In This Story
Despite countless frictions and hurdles, the 2025 election results swung in favor of the Democratic Party. How did they manage to do this, and what could it mean for the country? David Ramadan answers these questions with Kyle Kondik and J. Miles Coleman from Sabato’s Crystal Ball, one of the most respected election forecasting teams in the country. Together, they take a closer look at the winners (and losers) of the election, particularly in Virginia and New Jersey, to determine how this will shape the 2026 cycle. They also unpack the most surprising things about the 2025 elections, particularly the shifting political winds in key states, as well as how the government shutdown impacted voter turnout.
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Dissecting 2025 Election Results With J. Miles Coleman And Kyle Kondik
In this episode, we're digging into the 2025 elections, mostly in Virginia, and we may talk about New Jersey, two early tests of where voters stand ahead of the 2026 cycle. My guests are Kyle Kondik and J. Miles Coleman from Sabato’s Crystal Ball, one of the most respected election forecasting teams in the country. Their non-partisan political forecasting work is based at UVA's Center for Politics, where I happen to serve as a scholar as well. Therefore, I am happy to see my two friends join us here at George Mason.
You've seen their work everywhere, from CNN and the Washington Post to their regular deep dive columns that cut through the spin and get to the numbers. Together, we'll unpack what happened, what surprised these experts, and what these results might tell us about shifting political wins in key states. Miles, Kyle, welcome. Thanks for joining me.
Thanks for having us.
Looking Back To The Election Results In Virginia And New Jersey
Alright, let us assume that I’ve been hibernating for the past ten days. An election took place in Virginia on Tuesday. What happened? Give me the big picture. What were the headline outcomes in Virginia and New Jersey?
I think in some ways, the election was decided as soon as Donald Trump won the White House back in November 2024. The governorship in Virginia has a long history of almost always voting against the President's party. It happened again in what ended up being a wipeout in which Democrats not only won the three statewide races.
Going away, the weakest performer, Jay Jones in the Attorney General's race, who had horrible developments in his campaign, these violent text messages that emerged, he ended up winning by more than Kamala Harris did in Virginia in November 2024. Probably the most striking thing was the Democrats won basically all the competitive race in the House of Delegates and built their majority from 51 to 64 seats.
It's funny because I was saying like towards the end of the election that when we first looked at the race back, and I don't know, what was it, March or April, Spanberger was on track to win pretty clearly. For all the stuff that happened towards the end of the can campaign, our basic outlook didn't really change. In fact, things seemed to break towards the end of the election, if anything, in more favor of basically Spanberger and the Democrats.
The overall climate, the overall expectation was on the side of the Democrats for this election. Kyle, as you said, for the last 50 years, with the exception of 2013 when Terry McAuliffe was elected governor, Virginia has always voted for governor for the party against whoever is in the White House. We're talking fifteen points here. There is no way that we can attribute all of that to Donald Trump in determination. I saw a very pragmatic campaign coming out of the Spanberger side. She ran a very pragmatic, not partisan, kitchen table issues, affordability, healthcare, education versus a dumpster fire on the other side. What surprised you?
I came to think of it as Winsome Earle-Sears, the Republican candidate, that it was like a cover band candidacy, meaning that she was playing other people's hits and they weren't as good as the originals. The attacks she tried to use against Spanberger, she basically copied the famous Trump ads against Kamala Harris about Kamala for they, them, but the Trump people had good clips of Kamala to use on talking about transition surgeries for taxpayer-funded transition surgeries for inmates.
Spanberger never said anything like that. Even though I think she had a muddy answer on transgender issues, it didn't really matter, and they didn't have anything effective to put it in the ads. Earle-Sears tried to glom onto the Jay Jones text message scandal and tried to tie Spanberger to that. Spanberger wasn't sending texts like that. It was Jay Jones. Earle-Sears had a weak hand to play and I don't even think she necessarily played it all that well. I think that helps explain how the race expanded out to that fifteen-point blowout.
I think with Spanberger as well, she had a lot of her own strengths as a candidate. I think probably if Terry McAuliffe ran again this time, he would've probably won, but maybe not by as much of a margin. Nothing against him, but such a big topic of the election in 2025 was just the White House seeming to go out of its way to antagonize basically federal workforce.
