Virginia’s 2025 Election came to a close early Tuesday night with a Democrat sweep that is shaping up to be the year that absentee mail-in ballots swamped Republican balloting. Democrats took all the top races and flipped 13 House of Delegate seats to increase their majority and currently hold a slim majority in the state senate.
Turnout was over 3.4 million, 53.3% of the electorate, which fell below 2021 benchmarks after many Republican voters apparently decided to skip election day. Leading up to Election Day, Virginia was setting records for turnout in Early Voting with 22% improvement over 2021, the last time Virginia elected a governor.
With results still unofficial, Democrat Abigail Spanberger tallied 1.9 million votes (57% of Democrat voters) to handily win the governor’s race against Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, who received 1.4 million votes (about 43% of the Republican vote). The margin of difference on absentee by-mail ballots was the most pronounced — even lop-sided at 77% of the total absentee mail-in vote.
Democrat Jay Jones captured the Attorney General race — despite the scandal clouding his campaign over his text messages fantasizing about “two bullets” in the head of his political opponent and a probe of how he cleared his reckless driving conviction. Mail-in ballots made all the difference, as the charts below show.
Republicans were seen as over-performing throughout early voting where they traditionally fall short compared to Democrat voters. In many races, Republican-modeled voters were returning early voting absentee ballots at a much higher rate than modeled Democrat ballot returns. We are monitoring the “unmarked” status to track all the ballots.
More on that in our next report.
We put some graphs up of the unofficial tallies to show how the three chunks of Virginia’s election stacked up.
In the Governor’s race, Spanberger won 77% more of the absentee ballots. Sears also failed to get enough early voters out as well as election day voters.
In the Lt. Gov. race between Democrat Ghazala Hashmi and Republican John Reid, the percentage differences tell the story as well:
The Attorney General race was much more competitive in the Early Voting and Election Day turnout. But Miyares only won about 35% of the mailed absentee vote.
Source: VA Dept. of Elections (unofficial)
The disparity between in-person voting and absentee ballots was also pronounced in House of Delegate races — including those that were seen as competitive.
Every Republican incumbent who lost House of Delegate seats (13) fell short in the absentee balloting counts.
EPEC Team will be publishing more details on House races and overall balloting trends in our next report.
We’ve assembled a breakdown of each type of voting (Early In-Person, Mail-In, Election Day) for all House of Delegate races here with the tallies without the absentee votes tallied:
https://epec.info/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/HouseDelegatesUnofficialAllNov5_2025VAElections.pdf
Then with all of the House of Delegate ballot types tallied to show the difference that the absentee ballots made in the closest races:
VAGeneralHoDAllTallies_unofficialAllBallotTypesFormatted
As for the quality of the data management during Early Voting, EPEC’s Senior Analyst and Board of Directors member Rick Naigle’s overview can be seen here.
We see many anomalies with absentee mail-in balloting data and are marshaling our analysis for our next report. But the big picture is that absentee mail-in balloting numbers made all the difference for candidates up and down the ballot this year.
Electoral boards are conducting a canvas of over 45,000 provisional ballots, of which 34,000 are Same Day Registrations. The numbers are all unofficial — but already tell the tale. More in our next report. #