Large margins in Virginia’s northern suburbs powered the narrow vote to redraw the state’s congressional maps, even as Republican-leaning areas showed the strongest turnout.
Compared with other recent elections in Virginia — former Vice President Kamala Harris carried the state by about six percentage points in 2024, and Abigail Spanberger, the Democratic candidate for governor in 2025, won it by 15 — the ballot measure’s statewide margin of about three points in favor was an underperformance for Democrats.
But under the surface, the results show conflicting patterns that help explain how the referendum still came out ahead.
Northern Virginia and Democratic strongholds carried the measure despite a drop in turnout.
Northern Virginia, which includes the affluent suburbs of Washington, D.C., and a high concentration of federal workers, voted overwhelmingly in support of the measure. “Yes” performed much better there than Ms. Harris had in 2024, including in its majority nonwhite precincts, even as those precincts had lower turnout relative to the rest of the state. The measure did not, however, match the margins that Ms. Spanberger saw in those areas in November.
Across Virginia, majority Black, Hispanic, young and urban precincts had the biggest shifts toward the “yes” campaign relative to Ms. Harris’s margins in 2024, when those factions showed signs of abandoning the Democratic Party. The referendum’s results, combined with other recent elections, may alleviate fears among Democrats over whether the party had permanently lost its coalition of nonwhite and young voters.
Turnout among those groups, however, had some of the steepest declines from 2025, raising the possibility that the swings could be explained by changes in the makeup of the electorate. Precincts with more nonwhite or young voters, for example, turned out at some of the lowest rates.
In Manassas Park, which has the highest share of Hispanic voters of any independent city or county in the state, the 12-point swing from 2024 was the largest leftward shift out of all of Virginia’s localities. But the city had a turnout drop from 2024 — and 2025 — that was among the largest in the state.
Rural and white voters led the ‘no’ campaign.
Republicans fell short of a victory, but the relatively narrow margin showcased an energized base on the right. The areas where “no” did best compared with President Trump in 2024 also had the highest turnout.
In Rockingham County, a conservative stronghold, “no” outperformed Mr. Trump by 14 points, representing the largest locality-level shift toward “no” in the state. Rockingham’s margins for “no” nearly matched those of Glenn Youngkin, a Republican who won the county by 51 points in his successful run for governor in 2021.
The referendum outperformed Mr. Youngkin’s margins in 50 of Virginia’s 133 localities, mostly in white and rural regions.
Opposition to the measure was particularly strong in some parts of the state where redistricting would heavily affect the local population. The Shenandoah Valley, and many of its neighboring areas to the south, saw some of the largest swings toward “no,” made more impactful by the area’s relatively high turnout.
The result was a bright spot for Republicans. But each special is special.
The “no” campaign did not get enough votes to win, but many Republicans were encouraged by the closeness of the race.
The goal of the new map is to eliminate all but one of the state’s safe Republican districts. But calculations of a district’s lean are generally based on past voting patterns. An analysis of the results of the referendum along the new district lines adds nuance to the understanding of how competitive these districts could be.
“No” led in the newly redrawn Ninth District, which is expected to be the state’s only safe Republican seat. But it also led in the redrawn Sixth District, which had leaned Democratic in 2024. And in the redrawn Seventh District, nicknamed the “lobster district” because of its unusual shape, “yes” had only a small advantage.
Certain areas where Ms. Spanberger ran up the margins in 2025 also had particularly significant rightward shifts. For example, “no” won by 10 points in Spotsylvania, a county that flipped to blue in 2025 for the first time in at least a decade.
In Virginia Beach, “no” received just over 50 percent of the vote after Ms. Harris won the city by three points in 2024, and Ms. Spanberger won it by 11 in 2025.
These rightward swings energized Republicans after a stretch in which Democrats had made large gains across the board in special elections held since the start of 2025. But in any special election, the quirks of the electorate and the individual race make extrapolation to future elections fraught. And the specifics of this race, with the measure’s complicated wording and fuzzy ideological divides, may make it even less comparable to other elections.
Alex Lemonides, Jeff Adelson and Ilana Marcus contributed.
Christine Zhang is a Times reporter specializing in graphics and data journalism.
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