Basically, Spanberger comes from that world. Obviously, before her time in Congress, her background was in the CIA. She's probably better able to speak to some of those federal issues. I think probably one of her strengths that she came into this race with as well is it's weird seeing Spanberger winning by such a decisive margin. Her three races for Congress were always some of the hottest races in the country. I think she came into this race with a muscle memory of, “We're not going to take anything for granted.” Her races for Congress were very expensive. I think having a donor network that she came into this race also, I would think, probably helped her as well.
How The Government Shutdown Impacted Election Turnout
As you mentioned, the shutdown was a big factor. The government shutdown. This is, I think, the first ever that I can remember that our voters went for an election day while the government was shut down. I think the previous ones had just gotten over right before election day. How much did that affect turnout? What did you see in turnout trends overall?
I know you have just issued a lengthy dissection of the turnouts in different areas, and we're going to talk in the next segment a little bit about demographics, but talk to me about turnouts, Northern Virginia versus the rest of Virginia, the other metropolitan areas such as Richmond and Hampton Roads. How did that affect the balance of this election?
I would say really in terms of turnout, the shutdown definitely probably held Democrats on balance, but after the election, I was looking at some of the turnout rates by locality of 2025 versus 2021. Interestingly, if you look at the localities that increased most, a lot of the same localities that are just adding overall population, like a Goochland or a Chesterfield or a Stafford or places like that.
On the flip side, if you look at like the top 10 localities where turnout was down most from 2021, something like 9 of the 10 are in Appalachia. That was the part of the state that, years ago, really punched above its weight for Governor Youngkin. I was saying this at the time, but I would basically caution people about reading too much into the Virginia early vote because we just don't have that much of a history here. Throughout the early vote, you could see that area of Appalachia South side was basically lagging. That was maybe a bit of an indicator of some of the maybe lack of enthusiasm on the Republican side in this election.
What was that lack attributed to?
I guess basically Sears was not as good a candidate as Governor Youngkin. I feel like as Kyle was saying earlier, it's always the party that's out of the White House that's more enthused to show up and score points.
What I would add that there was a real turnout spike from 2017 to 2021 in terms of raw votes cast and the overall turnout rate too, and the places that really spiked for some of the redder parts of the state. In 2025, the turnout was really very similar overall to 2021. There were slightly more raw votes cast that the actual turnout rate was probably pretty similar. The differences you saw, as Miles suggested, some of the redder places that really jumped in 2021 maybe lagged a little bit in 2025. As with everything, and particularly in a fifteen-point win, it's not just a turnout, but it's persuasion too.
Voter turnout in 2025 was very similar overall to 2021, where there were slightly more raw votes cast than the actual turnout rate.
I do think it's telling that in the exit poll, when it was finally re-weighted to the results, it had an electorate that voted for Kamala Harris by nine points. She had won the state by a little under six. Back in 2021, I think the final exit poll was something like I think it was Biden by four. Biden, of course, had actually won the state by 10 in 2020. You could see it was a weaker Democratic electorate in 2021 and a stronger one in 2025.
Surprising Democrat Wins In The 2025 Elections
Was there any results that really grabbed your attention or surprised you here?
Basically, just as we were watching the returns on election night, just the House of Delegates, the Democrats flipping seats left and right. That, to me, is the biggest thing. What it reminded me of is back in 2008, at the national level, the Democrats had just taken the majority in the Senate in ‘06 and they had a very good chance of getting a 60-seat, super majority in ‘08. The motto of the Democrats at the time was 60 is the new 50. That's how I felt watching the House of Delegates because the Democrats had just gotten you a bare majority in 2023 and now, after this election, they are a few seats from a super majority, which was something else.
The Democrats united 13 seats in the House of Delegates, and really, if you go through the 13 seats, they flipped, most of them weren't even that close. I think there was only one seat that they flipped that was decided by less than two points. I think that was District 30, which is the Western Loudoun County seat. There were seats that were that seemed like they're pretty competitive ahead of the election that Democrats won by high single digits. If you look at just the seats that the Democrats held going into the election, they held 51. Their closest win in those 51 seats, which is the bare majority making seat. That was Michael Feggan’s in House District 97.
