Final 2025 Virginia Forecasts Show Democrats Poised to Win Virginia Elections

Author(s)

Chaz Nuttycombe, Allie Geier

November 3, 2025
Forecasting & Analysis, Governor, State Legislatures

Tomorrow’s Links to Bookmark

Virginia Election Results NavCast Model: race calls, live odds, projected margins, live margins – 99% COMPLETE, WILL BE DONE IN FULL BY TUES AM
State Navigate YouTube: livestream beginning at 9:30 AM as we call registrars for turnout reports throughout the day
State Navigate X Account: race calls will be posted here as well
Executive Director Chaz Nuttycombe’s X Account: pre-poll turnout analysis will be posted here as well as discussed on livestream, X space will begin at 6:30 with panel and race call announcements

Summary

It was 100 days ago that State Navigate debuted its first-ever election forecast, when it seemed that Democrats were overwhelmingly favored to win each statewide office and maintain control of the House of Delegates, while also expanding their majority in the chamber.

Not much has changed in the forecasts aside from the race for Attorney General, where Republican Jason Miyares started with roughly a 1-in-10 chance of victory and has surged in the final forecast to a 4-in-10 chance of beating his Democratic opponent, Jay Jones. That’s mainly due to the extensive opposition research conducted against Jones, which was released at the beginning of October, and the subsequent attack ads from the Miyares campaign and their allies since then.

In the race for Governor, Democrat Abigail Spanberger is virtually certain to win tomorrow; it is only a matter of what her margin of victory will be. Our final gubernatorial forecast gives her a 98% chance of winning and a 2% chance of losing to Lieutenant Governor Winsome Sears (R), with the most likely margin of victory for Spanberger being around 11%. In the race for Lieutenant Governor, Ghazala Hashmi is overwhelmingly favored to beat Republican John Reid, with an 89% chance of becoming the next Lieutenant Governor to Reid’s 11%. The most likely margin of victory for Hashmi sits at 6%.

In the House of Delegates, Democrats are incredibly likely to expand their current 51-49 majority. Democrats have an 82% chance of winning a regular majority and a 12% chance of winning a supermajority, which requires at least 67 seats in the House of Delegates. Their odds of winning a supermajority previously sat as high as 17%, but due to a lack of investment in required seats for a supermajority, their path to winning one is incredibly narrow. Republicans have a 6% chance of forcing a tie or winning a majority in the chamber.

In conventional wisdom, the most likely outcome range sits from a 57-43 Democratic House to a 65-35 Democratic House. Our final forecast has Democrats at least slightly favored to flip 9 seats in the House of Delegates this year, with four additional Republican seats sitting at less than a 70% chance of victory for the Republican incumbents in those races, including HDs 64, 73, 69 and 66, in that order. A simple overperformance by Spanberger in our model by a few points flips those seats into the Democratic column. Additionally, Republicans just need Spanberger to “only” win by a mid-to-high-single-digit margin to be in contention of winning seats they’re narrow underdogs in, such as HDs 86, 22, and 75.

Statewide Environment

The party that lacks control of the White House has had at least a slight turnout advantage in every Virginia gubernatorial election since the tradition of electing Governors opposite of the President’s party began in 1977 (yes, even 2013, when Democrat Terry McAuliffe became the sole exception to the tradition by winning a Virginia governor race while a Democrat was in the White House). This year will almost certainly be no exception, as much as Republicans in Virginia don’t want to believe it. The question isn’t whether the majority of Virginians who cast a ballot in this year’s elections voted for Kamala Harris in 2024; it’s by what margin they did so, and it will likely be by a wider margin than in 2024, even if only slightly.

