by James A. Bacon
Virginia looks like a red state if you look at voting results displayed on a map like the one above, but it’s still a blue state where it counts, which is in the cities and suburbs where the votes are. Democrat Party strength in urban cores and inner suburbs swamped Republican strength in small towns and rural areas. Virginia voted to elect Kamala Harris as president, return incumbent Tim Kaine to the U.S. Senate, and give six of eleven congressional districts to Democrat Party candidates.
You can read the top-line national election results almost anywhere, so I won’t tarry with them here. I’m more interested in documenting what I see as the evolving balance of power of the two major political parties in the state. The GOP is still in the game.
Comparing the 2024 election results (as of Wednesday morning with 99%+ of precincts reporting, according to the Virginia Public Access Project), we note the following:
- Donald Trump didn’t win quite as many votes in Virginia in 2024 as in 2020 — 1,949,000 compared to 1,963,000. But Kamala Harris saw her vote total compared to Biden’s erode even more — 2,302,000 compared to 2,412,000. The Democratic Party margin of victory slipped from about 10% to about 5%;
- Democrat Tim Kaine’s margin of victory over Republican challenger Hung Cao shrank compared to Democrat Senator Mark Warner’s margin over his challenger Daniel Gade — 353,000 votes versus 532,000;
- Adding up the votes for Ds and Rs in the eleven house districts, Democrats garnered more votes but Republican Party candidates chipped away at the Dem advantage. Comparisons between 2024 and 2020 get tricky because 9th district Congressman Morgan Griffith faced no competition four years ago, so the vote total for Democrats in that district was 0. Excluding the results for the 9th, the Democrat Party advantage contracted from 542,000 votes to 311,000. Given the fact that Griffith racked up a 179,000-vote lead this time around, the overall gap this year was smaller than those numbers indicate. All told, Dem candidates scored 51.6% of the vote in 2024 (excluding minor party candidates) and GOP candidates 48.4%.
Overall, Democrats dominated the 2024 federal elections… but Republicans were more competitive up and down the ballot than they were in 2020.
Does this represent a meaningful shift in partisan loyalties or does it just reflect idiosyncratic results due to the varying qualities of the candidates? One can make an argument for both interpretations.
Clearly, Harris had less appeal to Virginians than Biden did in 2020. (How he would have fared in 2024 is a different matter.) Trump was down 24,000 votes but Harris was down 189,000 compared to Biden. Was the problem the candidate? The candidate’s message? Changing voter priorities? We’ll be reading armchair punditry for weeks to come. (Let the circular firing squads in the Democratic Party commence!)
More fundamental than the candidates is the shift in the Democrat and Republican Party coalitions. The electorate appears to be realigning. Democrats are reconstituting themselves as the party of educated urban/suburban elites and “dispossessed” minorities. Under Trump, Republicans are reorganizing themselves as the party of those who see themselves as working people; as such, they continue to make inroads among minorities, especially Hispanics.
Showing how that realignment played out in Virginia’s electoral results this year may be beyond my pay grade. But I’ll be attentive to analysis that illuminates the issue.
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