He won by fifteen points, the same amount that Spanberger did. They very easily won the majority. They're getting almost close to it to a super majority. We ran a preview of the House of Delegates in Crystal Ball. It was written by our great intern team this semester, and they identified sixteen districts basically to watch. The Democrats won all sixteen of them.
It was 3 Democratic held districts, none of which were close, and then 13 Republican held districts. They tracked if the wave gets this high, if it gets this high. The wave was as big as we thought it could have been. They just swept out not only all the Harris district Republicans in the House of Delegates, but also several Trump district Republicans, that Democrats ended up winning those seats.
The Democrats swept not only all of the Harris district Republicans in the House of Delegates, but also several Trump district Republicans.
I’ll tell you what surprised me was the spending. You mentioned the Western Loudoun County seat. I ran in Eastern Loudoun County in 2011 and 2013. My campaign was $750,000 at the time. My reelection was also $750,000. I believe my proponent in the first campaign spent something like $850,000 and then in the second campaign, $1.2 million.
Combined, between my opponent and I, it was a $2 million campaign, which was then the most expensive house race up until that point. Those numbers got blown out this time. Geary Higgins, opponent in Western Loudoun County, spent $2.5 million. Carrie Coyner, opponent, spent $3 million. Coyner spent $1.8 million. I think Geary Higgins spent about $800,000, which was underperforming in dollars for an incumbent.
How Spanberger Ran Ahead Of The Democrats
Those were incredible numbers. Dwayne Yancey wrote an article, I'm not sure if you had a chance to see it in the Cardinal News, and the title is How Many House Seats Did Earle-Sears Cost Republicans? At least 10, but maybe all 13. Here's the Math. The question to you, did Earle-Sears cost the Republicans these 10, or did Republicans cost themselves these 10, or did Spanberger win Democrats these 10 seats?
I think Spanberger ran ahead of the Democrats in basically all of these competitive seats. I was looking at some of those. Miles, is that your sense of it too?
Yeah. I think there are maybe 2 or 3 in the key races that got a higher share of the vote or something than Spanberger. Yeah, that's also more or less how it was back in 2017 with Ralph Northam as well. He ran ahead of not just House of Delegate candidates, but basically the other statewide too.
Some of what might be going on is that, like, honestly, I would probably blame Trump more than Earle-Sears, just because I think this is also like very nationalized. If you look at what happened in some of the other states, again, it was a very nationalized election, but one of the things Democrats have just struggled with in Virginia is reaching what the presidential number is in these districts. Usually, the Republicans would do better.
This election, again, not only they win all the Harris Republican seats, but they actually won a handful of Trump seats as well. I don't want to say it's a completion of a realignment, but sometimes, we talk about political realignment, and I think Virginia has gone through one over the course of the last fifteen years, but particularly in the Trump era of becoming more of a clearly blue-leaning state.
I wonder if the realignment is just trickling down the ballot. The money helps. In fact, the Democrats basically had a big money advantage in all of the key House races and even some of the ones that were fringe targets that ended up being pretty close. There was this latent down-ballot Republican strength in the House of Delegates and the state Senate. I wonder if that's like gone now.
If that's the case, then we might be moving into a period where the state legislature actually really isn't all that competitive anymore. Maybe the Republicans could win the governorship under the right circumstances, like they did in 2021. Maybe the legislature is moving into more of a I never want to use the word permanent, but we might look back at 2025 and say, “The legislature is basically now going to be Democratic in almost all circumstances.”
Years ago, Republicans had a 67 majority in the House. Now it's 64 Democratic, so I wouldn't say permanent. That depends on what happens in the next four years as well. There's a lot of talk about a mandate and I didn't want to spend a lot of time on that because we're talking more about the election versus what moves forward, but no one should misunderstand the mandate. The mandate depends on what Democrats do for the next four years as well.
