Virginia Redistricting Referendum Results

Jeff Ryer, the chairman of the state Republican Party, said his efforts will now shift to trying to block redistricting through the courts. “Now, we enter the phase that will be decided through litigation,” he said. “We don’t know whether the Supreme Court of Virginia will rule that the General Assembly is not above the law and does not have license to violate the Constitution. For the sake of Virginia, we will hope and pray that they do.”

Tonight’s election is probably an indication of how politics will be funded for the foreseeable future. In recent elections, a greater and greater proportion of the money raised by outside groups has come from nonprofits that do not disclose their donors. In Virginia, that trend went into overdrive — over 95 percent of the money was undisclosed. So buckle up for the midterms, 2028 and all the secret-money elections to come.

Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat, applauded the result in a statement but emphasized that it was “a temporary measure” to counter President Trump’s push to get other states like Texas and North Carolina to gerrymander their maps. As written, the Virginia amendment expires in 2030. Spanberger said she was committed to turning the task of drawing congressional maps back over to the bipartisan redistricting commission that was established in six years ago.

“While many expected Democrats to roll over and play dead, we did the opposite,” Hakeem Jeffries, the House Democratic leader from New York, said after The Associated Press called the race. “Democrats did not step back. We fought back. When they go low, we hit back hard.”

Representative Suzan DelBene of Washington State, the chairwoman of the House Democrats’ campaign arm, said in an interview that the referendum’s victory is “another indicator that the public is souring on the Republicans agenda.”

Terry Kilgore, the leader of the Virginia House Republicans and a plaintiff in one of the lawsuits challenging the amendment, said in a statement that the ballot box was never seen as “the final word.” He said that legal questions remain about the process, which “now move where they belong: to the courts.”

Democrats in Virginia were celebrating the results as the race calls came in. Don Scott, the speaker of the House of Delegates, said in a statement, “Virginia just changed the trajectory of the 2026 midterms.”

Virginia voters have passed the redistricting referendum, according to The Associated Press. The new map could shift as many as four House seats away from Republicans.

“Yes” has nudged ahead in the Virginia count, as more votes are counted from the Democratic strongholds of Richmond and Northern Virginia.

Rural, mostly white counties located on Virginia’s southern border are voting overwhelmingly against the referendum. In Scott County, where Trump won by 70 percentage points in 2024, “No” is winning by 78 percentage points.

The “No” lead statewide has shrunk to less than 3 points, as populous Democratic strongholds have begun to report more of their vote. Most of the remaining vote is still in Democratic-leaning areas, including Fairfax County and Richmond.

Virginia Beach has started reporting more early and mail-in votes, and “Yes” is doing slightly better there as a result. The area is a key swing district in the state, as Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, won it by 8 points in 2021, and Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat, won it by 11 points in 2025.

You may notice a new feature on our results page tonight: a map that indicates which side is on track to win based on the results so far in each area. While our traditional maps show which side is ahead in the reported vote tally in each area, they don’t tell you if it is ahead by enough.

Among the larger counties to report a majority of their votes thus far, Arlington is reporting an overwhelming majority in favor of the referendum, with more than 80 percent voting “yes” as of 8 p.m. Eastern time. Turnout is down in the county compared to 2025, which matched 2024 levels, and is expected to come in about 10 percent lower overall.

While “No” has a double-digit lead in the early count, the results so far suggest that “Yes” is on track to prevail, according to our estimates. Why the disparity? Most of the results so far come from heavily Republican areas; nothing has been reported at all from Fairfax County and Richmond, two of the state’s populous Democratic strongholds. Where the count is complete, “Yes” has been running well enough to prevail.

We are forecasting results for the Virginia redistricting referendum. Our model, which is driven by precinct-level results broken out by vote method, currently estimates that the referendum will pass by a margin of approximately 4 points.

These early numbers look good for the referendum to pass. “Yes” has 61 percent in Loudoun County, with more than 92 percent of the vote counted. When Kamala Harris won Virginia by 5 points in 2024, she took 57 percent of the Loudoun vote.

While the count is still early, the results from a handful of completed counties and an analysis of hundreds of precincts show “Yes” receiving enough support to win by a modest margin statewide.

Loudoun is the first big county to finish reporting most of its votes. The “Yes” campaign there is leading by a margin of about 22 points. That is not far off of Gov. Abigail Spanberger’s performance in the 2025 governor’s race, in which she took Loudoun by 29 points.

