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RICHMOND — For all the $190 million spent by both parties, for all the talk of national trends, the results of Virginia’s legislative elections this week prove a predictable truth: Virginia is a closely divided state that leans slightly Democratic.
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The new redistricting maps made that plain, carving the state into a large number of red districts and a slightly larger number of blue ones, with just a handful of toss-ups in the middle to fight over. And Tuesday’s results bore that out, with Democrats flipping the House of Delegates to at least a 51-49 advantage (though one race is still too close to call) and protecting their majority in the Senate, 21-19.
Virginia Democrats projected to sweep General Assembly, dealing blow to Youngkin
The challenge now for Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) — whose two-point win in 2021 he routinely casts as a popular mandate — is that he will have to broker deals with newly empowered Democratic lawmakers to get anything done. And he has spent the past two years poking them with a partisan stick as he cultivated a national Republican profile — railing against critical race theory and racial equity and “woke” policies of the “radical left.”
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“He’s had this habit of talking in Virginia as if he wants to work with Democrats to do things in common, then he goes on Fox News in the evening and speaks about how he’s beating the lefties. I don’t think that’ll work anymore now,” said Bob Holsworth, a longtime Richmond political analyst.
As if to illustrate that point, Sen. L. Louise Lucas (D-Portsmouth), who is in line to become chairwoman of the Senate’s powerful finance committee, spent Election Day trolling Youngkin on social media with statements like, “Tell Glenn I want him to know it was me” and “If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably [is] our soon to be lame duck Governor Glenn Youngkin!”
Troubled past charts unlikely rise to power for Virginia Democrat
What’s more, the Democrat who could become the first Black lawmaker to serve as speaker of the House in the General Assembly’s 404-year history — House Minority Leader Don L. Scott Jr. (D-Portsmouth) — has been one of Youngkin’s top antagonists, once prompting the governor to trek across the Capitol for an impromptu meetup at Scott’s office after he questioned Youngkin’s religious faith in a floor speech.
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Youngkin expended so much money and personal political capital this year on races that failed — such as state Sen. Siobhan S. Dunnavant’s loss in the Henrico County suburbs to Democrat Schuyler VanValkenburg by an unexpectedly wide margin — that his status in Richmond could be diminished, Holsworth said.
Still, Youngkin began the work Wednesday of promising bipartisanship and emphasizing how close the two sides are.
“The number one lesson is that Virginia is really purple,” Youngkin said at a news conference on the Capitol steps where he confronted his party’s loss of power in the General Assembly. “I’m a little disappointed, to be clear. And I think that’s just a natural reality,” he said.
Virginia election results 2023
Youngkin also claimed that neither party won a majority of the overall vote. That’s true if you divide the total number of votes cast in the 140 races by the total cast for each party — giving both Republicans and Democrats a little over 49 percent. But 34 House seats and six Senate seats had a single candidate and were not contested, which waters down the overall ratio.
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In the Senate, looking only at districts contested by both parties, Democrats won 50.9 percent of the total vote. In the House, Republicans won 50.7 percent of the vote in contested seats, based on incomplete totals, though that figure is skewed by the fact there were six more uncontested Democratic seats than Republican seats. Democrats also performed well in local elections around the state, flipping the board of supervisors blue in both Henrico and Chesterfield counties outside Richmond, for instance, along with continued strong showings in Northern Virginia contests.
Democrats dominate N. Va., with some losses reflecting voter frustrations
Youngkin noted that Virginia has a tradition of divided government — which wasn’t true during long periods of the 20th century when Democrats ran the show, but has been true in the past 30 years or so as Republicans rose to power. In that time, Youngkin is the only governor whose party lost control of a chamber during midterm elections.
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“We are a state that is very comfortable working together, working across party lines to get things done,” Youngkin said Wednesday. “I look forward to working with the House and Senate going forward.”
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“I agree with him that Virginia is a purple state,” Susan Swecker, chairwoman of the Democratic Party of Virginia, said after watching Youngkin’s comments on the Capitol steps.
But Swecker added a caveat: Virginia is not purple, she said, on the issue of abortion. “The voters spoke loud and clear that they want to keep the status quo” for abortion access, Swecker said.
Youngkin had led Republicans to run on his proposal to ban most abortions after 15 weeks, with exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother. Virginia law allows the procedure through the second trimester (about 26 weeks) and into the third if three doctors say it’s necessary.
Post-Schar School poll: Abortion is key for Dems., women in Virginia election
The GOP strategy didn’t work. Abortion stood out in polling before the election as a strong motivator for Democrats and for women, and it was cited repeatedly by voters during interviews at polling places around the state Tuesday.
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“This is a race about reproductive rights,” voter Clint Cyr, 37, said in Newport News on Tuesday after casting his ballot for Democrats. “I’m a moderate libertarian for the government not telling people what to do with their bodies.”
The issue cut against the polarization that otherwise grips Virginia voters, said Stephen Farnsworth, a political scientist at the University of Mary Washington. “Beyond abortion, there wasn’t a lot that Democrats or Republicans could do to convince somebody on the other side to switch teams for the election,” Farnsworth said.
The overall results — though not yet certified, and with mail-in ballots still trickling in — suggest how closely divided the electorate was. Democrats won both the House and Senate by a single seat (pending one extremely close race that could go to recount), both narrower than the majorities the party won in 2019 and a contrast with Joe Biden’s 10 percentage-point victory over Donald Trump in 2020.
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Yet the decisive districts were not won by razor-thin margins. Democrat Josh Thomas won the western Prince William County House district that put Democrats over the top by three percentage points over Republican John Stirrup. In the Senate, Democrat Danica Roem’s three-point victory in Prince William County and Manassas clinched the blue majority.
Youngkin said Wednesday that he has not yet reached out to Democratic lawmakers, that he is waiting for them to select new leadership in the coming days. But he rattled off a list of priorities — economic development, workforce development, job growth, mental health services and education — where he believes they’ll find common ground.
He did not, however, back down from his stance on abortion or concede that a 15-week ban was rejected by voters.
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“Hopefully the dialogue we started can continue,” he said, when asked about it by reporters. “I do think that the fact that we tried to find a place to bring Virginians together will be a lesson that there is a place that Virginians can come together, there is a place that Americans can come together.”
That’s going to be a tough sell.
The 15-week abortion ban “went over like a lump of coal in your sock on Christmas morning,” Swecker said after his remarks. “Voters not only in Virginia but across the country said not only no but hell no.”
Scott Clement in Washington and Jim Morrison in Newport News contributed to this report.
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