One of the things I like about following politics in this state is that every year, there's an election, there's always another election. Looking a little ahead, I think ‘27 is basically going to be Spanberger's midterm. There's going to be this odd dynamic in the legislature where both chambers are up. The Democrats now have this like 64-seat majority. I think the day after the election or something, they put out a list of ten districts they are going to target. We'll see, but they are also going to be playing a lot of defense as well. Meanwhile, in the Senate, it's going to be interesting because from ‘23, the Democrats still have that bare majority.
I think there are probably 4 or 5 seats that went for Harris, but have Republican. That offense versus defense dynamic is going to be interesting in a few years. You're right, it is basically what I remember following the elections here in 2023, and you would have a lot of Democratic primaries where they would say things like, “We really can't accomplish a lot of our big-ticket items on your spending or education or stuff like that until we have a trifecta.” Guess what? That's right now. It's going to be interesting to see how they go about that.
Are Split Tickets Making A Comeback?
Absolutely. All right. Split tickets. We've seen some of it this year. There was an interesting attorney general race. The Democratic candidate got hit with a couple of October surprises. One was a texting scandal where he had attacked the former speaker of the House, a Republican. Wished death upon him and his child. That became the focus of the campaign. The Republicans all over the state moved from boys in girls’ bathrooms and transgender issue to the Jay Jones scandal for about a month. Talk to me about what was the results of that and how much split tickets did you see.
This is something we looked at for our most recent Crystal Ball. This is another thing where ever since we first looked at the election, it was obvious that there was probably something to the fact that he was an incumbent but he was still going to have to put a big amount of distance between him and the top of the ticket.
In 2021, it was a very straight party type of election where at the top of the ticket, Governor Youngkin won by about 1.9 or something like that while Miyares won his race by like eight tenths of a point, so not that much. What was interesting about Miyares is even though he did end up losing his seat, he still did run almost eight and a half, nine points ahead of the top of the ticket, which, by recent standards, and when I say basically recent, I mean going back to 2005, that distance, that gap is second to only Governor Northam when he was running for Lieutenant Governor in 2013.
He was against a really out there type of candidate on the Republican side. He ends up winning that race by ten and a half points, something like that. The Attorney General race, that was when Mark Herring was first elected by a few hundred votes. There was a ten-and-a-half-point gap roughly between the best-performing candidate and the worst statewide. The fact that Miyares was almost able to get there in this type of polarized environment, we thought that was interesting. That's probably a mix of his skills as an incumbent. He was able to raise a good amount of money as well plus some of the issues with Jay Jones. Still an impressive gap.
David, I think we talked, we were comparing notes before the election and was really thinking about the Northam's margin from 2017 and whether Spanberger would exceed it or not. I thought if she matched or exceeded Northam, that Jones would probably be in pretty good shape. If she was under that, then Miyares might have had an advantage. Sure enough, as Miles said, the difference is about eight and a half, nine points. Northam won by a little under 9 in 2017.
Had Spanberger matched Northam, the AG race might be going to a recount or something, but Spanberger blew it out. The Lieutenant Governor's race ended up being a double-digit margin too. Jones ended up winning pretty impressively despite the fact that he ran so far behind Spanberger anyway. An impressive amount of ticket splitting, but Miyares has just needed more than maybe is possible these days.
For our readers, I check my thoughts by calling Kyle before the elections. I'm like, “All right, am I thinking through here correctly or am I off?” Sure enough, he set me straight before the elections on some of my information. Is tickets splitting back or was this a one-off again for another 10 or 12 or 13 years?
If you have a candidate who has the problems that Jones did, then you can generate that ticket kind of splitting. My guess is you probably would've seen less of it had the story about Jones not come out. I still think Miyares probably would've been best-performing Republican, but maybe it would've looked a little bit more like the Lieutenant Governor's race. It is interesting that you had these three statewide races and they all produced fairly different margins. Spanberger by 15, Hashmi, I think, was maybe a little bit more about a little bit more than 11.
The results are not 100% finalized as we're talking here. Jones, it looks like about six and a half. You do have some differences. The Lieutenant Governor's race was definitely the third wheel of the statewide races. I think it reflected like a generic D versus R vote because I don't think that race was nearly as defined as the other two were.
