It’s been 46 years since Democrats last won a supermajority in the Virginia House of Delegates.

In 1979, Republicans gained two seats in the chamber as President Jimmy Carter’s approval rating plummeted due in part to the energy crisis that year, knocking the Democratic supermajority down from 76 seats to 74. This was the last time that Democrats had a supermajority in the House of Delegates: in 1981, despite Democrat Lieutenant Governor Chuck Robb’s 7-point win in the gubernatorial election that year, Republicans broke the supermajority by bringing Democrats down to 66 seats in the chamber.

The threshold for a supermajority in the Virginia House of Delegates is 67 seats. The last time one party held this threshold in the chamber was 2015, when Republicans held the exact minimum required for a supermajority. That year, all 100 seats in the House (and the 40 seats in the State Senate) were up for re-election, and then-Governor Terry McAuliffe (D) made it his mission to break the House supermajority so he could utilize his veto power to its fullest potential. That November, McAuliffe and House Democrats were successful in breaking the House supermajority by a single seat.

The House of Delegates has been closely contested in the last four elections since 2017, with neither party winning more than 55 seats in the chamber. Since redistricting in 2019, the estimated popular vote for the House of Delegates has been closely correlated with the share of seats each party receives in the chamber. These estimates were provided by friend of State Navigate Ryan Brune and Elections Coordinator Michael Foley.

Table 1. Virginia House of Delegates Elections 2017-2023

Year	Est. Statewide House Vote	Result
2023	DEM +2	51-49 DEM Majority
2021	GOP +3	52-48 GOP Majority
2019	DEM +5	55-45 DEM Majority
2017	DEM +4	51-49 GOP Majority

It’s important to calculate an estimate when examining state legislative elections’ popular vote margins, as many state legislative districts go uncontested. A perfect example of how uncontrolled state legislative popular votes can be unrepresentative is in 2022, when Illinois House Republicans won the popular vote due to Democrats leaving virtually every rural, conservative district without a Democrat on the ballot. Amateur observers would go on to screenshot the Wikipedia page showing the vote totals and suggest that it was Democratic gerrymandering that cost Republicans control of the Illinois House, when this was simply not the case.

In all likelihood, the estimated popular vote for the House of Delegates this November will range between D+4 to D+9; currently, our forecast estimates that the environment will land at roughly D+7. This environment suggests that for the first time in ten years, control for the majority in the House of Delegates isn’t a truly competitive chamber.

Our forecast currently has Democrats favored in 58 seats, with a higher chance of a Democratic supermajority in the chamber than a Republican majority: Democrats hold a 14% chance of recreating their supermajority from nearly fifty years ago, while Republicans have just a 6% chance of pulling off an early Christmas miracle by flipping the chamber.

So, what would it take for this dark horse of a Democratic supermajority to pull through? Through the remainder of the campaign, three things are needed for Democrats to become favored in our forecast to create a supermajority.

1. The August Surprise, Part III?

It’s rumored that in the next couple weeks, Democrats will release whatever opposition research they’ve uncovered on the Republican nominee for Lieutenant Governor, John Reid. That could be as soon as this month, which would repeat the “August Surprise” timeline of the 2017 (Charlottesville) and 2021 (Afghanistan) campaigns when the Virginia election worsened the incumbent President party’s chances of winning.

That would put incumbent Republicans in competitive House races in a precarious position, forcing them to distance themselves from the most ardent conservative on the ticket who’s campaigning all around the Commonwealth, whether the Republican establishment in Virginia likes it or not. Similar to what North Carolina Democrats did to legislative Republicans in 2024 after the Mark Robinson scandals, Democrats could anchor Republican incumbents to Reid and sink their chances of re-election if there is indeed an upcoming drop in opposition research which makes Reid a liability.

Of course, something else may occur which qualifies as an “August Surprise,” perhaps at the federal level, which upends the environment, making things worse for Republicans. The most likely candidate at the moment is the ongoing drama in Washington over the release of the Epstein files, but we’ll have to wait and see.

2. Trump’s Approval Nosedives

Trump’s approval is declining at about the same rate it did in 2017; while his approval rating is slightly higher than what it was at this point in 2017, the net loss in approval from the start at his term is about the same.

