This article was republished with permission from WTOP’s news partner InsideNoVa.com. Sign up for InsideNoVa.com’s free email subscription today.
Northern Virginia accounted for about 88% of Gov.-elect Abigail Spanberger’s victory margin on Tuesday, according to preliminary election results analyzed by InsideNoVa.
In the region’s four counties and five cities, Spanberger, the Democrat, won 72.3% of the total vote to just 27.4% for her Republican opponent, Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears.
Across the rest of Virginia, the margin was much tighter, with Spanberger winning 51.2% to 48.7% for Earle-Sears. Spanberger wound up winning with 57.1% of the total vote statewide as she ran up the largest margin in a gubernatorial election since 2009.
InsideNoVa’s analysis is based on results from the Virginia Department of Elections as of midday Wednesday and does not include provisional ballots or late-arriving mail ballots, which will be counted and reported later this week.
Spanberger’s margin across the region also far outpaced that of Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe in the 2021 election, which McAuliffe wound up losing to Republican Glenn Youngkin. In that race, McAuliffe won 63.7% of the Northern Virginia vote to 35.6% for Youngkin. He won the region by about 265,000 votes, but lost to Youngkin by 64,000 statewide.
This year, Spanberger won the region by about 426,000 votes, only about 60,000 votes less than her statewide margin of 486,000.
Total votes cast in the region were about 950,000, about 8,000 more than were cast in 2021. The 2025 number will increase as the provisional and late-arriving ballots are tallied.
Statewide, 3.36 million votes were cast this year, an increase of about 72,000 from 2021.
In last year’s presidential election, Democrat Kamala Harris won the region with 64.2% of the vote. About 1.25 million votes were cast regionwide. Harris trailed President Donald Trump across the rest of the state but still won the statewide vote by about 5 percentage points, a margin that Spanberger tripled on Tuesday.
In Northern Virginia, Spanberger’s biggest margins were in the largest localities, and her margin increased by at least 24% in every locality, compared with McAuliffe’s margins in 2021. The biggest percentage increase was in Manassas, which Spanberger won by 3,502 votes, compared with a margin for McAuliffe of only 1,105 in 2021.
Spanberger’s margin increases in the other Northern Virginia localities were as follows:
- Alexandria, up 35.5%, or about 12,000 votes
- Arlington, up 24.6%, or 13,000 votes
- Fairfax County, up 53%, or 70,000 votes
- Fairfax City, up 60%, or 1,600 votes
- Falls Church, up 35.5%, or 1,400 votes
- Loudoun County, up 163.8%, or 30,000 votes
- Manassas Park, up 109.5%, or 850 votes
- Prince William County, up 139.3%, or 32,000 votes
