Virginia and New Jersey's elections in 10 charts
A medley of maps, charts, and tables to explore the 2025 election results in Virginia and New Jersey
🍺 What’s on tap 🚰
Today’s newsletter features:
Opening Bell: Must-read items about elections and politics.
The Frontrunner: 10 maps, charts, and tables that help explain the 2025 election results in Virginia and New Jersey.
Blake Burman on Prediction Markets: Blake Burman, Chief Washington Correspondent for News Nation, has started a Substack tracking prediction markets. His analysis features no red or blue, just green.
Around the Corner: Upcoming races we’re tracking at DDHQ.
🔔 Opening Bell 🐏
Must-read items about elections and politics.
Nancy Pelosi, a former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, announced that she would not seek reelection in 2026. The longtime Democratic leader obviously leaves behind quite an influential legacy. Electorally, though, she leaves behind an open seat in the dark blue 11th District around San Francisco that could have a very crowded primary.
The wait is finally over: On Friday, Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik announced her long-awaited bid for New York governor. Stefanik immediately becomes the frontrunner for the GOP nomination in the race to take on Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul. However, Stefanik may not have the Republican primary all to herself, as Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman is also considering a bid.
While Democrats had tons of positive electoral news last Tuesday, Wednesday included a down note for them: Democratic Rep. Jared Golden of Maine announced he would not seek reelection. Golden had faced a serious primary challenger from the left, state Auditor Matt Dunlap. However, Golden had repeatedly won Maine’s red-leaning 2nd District, something Dunlap or another Democrat could struggle to do in 2026.
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📈 The Frontrunner 🥇
10 visualizations exploring the results in Virginia and New Jersey
Democrats of all stripes enjoyed a strong electoral showing last week, largely as a response to President Donald Trump. In the realm of statewide elections, the two most significant performances came in Virginia and New Jersey, where center-left women candidates with national security backgrounds won double-digit victories in each state’s race for governor. Those successes also paved the way for sweeping Democratic wins in downballot races. Democrats captured all statewide offices in Virginia, achieved a double-digit seat gain in the state’s lower legislative chamber, and took full control of state government. In New Jersey, Democrats have won their largest majority in the lower chamber of the state legislature in 52 years.
Below, I’ve put together 10 visualizations — maps, charts, and tables — detailing these results and their contexts.
Virginia
The Old Dominion made history last week when it elected its first woman governor. Former Rep. Abigail Spanberger, the Democratic nominee, defeated Republican Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears by about 15 percentage points, 57%-42%. Spanberger accomplished this by improving on the Democrats’ showing in the 2024 presidential election in nearly every locality in the state — currently 128 of Virginia’s 133 counties and independent cities, based on unofficial results.
And where Spanberger improved the most was in Northern Virginia, which already serves as the Democratic Party of Virginia’s bedrock. Across the cities, suburbs, and exurbs within the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, Spanberger won by more than 36 points, around a 12-point improvement on former Vice President Kamala Harris’s 24-point edge in 2024. Accounting for 35% of the state’s vote, Northern Virginia contributed the most to Spanberger’s sizable win.
But Northern Virginia was not the whole story, considering Spanberger won by the largest margin of any Virginia Democrat in a gubernatorial election since 1961. She improved on Harris’s margins by about 7.5 points in both the Richmond and Virginia Beach-Norfolk metropolitan areas, and even did 6 points better in the rest of the commonwealth outside of the Urban Crescent (the three major metro areas).
As a result of her performance, Spanberger continued Virginia’s long-running pattern of swinging away from the president’s party in gubernatorial elections, which always occur the year after the presidential election. After President Donald Trump only lost the state by about 6 points in 2024, Earle-Sears lost it by close to 15 — about a 9-point shift.
Spanberger’s huge win at the top of the ticket also had downballot consequences. The 2025 election marked the fifth consecutive time that the same party swept Virginia’s three statewide offices of governor, lieutenant governor, and attorney general (the last split result came in 2005).
In the lieutenant governor race, state Sen. Ghazala Hashmi dispatched Republican John Reid by about 11 points. That will make Hashmi the first Muslim woman elected to statewide office in the United States. Hashmi ran fairly close to Spanberger, a result largely in keeping with most recent elections for statewide office in Virginia. For instance, in 2021, Republicans won the races for governor, lieutenant governor, and attorney general by between 0.8 and 1.9 points — the kind of consistency that points to few split-ticket voters.