How The Suburbs Voted In The 2025 Elections
Let's dig a little bit into the suburbs and the demographics. You did some work on this as well. Talk to me about Gladin County, about Prince William County, about the Asians and the Latinos. Where did that fall in this election?
When Kyle and I were watching the election in 2024, basically, the moment we knew Harris had lost a whole election was, basically, to its credit, I would say that Loudoun is pretty good about reporting votes fast. Most of its votes were in and Harris had fallen from your Biden plus 25 down to Harris plus 16. It almost looked like a reporting error, but it was still within the range of believability. We experienced the same thing this election where most of the results there were in and Spanberger was up by 30. Basically, same thing. It looked like maybe, is this too good? That's what it was.
Interesting bit of a whiplash there. I think what it spoke to is even though it is a county we talk a lot about, it's really two localities in one. Before I started here at the Center for Politics, I lived up in Sterling. It's a very diverse area, a large Asian population, a large Muslim population as well. All that is in Senate District 32, which David, I think, is roughly the area that she represented. The rest of it out by Leesburg, Western part, it's more White. Where I'm going with all of this is that wider part in SD 31, between all these elections, it did not move that much.
I think it dropped from like Biden plus 17 to Harris plus 14 or something like that. A lot of the movement came in the Eastern part of the county, which is District 32. I think it went from Biden plus 35 to Harris plus 22, so a dozen points. What we saw in this election here is in Eastern Loudoun, Spanberger's numbers were even stronger than what Biden got. She wanted by almost 40. I think it's basically a group that fundamentally leans Democratic, but I think over the years, it's been an interesting constituency to follow.
If you just look at Northern Virginia, Northern Virginia was where Harris lagged Biden. Obviously, Northern Virginia is still very blue. Actually, one of the other things that's going on is that the Democratic tendrils from Northern Virginia are extending further West and further South, like Stafford, around Fredericksburg. That's now a swing county. Spanberger did quite well there. She did quite well in all the swing counties. Even going down to South, if you keep going South on 95 I think Spanberger carried Caroline County.
Probably like a few votes.
You would think of that as being more of a Republican leaning place in in recent elections. The real nor nova really swung back toward the Democrats after some weakness, particularly in non-White heavy areas in Northern Virginia. That was an encouraging thing for Democrats. You saw some of that in New Jersey too after these big losses in 2024 in places that went from blank super blue to a lighter shade of blue. They went back to being super blue in the context of 2025.
Some places in New Jersey went to a lighter shade of blue in 2024. They now go back to being super blue in 2025.
Something I’ll add on that because Kyle brought up a basically Interstate 95, the one area of the state that's been consistently the most Democratic trending over the election cycles is this stretch of the state running from roughly Williamsburg to Richmond to Charlottesville. It all follows Interstate 64. You have localities there like Chesterfield that used to be a marginal county, even Republican leaning. Spanberger won that by almost 60%. It was nuts.
How about Prince William County? Is the realignment you talked about earlier evident in in the Latino votes in Prince William?
Yes. One of the interesting races there, unlike basically a New Jersey, which was also off this year which has these large pockets of basically Hispanics, Virginia doesn't have like one city or one constituency where they just dominate. The proxy we got for that race or the demographic was House District, I think it was 20 held by Michelle Maldonado. I think it's like a plurality Hispanics, something like 45.
That was one where in ’21, Terry McAuliffe only won it by a dozen points. Spanberger won it 2 to 1. That was also an interesting race because I think it was emblematic of the Republican struggles in this state, because basically, Maldonado was always a favorite. Her Republican opponent was a defense contractor who lost his job. Had to move to another state. He dropped out too late for his name to be removed because of that, and there was a high write-in vote in that district as well, but because of that, Maldonado was one of the few Democrats who outperformed Spanberger.
Predictions For Virginia And New Jersey In the 2026 And Midterm Elections
You talked a little bit about New Jersey. There are a lot of similarities or a lot of lessons that we can take or predictions even between Virginia and New Jersey regarding 2026 and the midterm elections for Congress. I don't believe you can draw any lines unless you do from the New York City elections. I think that's an outlier and separate. Talk to me a little bit about what are you seeing for 2026 for the midterm Congressional elections based on what we saw in Jersey and Virginia.