If the amendment passes, Virginia’s current balance of six Democratic districts and five Republican districts could end up being 10 to one in favor of Democrats. The proposed map would draw eight safely Democratic districts, two competitive districts that lean Democratic and one safely Republican district.

Republican leaders have filed several lawsuits challenging the referendum that Virginians voted on today. One circuit court judge agreed, ruling that the legislative process behind the amendment was badly flawed. But on appeal, the Virginia Supreme Court ordered the referendum to go forward. If voters approve the referendum today, virtually everyone involved expects the litigation to continue.

With Virginia’s vote tonight, the national redistricting wars are nearing their conclusion — at least for the 2026 election. The final remaining state that has indicated a desire to redistrict is Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis has scheduled a special session of the legislature to redraw the state’s maps. (Of course, the Supreme Court could change all of that, depending on the timing of its ruling on the future of a key provision of the Voting Rights Act.)

Rural, more Republican-leaning parts of Virginia tend to report their votes before the more Democratic urban and suburban areas. Typically, Republican candidates appear to be doing better in the early hours after polls close, and Democrats make up ground or move ahead when results from Fairfax County, the state’s largest and most Democratic, come in later.

Expect it to take a while before any definitive calls are made about a winner in today’s election. It took The Associated Press until 11:42 p.m. to declare Vice President Kamala Harris the winner in Virginia in 2024, when she carried the state by six percentage points. If the referendum is much closer than that, it could be a very late night.

The polls have closed in Virginia’s statewide referendum on whether to redraw congressional district lines in a way that could shift as many as four Republican-held seats to Democrats.

Since 2000, Virginia voters have decided 24 statewide ballot measures, and almost all passed or failed without much of a fight. Only three were genuinely competitive, making the uncertainty surrounding the results of tonight’s referendum fairly unique. If the redistricting measure fails, it would join a 2016 right-to-work amendment as the state’s only ballot propositions to fail since 1998.

This race attracted tens of millions of dollars, and a large portion of that went to the airwaves. More than $81 million was spent on political ads about the referendum, according to AdImpact, a media tracking firm. Democrats far outpaced Republicans, spending nearly $32 million more than Republicans on referendum ads in Virginia. To put that $81 million in context, that is just $3 million less than the $84 million spent on the Virginia governor’s race last year. And it’s $16 million more than what was spent in the New York City mayor’s race.

Gov. Abigail Spanberger said nothing in public and did no interviews today to promote the Yes side of the referendum, her spokeswoman said. She did post about it on social media and encouraged Virginians to “vote YES.”

In Goochland, outside Richmond, Richard Grebe, 63, a member of the local Democratic committee and a former contractor for the Environmental Protection Agency, said he had voted in favor of the referendum to help Democrats counter what he said was a misuse of executive power by President Trump.

The starkly gerrymandered nature of the House map that Democrats are proposing — they could win as many as 10 seats, leaving Republicans with only one — appeared to be resonating with some voters. “Ten to one. That says it all,” said Susie Goad, 67, a retired emergency room nurse speaking in Galax, Va. “Our rural areas need to be represented.”

Election Day reports have indicated turnout is stronger in Republican parts of the Virginia than in Democratic areas, but with 1.3 million ballots already cast — and Democrats far more likely than Republicans to vote before Election Day — the G.O.P.-backed “No” campaign has much ground to make up.

In some of Virginia’s red western counties, voters appeared well aware of the national redistricting picture — but were more focused on how rural voters might be disenfranchised by a newly gerrymandered map. “I understand voting ‘Yes’ has to do with countering what other states are doing,” said Franklin Surratt Jr., 26, of Sylvatus, who works at a Burger King. “I voted ‘No,’ looking at the issue for what it is. I think rural Virginia should do for Virginia what Virginia is supposed to do.”

Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the House Democratic leader, reiterated the message today that approving the referendum will help Democrats block President Trump. “Voting yes is an opportunity for the people of Virginia to decide that it’s the people of Virginia who should determine who gets to represent them in Congress, not Donald and the MAGA extremists,” Jeffries said during an interview on a Black radio station in Richmond.

President Trump, who on Monday night phoned into a conservative radio host’s online stream and hosted a conference call with supporters, urged Virginians in a social media post on Monday to vote against the measure “TO SAVE YOUR COUNTRY!”

The state was blanketed with advertising in the final days before Election Day. In the end, more than $80 million was spent on the race, with forces for and against the referendum using former President Barack Obama in their ads.

Polls close in about an hour in Virginia’s redistricting referendum. Turnout in early voting for the one-question election nearly matched the totals in last fall’s contests for governor and other state offices.