Early voting indicates that, despite massive reductions in large Democratic localities in satellite voting locations compared to 2024, the partisan composition of the early voting electorate is slightly bluer than in 2024. The State Navigate early voting tracker has several features, including calculating how many votes there are in each county and precinct as a percentage of how many ballots were cast in that county/precinct on the equivalent day of 2024; this shows us that the Republican base in southwest Virginia and in large suburban/exurban localities like Pittsylvania, Bedford, and Campbell are running slightly behind the statewide total of 2024, despite little to no changes in early voting access and Republicans performing well with getting lower and mid-propensity voters out to vote early statewide. Rural counties in the coalfields have plummeted in turnout as well.

Meanwhile, the Richmond media market is on track to make a larger composition of the electorate this year, which is good news for Henrico native Abigail Spanberger. She’s likely going to have her biggest overperformances in comparison to the presidential results last year in the region. Northern Virginia does seem to be slightly behind the statewide average as well, as of this writing, but with more mail to count, that will likely pick up. Hampton Roads, however, is unsurprisingly lacking in turnout, particularly in majority-Black areas. However, heavily Republican areas are also running behind the statewide average at a smaller rate.

In part due to the reduction in access for satellite voting, Election Day will probably be bluer than that of 2024. This continues a trend of Virginia Republicans continuing to embrace early voting and making the Election Day vote less “red” since the widespread access to early voting in Virginia, which begins 45 days before Election Day. Privately, Democrats are saying that more of their voting base wants to vote on Election Day, but we’ll have to wait to see whether this is, in fact, the case. State Navigate’s Executive Director, Chaz Nuttycombe, and Data Science Committee Chair Charlie Kramer will be calling registrars around the Commonwealth to track turnout throughout the day before polls close and entering it in a sheet created by Elections Coordinator Michael Foley.

One key question that will determine the margins in the statewide races is the persuadable voters, which likely comprise roughly ~10% of the Virginia electorate. Spanberger seems more likely than not to win Independents by at least a 2-to-1 margin in the race for Governor, with Hashmi not far behind. In the race for Attorney General, however, Miyares seems to be performing well with these voters. What may sink him, however, is the statewide environment that favors Democrats. If this were a year like 2021, Miyares would be incredibly likely to win.

But it’s not 2021, it’s 2025. President Trump is incredibly unpopular nationally, and even more so in Virginia. Unlike 2017, his standing on the economy in the eyes of voters is one of his biggest liabilities. Grocery prices haven’t decreased, unemployment has grown in Virginia, and Spanberger seems poised to gain with voters who have the economy at the top of their mind. For Miyares to win, he must win a significant percentage of Spanberger voters (likely mid-to-high single digits) and hope there’s between 1-4% of Spanberger voters who decide not to vote for either candidate in the race for Attorney General.

It is a feasible path, and it wouldn’t stray far from the predicted route to victory if he won. Only two nonpartisan polls, State Navigate’s and Emerson’s, have Jones leading. In the final forecast, Jones is a moderate favorite to win the race for Attorney General. Should Miyares win, it will not be on the backs of Republican voters who came out for him and the rest of the statewide ticket in droves; it will be on the backs of independent-minded Democrats and swing voters who crossed over to his column over their disgust with Jones’s conduct. This would be the inverse of what some are calling “shy Jones” voters, who don’t publicly disclose their intention to vote for Jones in polling, but nonetheless vote or will vote for him.

Confidence in Forecasts

In 2023, Executive Director Chaz Nuttycombe and Development Director Jack Kersting gained statewide and national recognition for creating a forecast for the Virginia legislature that correctly predicted the winner of every legislative district in Virginia: 140/140 seats correctly predicted. We are going to dampen expectations given the difference in timing for gubernatorial elections and elections for the year before the presidential election: the forecast’s goal is not to hit another 100/100, but hopefully a 97/100.

Gubernatorial election years present the biggest challenge in forecasting House of Delegates elections due to the shift in the environment over thermostatic public opinion. We compared forecasting Virginia elections to a mile-long race track: The first quarter mile is the presidential year, the second is the gubernatorial, the third is the midterm, and the fourth is the “gubernatorial midterm.” The closer you are to the end of the track, the easier it is to see who the winner will be. Previously, Nuttycombe and Kersting put together a Virginia House forecast in 2021 that correctly predicted 96/100 seats in the House of Delegates, and in 2017, Nuttycombe created a forecast that also predicted 96/100 seats in the House of Delegates.