However, Virginia’s 2025 attorney general race tested the straight-ticket voting tendencies of our polarized era. In early October, the race between Republican Attorney General Jason Miyares and Democrat Jay Jones received a major shakeup when news broke about a series of violence-laden texts Jones had sent in 2022. Miyares took a narrow lead in the polls, making it seem quite possible that Virginia voters might produce a split-ticket outcome. But the pro-Democratic environment dragged Jones to a 6-point victory. Still, the fact Jones ran about 9 points behind Spanberger in margin is an obvious sign that the scandal affected his performance.
However, that Jones still won suggests that a lot of voters who voted Democratic still cast a ballot for him. The result answered at least in part a question coming into the election: To what extent would voters who cast ballots in the governor’s race choose to not vote for attorney general (or write in a name)? In theory, some Spanberger voters repelled by Jones’s texts might not vote for him but also might be unwilling to vote for Miyares, the Republican.
As it turned out, some voters did abstain, but not a huge share. The named candidates in the attorney general’s race received 1.3% fewer total votes than those in the gubernatorial contest. Now, some ballot roll-off is par for the course because races at the top of the ballot usually receive more votes than ones lower down on the ballot. Yet while the undervote for attorney general was the largest since 2009, it was not historically large — a sign that Jones’s scandal only compelled a small group of voters to not vote in the attorney general contest.
Lastly, Democrats also reaped the benefits of the blue wave in the House of Delegates, the lower chamber in Virginia’s General Assembly (state legislature). Democrats won 64 seats, a 13-seat gain from their pre-election position, when they held a narrow 51-49 majority. As a result, Democrats will have their largest majority in the House in nearly 40 years when the General Assembly gathers for its regular session in January.
However, while this will ease Democrats’ efforts to pass legislation in the House, they will still have a very fine margin to work with in the state Senate. There, Democrats hold just a 21-19 majority, and that edge will actually shrink at least temporarily when Hashmi takes office as lieutenant governor. Democrats will be heavily favored to retain her seat in the ensuing special election — Harris carried it 63%-35% in 2024 — but they will have little breathing room as the General Assembly looks ready to take another vote on a constitutional amendment to allow mid-decade redistricting.
New Jersey
While Spanberger was a heavy favorite in Virginia, Democratic Rep. Mikie Sherrill looked to be a weaker frontrunner in New Jersey. In the polls leading up to Election Day, she led Republican Jack Ciattarelli by only about 5 points in Decision Desk HQ’s average, and other aggregators placed her advantage in similar territory. But Sherrill looks to have defeated Ciattarelli by nearly 14 points, 57%-43%, per unofficial results — nearly the same spread as Spanberger.
This example should serve as a good reminder that trying to predict the direction of polling error before an election is a mug’s game. As Eli McKown-Dawson noted at Silver Bulletin right before Election Day, error in New Jersey’s polls has varied. In 2005 and 2013, polls exaggerated the GOP’s final margin in the gubernatorial race. In 2001, 2009, 2017, and 2021, the polls overestimated Democrats. This was especially true in 2021 when different aggregators gave Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy a lead in the high single-digits, only for him to defeat Ciattarelli by just 3 points. But the 2025 miss may take the cake for overshooting one side — and in this case, it exaggerated the GOP’s numbers.
Sherrill’s victory involved gaining ground most everywhere in New Jersey, but her performance in places that swung sharply to the right in the 2024 presidential race particularly stood out. Last November, Trump improved the most on his 2020 showing in three counties: Passaic (19 points, from Joe Biden +16 to Trump +3), Hudson (18 points, Biden +46 to Harris +28), and Middlesex (14 points, Biden +22 to Harris +8). But of New Jersey’s 21 counties, those same three featured the largest swings to the left in Tuesday’s election.
