KEY POINTS FROM THIS ARTICLE
— Earlier this week, Virginia passed a ballot measure aimed at allowing Democrats to gerrymander the state’s congressional map.
— The Yes side won by about 3 points.
— The fairly close result was due in part to redder areas of the state having relatively strong turnout.
— Despite some Democratic worries about voter confusion, the Yes campaign seemed to perform fine in heavily Black pockets of the state.
— Across the state, the amendment seemed to have more upside with minority voters than it did with white voters.
A close, but clear, vote in Virginia
On Tuesday night, Virginia voters approved a redistricting ballot measure that was intended to help Democrats capture up to 10 seats in the state’s House delegation. While late ballots have been trickling in, as of this writing, the redistricting measure is passing by about 3 percentage points.
Shortly after the measure passed, the Crystal Ball made 4 rating changes, all to the benefit of Democrats. Those new ratings will remain operative unless the state Supreme Court invalidates the referendum and restores the old map. On that note, shortly after the statewide vote passed, a circuit court judge in Tazewell County moved to block the map—however, this was not very surprising, as that court has issued other GOP-friendly rulings on this matter. Ultimately, the state Supreme Court will likely have the final say here. Virginia Public Media has a more thorough explainer on the legal cases at play.
The status of the map aside, for this issue, we’ll look more closely at Tuesday’s vote. Map 1 shows the result by locality.
Map 1: Virginia redistricting amendment vote
Leading up to the election, we often cited last year’s race for attorney general as a baseline for the redistricting vote. Last year, now-Attorney General Jay Jones (D), the weakest statewide winner of 2025, clearly got enough softer Democratic partisans to hold their nose and vote for him despite the pre-election revelation of violent text messages he had sent. We were wondering how many from that group would do the same for the Yes position.
Last week, we mentioned the localities that Jones carried by single digits as places to watch. Overall, the No position outperformed now-former Attorney General Jason Miyares (R) by about 3.7 percentage points. As part of that overperformance, No captured several Jones-won localities, most notably Virginia Beach and Stafford (the latter is a swing county located just north of the Democratic city of Fredericksburg). However, at least in terms of their percentage margin in 2025, these localities were comparatively “low hanging fruit,” and they only backed No by about a point each.
As of this writing, No actually did flip Montgomery County, which includes Virginia Tech. Montgomery County tracked closest with the statewide result in last year’s attorney general race. However—in what will become something of a theme in this article—the county has not tallied up its provisional or post-election votes, so it is possible Yes may overcome its current deficit (about 200 votes) there.
But there were some other marginal localities where No did not perform as well. Chesapeake, just west of Virginia Beach, was another large single-digit Jones locality where Yes got to a majority. Similarly, Chesterfield, a blue-trending county that includes Richmond’s western and southern suburbs, was a Jones +8.4 locality that only slid down to Yes +6.5.
What was turnout like?
One of the things that was impressive about the redistricting vote was its relatively healthy turnout. While Virginians are used to having some type of election every fall, spring referendums are much less common. As of this writing, the election’s raw vote total stands at about 3.06 million. Again, that number will probably rise somewhat as some late votes are counted, but for now, turnout was only down by about 10.6% from 2025’s gubernatorial race (we are using that contest as a baseline for this comparison because it was at the top of last year’s ballot).
Map 2 shows the relative turnout by locality. Gold counties saw drops that were smaller than the statewide 10.6% while purple localities saw more pronounced drops.
Map 2: 2025 governor to 2026 redistricting vote relative turnout
As is plainly visible on Map 2, differential turnout was one factor that helped the No campaign get relatively close to the finish line. The gold localities are generally the more conservative localities and voted heavily against the ballot measure (you can see that visually by comparing Map 2 to Map 1). Although Map 2 considers relative turnout, we’d note that several of the darker gold localities actually cast more total votes this year than they did in last year’s gubernatorial race.
The Shenandoah Valley was one of the standout areas on the map, with comparatively strong turnout across most of its localities. This is likely one region where backlash to the new map was a prime motivator: for the past few decades, this red-leaning area has been kept, basically, intact in districts where its conservative attitudes prevailed. Under the new lines, it will be split 4 ways, and stands to have, mostly, Democratic representation.
Aside from the populous urban localities, college towns emerged as places that were consistently less excited to vote—a contrast from last year, where localities like UVA’s Charlottesville saw relatively small turnout drops from 2024. Even within the Shenandoah Valley, Harrisonburg, which has become heavily Democratic and includes James Madison University, is purple on Map 2.
NOVA vs the rest of the state…again
In 2024, much of Virginia’s swing at the presidential level was driven by Northern Virginia. That year, the 9 “core” NOVA localities went from backing Joe Biden by about 40 points to backing Kamala Harris by closer to 32 points—a nearly 8 percentage point swing. Meanwhile, the rest of the state saw relatively muted movement: instead of losing the balance of the state by 2.2%, as Biden did, Harris only slid down to losing it by 5%, accounting for less than a 3-point redshift.
This week, NOVA also seemed to march to the beat of its own drum, at least when we look at how it moved compared to 2024. While the Yes side carried NOVA by a margin in between what Biden and Harris got, the rest of the state drifted rightward. Yes carried NOVA by 36.7%, representing a 3.5 percentage point “leftward” swing from 2024, while the measure failed by 9 points throughout the rest of the state, representing a 4 percentage point swing to the “right” from 2024. During the campaign, one of the Yes side’s overriding messaging goals was to nationalize the vote as much as possible—in the D.C. media market, that nationalization may have had more upside for Democrats. In this region that has never liked Donald Trump to begin with, memories of DOGE might still be fresh for many voters.
