By Giulia Carbonaro
Senior Reporter
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Abigail Spanberger will become Virginia’s first female governor after defeating Republican rival Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earle-Sears on Tuesday by the largest margin of any Democratic candidate in the state in decades.
With an estimated 95 percent of the vote in on Tuesday night, Spanberger had 57.4 percent compared with 42.4 percent for Earle-Sears.
“Affordability and intense dislike of Donald Trump fueled this big vote for Democrats,” Larry Sabato, founder and director of University of Virginia Center for Politics, told Newsweek.
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“In Virginia, candidate quality played a role, too. Spanberger was a terrific candidate who fit Virginia perfectly. Earle-Sears was neither energetic nor impressive on the campaign trail. And that’s what Republicans said privately too.”
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Newsweek emailed the campaign teams for Spanberger and Earle-Sears for comment.
Where Did Virginia Voters Back Spanberger?
Spanberger’s victory on Tuesday flipped Virginia’s governorship from red to blue, bringing Democrats in the state and across the country a meaningful win in one of the first elections in the country since President Donald Trump’s return to the White House.
The 46-year-old former Democratic congresswoman and CIA officer’s double-digit victory was brought home by strong gains in Virginia’s suburban areas, as shown by a map of the electoral results provided by independent political news outlet VoteHub.
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The map shows overwhelming support for Earle-Sears in the western part of Virginia, with the notable exceptions of voters around Blacksburg, Cave Spring, Hollins and Martinsville. These are in less populated counties than the ones in the eastern part of the state where a majority of voters backed Spanberger.
In the western part of the state, Radford, Montgomery, Roanoke City, Martinsville and Danville, Lynchburg and Lexington voted for Spanberger, blue dots in a sea of red.
Moving toward the center and east of Virginia, the map becomes increasingly blue. The biggest blue patches in the map are around Charlottesville, Danville, Lynchburg, Staunton, Richmond, Fredericksburg, Hampton, Norfolk, Virginia Beach, Dale City, Bull Run, Winchester and Arlington.
Fairfax County—the most populated in the state—appears solidly blue, with voters backing Spanberger over Earle-Sears by a strong margin. It produces the highest number of voters, with The Associated Press estimating that nearly 320,000 people in the county voted for Spanberger, against around 113,000 for Earle-Sears.
What Does Spanberger’s Victory Tell Us?
Spanberger and her fellow Democrats’ victories across the country on Tuesday have been generally seen as a rebuke to Trump and what his administration has been doing for the past 10 months.
“Commonwealth voters made it clear what they were looking for from their next governor: lower costs, good jobs, affordable health care, and strong schools. And tonight, those same voters made it clear who they want to lead: Abigail Spanberger,” Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin said in a statement on Tuesday.
“With tonight’s victory, Virginians also delivered a resounding rejection of the self-serving and corrupt Trump establishment.”
Unlike Zohran Mamdani’s victory at the mayoral election in New York, which boosted progressives within the Democratic Party, Spanberger’s win fostered the case for more centrist politics. Both Democratic candidates, however, ran with campaigns focused on affordability, promising to deliver relief to struggling residents.
Spanberger, who will take the helm of a state which contains more than 300,000 U.S. government employees, also promised to address local concerns about the job market in the midst of the ongoing government shutdown, which has now become the longest in U.S. history.
Her rival, on the other hand, focused on culture war issues like transgender exclusionary policies.
“Tonight we sent a message,” she said on Tuesday in her victory speech. “We sent a message to every corner of the commonwealth, a message to our neighbors and our fellow Americans across the country. We sent a message to the whole world that in 2025, Virginia chose pragmatism over partisanship.”
According to Sabato, the elections’ results show that “Democrats need to nominate candidates that connect with each state or locality, and they’re all different. Spanberger plus [New Jersey governor race winner Mikie] Sherrill, two moderates, frustrate the GOP plan to claim Mamdani is the face of the Democratic Party,” he said.
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With Spanberger set to take over the office from Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin, Virginia’s top three statewide positions would all go to Democrats, with the party taking full control of the executive branch for the first time in four years.
“Youngkin’s administration hasn’t left much of a mark, and his Trumpism was out of step with Virginia. The page will be turned very quickly after this Democratic landslide—a contrast with Youngkin’s narrow victory in 2021,” Sabato said.
Democratic State Senator Ghazala Hashmi became the first Muslim woman to be elected statewide in the country after winning the race to become Virginia’s next lieutenant governor on Tuesday.
On the same day, Democrat Jay Jones won the race to become the state’s next attorney general, overcoming backlash surrounding texts in which he fantasized about killing a Republican lawmaker and his family.
Spanberger’s victory could have huge consequences for the Old Dominion, as she has expressed her support for constitutional amendments that would redraw Virginia’s constitutional map and restore voting rights for people with past criminal convictions. If the first of such amendments is implemented, Democrats stand to gain as many as four new congressional seats—a move that, like the one just approved in California, could counteract Republicans’ efforts to redraw districts in their favor in red states.
Update 11/5/25, 10:06 a.m. ET: This article was updated with comment from Larry Sabato.
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