Commentary: A blow to Trumpism as Democrats soar in Virginia

Democrats in Virginia and elsewhere won with the message they would fight back against the excesses of the Trump administration and make voters’ lives more affordable.

For much of the gubernatorial campaign in Virginia, the question wasn’t whether Democrat Abigail Spanberger would win, it was what her margin of victory would be. 

That’s in part because her opponent, Republican Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, ran what was widely viewed as a bad campaign. It’s also because it seemed inevitable that President Donald Trump’s cuts to the federal government would be particularly harmful for any Republican running in a state like Virginia, with its hundreds of thousands of federal workers. 

Spanberger beat Earle-Sears by a whopping 15 points. That by itself would have been enough for Democrats to reasonably argue they had a mandate from voters. 

But add on top of Spanberger’s big win, state Sen. Ghazala Hashmi’s win in the lieutenant governor’s race, Jay Jones’ election as attorney general despite a texting scandal, and Democrats picking up 13 seats in the Virginia House of Delegates, and Democrats are living up to the preferred walk-up song of House Speaker Don Scott, “All I Do Is Win.” 

Republicans’ focus on Jones’ texts clearly moved some voters, one of whom I actually met on Election Day. And those texts will follow Jones the rest of his political life. But in the end, Jones beat Miyares by six points with the simple message that he would try to hold Trump accountable in ways that Miyares never had. And perhaps, as my editor suggested to me, after a decade of Trump’s scandalous politics, candidates’ bad behavior is no longer disqualifying for most voters—at least as long as it’s their party’s candidate.  

As one voter put it to me about Jones outside a voting precinct in Bristow: “He said a few things I didn’t like, but, you know, so did the guy in the White House, so I can’t hold him for that.”

The guy in the White House surely also played a role in the massive gains Democrats made in the House of Delegates, where they defended competitive seats and flipped 13 seats away from Republicans by the sheer will of the voters – no redistricting needed. 

The gains in the House spanned rural, suburban, and urban areas, and nearly every county in the commonwealth voted more blue than they did in last year’s presidential election. 

Taken all together—Spanberger’s running up the score, Jones overcoming a scandal, and massive gains in the House—it adds up to the best of all possible outcomes for Virginia Democrats and a solid shot across the bow against Trumpism that bodes well for Democrats heading into the 2026 midterms. (Election season is never over in Virginia.) 

The results mean that Virginia’s four state constitutional amendments on redistricting, reproductive rights, voting rights, and marriage equality will almost certainly make their way to voters next year and likely be adopted. 

As a reminder: Democrats quickly passed a resolution on redistricting in a special session in the week before Election Day. They need to pass it again in the upcoming session that begins in January and get it approved by voters sometime in the spring in time for the 2026 midterm primaries. 

Its advancement means that Virginia has joined other Democratic led states like California, where voters on Tuesday overwhelmingly backed a redistricting push, in fighting back against Trump’s bid to rig the midterms in Republicans’ favor. Confronted by the behavior of an anti-democratic strongman, otherwise moderate Democrats are fighting back. Their big wins in Virginia and elsewhere are adding to their swagger. 

State Sen. L. Louise Lucas (D-Portsmouth) has posted repeatedly on X about Democrats drawing up maps that would result in 10 Democratic seats and one Republican seat. That would translate into Democrats adding four seats in Virginia to help combat Trump’s gerrymandering in other states. 

It’s not just Virginia where Democrats won big, and it’s worth considering how the election results here relate to the improbable election of Zohran Mamdani as New York City’s next mayor. 

New York is not Virginia. But there are parallels. 

As the writer John Ganz argues, Mamdani’s position on Palestine made him sound reasonable and attached to reality, “while the people who were defending Israel tooth and nail and calling everyone else antisemites and terrorists…sounded like the wild-eyed ideologues.”

Something similar happened in Virginia. 

Spanberger’s position on the Trump administration’s carving up of the federal government and its attacks on Virginia’s hundreds of thousands of federal workers made her sound reasonable and attached to reality. 

Meanwhile, Earle-Sears repeatedly downplayed the pain of these workers and urged voters to “keep a good thing going” as they struggled to pay for groceries and braced for higher health care bills. This made her sound out of touch with the realities playing out in communities across the commonwealth, especially given its outsized reliance on federal jobs and spending.

A lot is going to be made about how Spanberger and Mamdani are different and represent clashing views of the Democratic Party. They do have ideological differences, but they both won with the same message for voters: the Trump administration is making your lives more expensive and it’s Democrats who can fight back against Trump’s worst policies—economic or otherwise—and work to make your lives more affordable. 

Such were the campaign pledges of the preceding month. It’s up to Virginia Democrats to make good on those promises.