Hudson and Passaic counties both have plurality Latino populations, while Middlesex residents are around one-quarter Asian and one-quarter Latino. Both of these broad demographic groups, especially Latinos, shifted notably toward Trump in 2024. But in New Jersey, some of those voters returned to the Democratic fold in 2025: Hudson shifted 22 points to the left from the 2024 presidential race, while Passaic moved 18 points and Middlesex 17 points. Among the most striking results was the vote tally in Paterson, a 64% Hispanic municipality in Passaic that Trump lost by 61 points in 2020 but by only 28 points in 2024. The longtime Democratic stronghold went solidly blue on Tuesday, backing Sherrill by 71 points.
Some of that swing to the left likely did result from some Trump voters voting Democratic. We can say that because New Jersey had very high turnout for a gubernatorial race: about 51% of the voting-eligible population cast a ballot, the state’s highest share over the past 40-plus years. While that was short of the 67% who voted in the 2024 presidential race, it marked a much smaller drop in turnout from 2024 than what we saw in New Jersey from 2020 to 2021. Back then, the share of the VEP who voted went from 72% in the presidential race to just 41% in the gubernatorial contest.
As a result, turnout in New Jersey looked much more like Virginia’s turnout rate than it did four years ago. In 2021, about 52% of Virginia’s VEP showed up in a close gubernatorial contest that now-outgoing Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin won by 2 points. But even though New Jersey also had a close race, it fell well short of Virginia’s turnout share. This time around, they both just cleared 50%.
The 2025 election was guaranteed to break one of two streaks in New Jersey — Democrats would either win three straight gubernatorial races for the first time since the 1960s, or Republicans would become the first presidential party to win an open-seat race for governor in New Jersey since 1981.
In the end, it was the former streak that came to an end. Sherrill’s victory means Democrats have garnered a third consecutive four-year term in Trenton.
New Jersey governors have had four-year terms since the 1949 election — they had an unusual three-year term before then — and in that time, only once has a party won more than two gubernatorial elections in a row. From 1953 through 1965, Democrats won four straight races. Since then, neither party had pulled off the feat until Sherrill’s victory last week.
Lastly, as in Virginia, Sherrill’s resounding victory at the top of the ticket boosted Democrats downballot. New Jersey has no other state-level offices elected statewide besides governor, but its 80-seat General Assembly was on the ballot last Tuesday — and Democrats expanded their majority to heights not seen in a long time. (In New Jersey, the General Assembly is the lower chamber of the New Jersey Legislature, while in Virginia, the General Assembly is the title of the entire legislature encompassing the Virginia Senate and House of Delegates.)
As of this writing, DDHQ has projected Democrats will win 55 seats in the lower chamber to the GOP’s 19, with six very close races still undecided. That is the largest majority Democrats have attained since they won 66 seats in 1973 during a difficult political period for Republicans as Watergate destroyed Richard Nixon’s presidency.
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We’ll have more to say about the 2025 election and some other races next week!
🟢 No Red Or Blue, Just Green 📗
Blake Burman on prediction markets:
As I wrote last week, there was a spread between the polling and the political prediction markets on who will control the House of Representatives in 2026. The generic Congressional ballot average is D +2.5, but the prediction markets are much more bullish on Democrats’ chances to flip the House.
Keep in mind, the House margin right now is the narrowest in the history of modern politics. The 2024 election led to Republicans with a 220-215 edge. So, it wouldn’t take a political earthquake for the House to potentially flip (or remain in Republican control). A big question, though, remains: how redistricting will play out, and what could the net effects be in the totality?
And how about this for both the inverse and some symmetry:
The Senate is basically a 70-30 in the prediction markets also, but in favor of Republicans. They do have to defend more seats than Democrats in ‘26, but Republicans currently hold 53 seats.
Tuesday’s elections certainly showed that the affordability issue that was there for Democrats in 2024 is still very much there for Republicans in 2025, and likely will be the top issue in 2026. However, the dynamics simply favor Republican senators at the moment, which could be why an 80-20 belief from earlier this year in the prediction markets is still a solid 70-30 now.
You can read more from Blake on his new Substack!
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📆 Around the Corner 📌
December 2, 2025
TN-07 Special Election
I think comparing VA 2025 to 2017 or even a progression from 2005-2017-2025 provide a more interesting picture of shifts in voting allegiance .
Lovely graphs, charts and stats ( where are the Venn diagrams??). But all of this precise detail and in depth analysis proves only that the Dems won a home court game early in the season. Much ado about nothing except that the Dems win in Blue states.