What changed in Virginia

I am by no means the only person to have made this observation, but the point at which I knew Kamala Harris was in trouble last year was when the results in Virginia weren’t immediately obvious. As the hours dragged on, the fact that a state her ticket had won by 6 points four years prior was too close to call suggested that the shift away from the Democrats was larger than what had been expected.

On Tuesday, the state shifted back.

There’s been a lot made (including by yours truly) about the scale of the shift in Virginia. There’s a reason for that: in addition to being one of the few places where there were statewide races on the ballot, Virginia (unlike New Jersey) has a lot of counties and cities that represent different demographics and political tendencies. In other words, you can more easily get more detailed information about what happened in Virginia than you can for a lot of the other races that unfolded on Tuesday.

And, again, the shift since a year ago was dramatic. As of writing, there were only four counties or cities in the state that shifted to the right relative to the 2024 presidential election. In all of the 120-plus other places, the shift was to the left.

But the shift since the gubernatorial race in 2021 was even sharper. There were no counties or cities (as of writing) that moved right relative to four years ago. On average, they instead moved 13 points to the left.

You can see that on the (laughably huge) chart below. In 103 of the 133 counties and cities, 2021 saw the biggest margin for Republican candidates of any presidential or gubernatorial race since 2012.

If we compare the 2025 results with the 2012 presidential election, we can see the broader patterns that helped turn Virginia from reddish to bluish 20 years ago. Big shifts to the left particularly in the northern, D.C.-adjacent parts of the state. Big shifts to the right in more rural parts of Virginia, particularly the Appalachian west.

Since 2012, 75 of the 133 counties and cities in the state moved to the right. But the places that moved to the left have a lot more people.

One of the questions about the shift from 2024 to 2025 that Virginia can help answer is whether Trump’s improvement with younger and non-White voters (improvements that overlap) eroded this time around. If we group Virginia’s counties and cities into quartiles by age and diversity — that is, four groups from smallest to largest elderly population and four from lowest to highest White percentage — we can get a sense for what shift might have occurred.

For example, the oldest and Whitest counties voted for the Republican candidate by an average of 44 points on Tuesday. The youngest and least-densely White counties backed the Democrat by an average of 35 points.

(Importantly, there are 12 times as many people in the younger/less-White counties than the older/more-White ones.)

If we look at the average margin shift, the young/less-White counties moved the left twice as much as the older/more-White ones.

As you can see, given that the circles at left are so much larger than the ones at right, this was heavily a function of there being bigger shifts among younger counties. Age and party choice do tend to correlate (which is a subtle way of saying that older people are more likely to be Republican), but we’re talking about shifts in margins here, not vote totals.

The data from Tuesday night are literally incomplete, though it’s unlikely the vote totals will change substantially. It is likely, though, that we’ll learn more about the political shifts that occurred over the past 12 months as weeks and months progress. For now, we can simply say that 2021 was a high-water mark for Republicans in the state since 2012, with data indicating a particular shift back to the left among younger voters since 2024.

Incidentally, while 2021 was the Republican high-water mark, 2025 was the high-water mark for Democrats in about half of Virginia’s cities and counties. (For the other about-half, 2012 was the high-water mark.) From 2021 to 2024, all but four counties and cities in the state had already shifted to the left. Then all but four counties (different ones, if you were wondering) shifted further to the left in 2025.

The question is: What will the shifts look like 12 months from now?

Photo: The University of Virginia, seen from the air, 1934. (National Archives)