There’s less confidence in the predicted margin for the races of Lieutenant Governor and Attorney General: while Nuttycombe put together an expectation for ticket-splitting based on recent statewide elections and incumbency, the drastic change in the race for Attorney General race has increased uncertainty in the predicted ticket-split rate between the statewide elections. In any state, trying to predict the differences between statewide races is incredibly difficult, and given the lack of polling in other statewide elections for state government last year, there will not be any statewide forecasts at State Navigate for the midterms aside from the gubernatorial elections that year.

District Profiles

Nuttycombe and Managing Editor Allie Geier have written extensively on most of the competitive districts in the House of Delegates this year. For deep dives on these districts, we’ve created a bulleted list with hyperlinks.

Due to time constraints, we unfortunately did not have the time to write district profiles for 69 (Chad Green), 89 (an open seat vacated by Baxter Ennis), or 34 (Tony Wilt). To make up for it, we’ll summarize these races here.

In HD-69, which contains just over half of York County, some of James City County, and smaller parts of the city of Newport News and Gloucester County, the incumbent Chad Green is trying to buck the encroaching Democratic gains in Newport News and James City. Donald Trump narrowly won this seat in 2024, and Tim Kaine lost it by exactly 30 votes to Hung Cao. Green ran uncontested in 2023, but he is facing a well-funded challenger in Mark Downey, a doctor who formerly challenged Amanda Batten in 2019 and 2021 when she represented the old HD-96. Green has been outspent by a million dollars by Downey, but incumbency/name advantage and stalwart Republicans’ voter participation could make the difference here on Tuesday. We predict that Green will keep his seat, but only barely; we have his projected margin at +1.8.

In HD-89, an open seat draws two new candidates into the fray. This district has parts of both Chesapeake and Suffolk Cities, and until this year was represented by N. Baxter Ennis. Ennis defended his seat in a multi-million dollar election against Democrat Karen Jenkins in 2023 and won by a touch under 2 points. This time, we don’t think the race will be that close, in no small part because Ennis decided not to seek re-election in 2025, and because Democrats have spent even more here to win the open seat. The Republican candidate, Mike Lamonea, is a retired ICE special agent and current Chesapeake School Board member who has served on Governor Youngkin’s Human Trafficking Commission. While both candidates have received substantial donor funding, his opponent, attorney Karen Carnegie, has the money advantage. She’s raised over $2.7 million dollars this cycle, and she is favored to win with projected odds of +5.2.

In HD-34, which includes the JMU homebase of Harrisonburg and parts of Rockingham County, incumbent Tony Wilt is the strong favorite to win against challenger Andrew Payton, a learning designer from Harrisonburg. Despite this being a college town, Democrat turnout in the City of Harrisonburg will not be strong enough to offset the solid Republican voters in Rockingham; this is a district that voted for Donald Trump by a touch over 6 and a half points, which is almost identical to the performance we’re expecting from Wilt on Tuesday. We have given Wilt’s victory a projected margin of +6.7.

Conclusion

Democrats are poised to win a trifecta tomorrow in the Virginia state government by capturing the races for Governor and House of Delegates. Abigail Spanberger will more likely than not win by 9 to 15%, carrying House Democratic candidates to victory on her coattails, as well as Ghazala Hashmi in the race for Lieutenant Governor, most likely. The real questions to be answered tomorrow are whether Jason Miyares can defy the favorable environment for Democrats and thus run for a promotion to the Governor’s Mansion in 2029, and just how many seats Democrats pick up in the House of Delegates.

Stick with the links at the top of this article for all of the latest results throughout the day and night in Virginia tomorrow.