One of the things you definitely saw in New Jersey was actually, throughout the campaign, I thought that Spanberger was running a better race than Mikie Sherrill, the now Democratic Governor-Elect in New Jersey. That Jack Ciattarelli, the Republican candidate up there, was running a better race than Winsome Earle-Sears. I thought New Jersey would be closer, but it was closer, but only by like a point or two. Sherrill ended up winning a very impressive victory of her own. In fact, her margin, I think, was probably more surprising than Spanberger’s just because the polling generally showed a closer race in New Jersey, and again, technically it was, but only by a couple of points.
In Northern New Jersey, in some of the strongly Latino areas that Miles had alluded to earlier, you saw a decent swing back to Democrats. I think there has been some real erosion for Democrats in some of those places, particularly if you look over the longer sweep of the last ten years since Trump emerged on the scene. There was definitely a rebound.
What do these races tell us about 2026? I feel like all of 2025 electorally has felt a lot like 2017 did, where you had Democrats consistently doing well in special elections relative to like Harris did in various districts across the country. You had a big state Supreme Court race in Wisconsin where Democrats did well. November 2015 was the best test, the most elections going on. The Democrats really performed quite well all over the place Virginia, New Jersey, and California, Pennsylvania and Georgia, some other places that had notable statewide races.
This all doesn't have to be predictive of 2026, but we are at the midway point to the midterm. The results have really been quite good for Democrats, even though the party is struggling with its internal strife, and there might be these ideological primaries in 2026. Democrats are upset with their leaders, but they're donating money as we saw in the Virginia House of Delegates races, and they're turning out to vote. Ultimately, that's the most important thing for determining power. There's a lot of complaining going on, but the electoral performance for Democrats really has been quite good.
It doesn't automatically mean that Democrats gare oing to sweep in two years for the midterm elections. There's a lot of play here.
Things could change. We sometimes have intervening factors. I think that the Dobbs decision in 2022 probably changed the environment and probably made the 2022 midterm weaker for Republicans. You might have expected the morning after the 2021 elections, for instance.
Something I’ll say, looking forward to the midterm’s success is something that has been a big storyline of this midterm, that's also starting to get some play in Virginia as of late is the idea of mid-decade redistricting. One of the big non-gubernatorial races was Proposition 50 out in California. Basically, Governor Newsom put it to a vote if the people would like to temporarily override their independent commission in California to draw a map that was more favorable to the Democrats.
It looks like within the next few months, the Virginia Democrats will be doing something similar. This is a state that they could probably net 2, 3, 4 seats out of if they do a well enough job at redrawing the congressional map here. Something that I think was probably encouraging out of that vote for the Democrats is I was comparing how Prop 50 looked compared to Kamala Harris's margin in 2024 because I’ve been told Virginia is not California.
Basically, Kamala Harris won California roughly 60-40. If Prop 50 passed by less than that, that might have not been an encouraging sign for Democrats here, because for Virginia, it's only a Harris plus six states, so less of a margin for error but it beat Harris by a few points. I think if you are the Democratic legislators here in Virginia, you look at the strong result for Spanberger in 2025. You look at Prop 50 as well, passing by almost 30.
One point I was going to make on New Jersey very briefly is one analogy I was making in terms of why we might have been surprised the lead a little, something that a Virginia audience might like is it almost reminded me a little bit of Ed Gillespie where he came very close in 2014, so I think a lot of us were surprised by how much he lost in ‘17. I saw the same thing with Chad. Yes, he probably was a better candidate than Sears in Virginia. Same deal. He comes very close to pulling an upset in ‘21 in a good national environment for the Republicans, runs again and loses decisively in an environment that's just not as favorable as it was at first time.
To piggyback off that, there was a lot of uncertainty about Virginia. We had the Democrats favor the whole time, but I remember the polls were relatively close in Virginia, and then Northam just ended up blowing it out. It is a carbon copy. We saw in New Jersey. It seemed like Gillespie was dominating in conversation, contesting the election on the issues that he wanted to contest it on. It just ended up not being close. New Jersey was the same thing.
