted, and Democrat Tom Perriello conceded that evening. Cardinal News called the margin a significant swing left in a district that has been solidly Republican.¹⁶ Ben L. Cline won the Sixth by 10.2 points and H. Morgan Griffith the Ninth by 30.8. Mizusawa carried 79 of the 133 counties and cities. The small towns and rural counties, which cast 13% of the vote, still voted Republican by 16.6 points.

Neither of Virginia’s U.S. Senate seats is on the ballot in 2028. The governor’s office is next on the ballot in 2029, and the race will have no incumbent: the constitution makes a governor ineligible for the term that follows the one she was elected to.^{1, 2} The redistricting commission is convened in 2020 and every ten years after that, which puts its next scheduled meeting in 2030.⁴ Democrats will defend eight U.S. House seats in 2028, two of them won this year by 2.9 and 9.0 points.

The reproductive freedom amendment may not be certified on schedule. The Founding Freedoms Law Center, the legal arm of the Family Foundation of Virginia, sued in Tazewell County Circuit Court on April 30 and asked for a preliminary injunction to stop certification, WSLS reported.¹⁷ The case was set to go before a judge there on November 13, according to WDBJ.¹⁸ Patch reported that a separate challenge to the marriage amendment involves a Prince William County pastor represented by the same group.¹¹