While Yes did enjoy a strong showing in NOVA, it would be hard to say that the region getting more Democratic relative to 2024 alone was responsible for the measure’s passage. Using 2024 as a baseline, if NOVA moved in line with the rest of the state (that is, 4 percentage points in No’s favor), the vote would have still passed statewide by about 1.2%. So, while Republicans had some differential turnout dynamics working in their favor, as we saw in Map 2, Democrats had enough of a partisan cushion to prevail.
White vs non-white voter patterns
Even as NOVA was a banner area for the Yes side overall, we can see some evidence that Yes ran comparatively better with minority voters there than with white voters.
Manassas and Manassas Park, which straddle Fairfax and Prince William counties, are not especially large localities, but taken together, they are close to 44% Latino—the highest share in the state. The pair backed the redistricting measure by 63%-37%, identical to what Jones carried them with, and up from Harris’s 57%-41% from 2024.
In one of our postmortems last year, we highlighted Loudoun County’s two state Senate districts. This week, Loudoun County again helps illustrate how some subgroups broke down. State Senate District 32 covers the eastern part of the county, basically centering on the Dulles airport. This plurality-white district is 42% white, although Asians make up about one-third of its population, and it also includes some Hispanic-majority precincts. After Harris carried SD-32 by 22%, and Jones improved to win it by 29%, Yes passed there by 34%. That type of Yes margin in the district would have actually been more consistent with the 2020 presidential or 2025 lieutenant governor results, which were double-digit overall wins for Democrats.
State Senate District 31 includes the balance of Loudoun County; with Leesburg as its center of gravity, it is more than 60% white. Voters here favored Yes by a 55%-45% margin. This was unchanged from last year’s attorney general result but was weaker than the 54%-43% margin that Harris got there, suggesting white suburbanites viewed a Yes vote with more ambivalence.
This dynamic can also be found—albeit to a less pronounced degree—in the Richmond area. Like Loudoun County, Chesterfield County is a large and basically purely suburban locality that is divided roughly evenly into two state Senate districts. Current Lt. Gov. Ghazala Hashmi (D) used to represent SD-15, which includes the Chesterfield County precincts that are nearer to Richmond—this area is white-plurality with sizable Black and Latino blocs. While Yes ran a couple of points behind Jones there, it took 60.2% of the vote, which was slightly better than the 59.9% Harris got.
Northern and western Chesterfield County is located in SD-12, which is 72% white and can be called one of the most traditionally Republican parts of the commonwealth. Currently held by state Sen. Glen Sturtevant (R), this will probably be a key state legislative battleground next year. In any case, in 2024, Harris became the first Democratic presidential nominee in decades to carry this area—she won these Chesterfield County precincts by 2.5%. The SD-12 portion “reverted” to backing No, if just by 1.5%.
How Black-majority areas performed
Finally, we thought it would be worth dedicating a section specifically to some Black voting patterns. The Yes campaign relied noticeably on former President Barack Obama as a surrogate; he cut ads and appeared on literature imploring voters to “level the playing field” by backing the amendment. However, some Democratic-aligned groups complained when flyers surfaced suggesting that Obama—who, like many Democrats, has previously called for fair maps at a more general level—was supporting the No position. Black groups condemned these flyers, and some others, as efforts by the No side to muddy the waters and confuse their voters. But, did this show up in the election results?
From our initial analysis, it doesn’t seem like such tactics materially moved the needle, at least when it came to the voting patterns of heavily Black areas of the state.
According to Dave’s Redistricting App, Virginia has 8 House of Delegates districts that are majority Black by composition; all of those districts are in the southeastern part of the state. Table 1 includes data for 6 of those 8 seats—the omitted districts were based in localities that have not yet allocated significant chunks of their vote to precincts, making granular analysis less accurate.
Table 1: 2025 Attorney General vs 2026 redistricting vote in Black-majority districts
While we would note that these precincts aren’t very elastic to begin with, Yes collectively carried the group by an almost exactly 3-to-1 margin, a spread that nearly matched the 76%-24% that they collectively gave Jay Jones last year. As a group, these districts saw about a 13-percentage point drop in turnout this week, compared to what they cast in the 2025 attorney general race, a decline somewhat steeper than the statewide drop. However, as we discussed earlier, these larger-than-average turnout drops characterized most urban localities across the state regardless of their demographic composition. Several of the localities that these districts include also have yet to add their provisional totals, so the total votes cast could still inch up.
Staying in the southeastern part of the state, another, more competitive district also tells a similar story. Last year, the long list of Democratic flips included HD-82, a plurality-Black seat that includes Petersburg and some surrounding rural localities. Despite Democrats’ recent success here, this district has been trending to the right: in 2020, Joe Biden’s 55%-44% vote there lined up well with his overall showing, but last year, Spanberger’s nearly 9-point margin in HD-82 placed it almost 7 points right of the state.
By our preliminary calculations, HD-82 voted against the redistricting measure but only by about half of a percentage point—it is possible that provisional ballots may even push Yes into the lead. Whatever the precise total there ends up being, HD-82 profiled as the type of place where the No side likely needed to do more than just break even to be on track for an upset.
So, to sum up the whole statewide picture, the pro-Democratic Yes coalition—which benefitted from a solid showing in Northern Virginia and was bolstered by strong support among minority voters throughout the state—remained durable enough to offset a turnout differential that gave Republicans a boost.