For 2025, somebody shared with me the interesting similarities and connections between Virginia and New Jersey. The governor-elect of New Jersey was born in Virginia. The governor-elect of Virginia was born in New Jersey. They both went into Congress at the same time as freshmen. They were roommates, and now they have become the first woman governors of their two respective states.
I’ll add one more thing. Spanberger is going to be the 75th governor of Virginia. Sherrill is the 57th governor of New Jersey.
Same numbers, too.
Episode Wrap-up And Closing Words
Gentlemen, before I close this out, your final thoughts.
I would just reiterate that again for all of this strife on the Democratic side, the Democratic performance of 2025 has really been quite strong. I’m curious to see what happens when Spanberger takes over as governor. As Miles said, she was running in competitive races. She's seen as someone who's been a critic of the left within her own party. One of the first things the legislature's going to do when they get back in January is they're going to repass this gerrymandering proposal to take the voters.
Despite all of the strife on the Democratic side, their performance in 2025 has been quite strong.
That's inherently a hard-edge partisan issue. My guess is that Spanberger probably would like to be dealing with other things, but this is going to be one of the defining stories of her first several months in office, this gerrymandering push. Gerrymandering is about as political and partisan of an activity as you can get. She doesn't have a direct role in it. The legislature determines what goes on the ballot. They obviously already passed this thing right before the election.
There's a legal fight about it, and then they're going to do it again, coming back here. She doesn't have a role in this, but she's the governor of the state, or she's going to be the governor of the state. She's the leader of the party, so she's inherently involved in it. That's just an interesting little thing to watch early on in 2026.
Miles, final thoughts.
It probably was as good an election as the Democrats could have asked for. I basically agree with what Kyle said. I think basically Spanberger, temperamentally, is a type who I feel like wants to be able to work across the aisle, work with everyone, but in this moment, that might not be where the Democrats as a party are. It's going to be interesting to see how she navigates that. I think as far as next steps, we're still digging into all these breakdowns and precinct results and stuff. We will still be writing about all this stuff.
Kyle, Miles, always a pleasure. Thank you for your sharp analysis for helping us decode the data. Readers, you can follow their work at Sabato Crystal Ball, published by UVA Center for Politics. Until next time, stay informed and stay engaged.
Important Links
About J. Miles Coleman
J. Miles Coleman is the associate editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball, the University of Virginia Center for Politics’ authoritative, nonpartisan newsletter on American campaigns and elections. He also serves as the Center’s Media Relations Coordinator.
A political cartographer, Miles has generated a portfolio of thousands of electoral maps. Prior to joining the Center for Politics in 2019, Miles supported Decision Desk HQ, where he specialized in collecting and analyzing election night returns. Outlets that have cited his work include the Washington Post, Politico, and MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show. Miles also has spoken at venues such as the New Hampshire Institute of Politics.
A New Orleans native, Miles is a 2014 graduate of Louisiana State University, where he double-majored Anthropology and International Studies. When not combing over precinct spreadsheets or tweeting maps, he can often be found running at the gym.
About Kyle Kondik
Kyle Kondik is managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball, the University of Virginia Center for Politics’ authoritative, nonpartisan newsletter on American campaigns and elections. He is the author of The Long Red Thread, a history of the growth of Republican power in the U.S. House of Representatives, as well as The Bellwether, an analysis of Ohio’s presidential voting history.
He is a frequently cited expert on American politics who has appeared on CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, PBS NewsHour, and Comedy Central’s The Daily Show. He is a member of the CBS News Election Decision Desk team.
Before joining the Center for Politics in 2011, Kyle served as director of policy and research for former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray and as a reporter, editorial page editor, and political columnist at newspapers in Northeast Ohio. He earned his MA in Government from Johns Hopkins University in 2019.
Kyle is a 2006 graduate of the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University, where he also served as editor of the university’s student-run newspaper, The Post. He was honored by the university with the Charles J. and Claire O. Ping Recent Graduate Award in 2019.
He lives in Northeast Washington, D.C. with his wife, Lottie Walker, and their young son, Albert. He is a native of greater Cleveland, Ohio.