If it continues to follow that trajectory and matches the net loss in approval in 2017, Abigail Spanberger will likely win the race for Governor by roughly 15 points. Given the ticket-splitting tendencies between Governor and the House of Delegates, that’s likely not quite high enough for Democrats to win a supermajority; they’d probably win 65 or 66 seats, but not 67. Thus, the second key to the supermajority is a larger net loss in President Trump’s presidential approval from the start of his second term by Election Day than the net loss in 2017.

3. Investment in the “Supermajority Three”

Democrats would need to net 16 seats in the House of Delegates to create a supermajority, one more than what they gained in the House in 2017. As of this writing, our House forecast has them almost halfway there with a projected seven-seat Democratic net gain.

Another six Republican-held seats are well within the margin of error. A slightly better environment for Democrats, plus a bit of luck, could result in them flipping the seats Republicans are leading in our model by 0-4 points, including HDs 30 (Western Loudoun and Northern Fauquier), 86 (Hampton, Poquoson & York), 69 (Jamestown and Yorktown), 64 (Northern Stafford), 73 (Western Chesterfield), and 66 (Spotsylvania and southern Caroline). If Democrats win those, plus the seven we have them up in, that gets them to a net gain of 13 seats.

This brings us to what we’ll be calling the “Supermajority Three” of the 2025 elections. These are Republican-held seats where the incumbents have the clear lead but are currently moderate favorites to win. As of this writing, these seats are in the 5.5%-7.9% margin of victory range for Republicans, with each seat at a 76%-84% chance of Republican victory in our House forecast.

If Democrats win the 13 seats they’re either favored in or highly competitive in, they’ll need to win all three of the Supermajority Three seats to create a supermajority in the House. These seats include HD-52 in Lynchburg, HD-99 in Virginia Beach, and the tipping point seat for the supermajority, HD-34 in Harrisonburg.

Of these seats, the House Democratic Caucus have only one on their target list: Harrisonburg and Rockingham’s HD-34, the most likely supermajority tipping point in our forecast. The district was added to their roster in mid-July, but there hasn’t been any indication of financial investment into their candidate, Andrew Payton, as of the latest campaign finance reports which cover donations and expenditures through the end of June.

Despite our model showing HD-99 and HD-52 to be better pickup opportunities for Democrats than HD-34, it’s understandable why the caucus would add HD-34 first to their target list when examining previous election results in each district, as it had the closest result in the 2019 cycle.

Table 2. Election Results in the Supermajority Three

District	2023 Result	2021 Result	2019 Result	2017 Result
HD-34	GOP +13.8%	GOP +18.0%	GOP +5.4%	GOP +7.4%
HD-99	GOP +14.7%	GOP +18.6%	GOP +18.7%	GOP +18.0%
HD-52	GOP +9.0%	GOP +17.3%	GOP +8.1%	N/A (Partially Uncontested)

One commonality between two of the three Supermajority Three is a key voting demographic– college students. At the end of the day, college students will make or break the supermajority path for the Virginia House Democrats this year. HD-34 is based in Harrisonburg and nearby small towns and rural areas in Rockingham County.

James Madison University’s student and staff population makes up nearly half of Harrisonburg’s population; turnout and support amongst Duke voters is imperative to a Democratic victory, and the JMU Democrats haven’t made a successful post-COVID recovery in activity like the Virginia Tech Democrats have.

In seats like these, on-campus operations are required for student turnout. Our model uses the trends in the district going back to 2019, which have moved the seat sharply in the Republican direction, but seats like these can be elastic if there’s an active presence on campus from college Democrats, so it may end up being the closer seat of the three depending on the operational difference.

HD-52 is home to perhaps the most famously conservative college in the country, Liberty University. The university’s campus precinct is the most conservative in the Commonwealth, with Republicans regularly winning over 90% of the vote. However, students are what politicos call ‘low-propensity’ (or the more colloquial ‘low-prop’) voters, meaning that their turnout rate is irregular, particularly in non-presidential years like these.

As the Republican voting base has become more cohesively low-prop, it’s become a liability for them in years not divisible by 4. While Donald Trump won HD-52 by 11.7%, incumbent Republican Wendell Walker won re-election by 9.0% against a Democratic paper candidate, simply because the turnout at Liberty University was abysmal. It’s the inverse of seats like HD-34– Democrats need to hope that students don’t turn out here aside from small colleges like the University of Lynchburg or Randolph College, which have more liberal-leaning student populations.

The oddball of the Supermajority Three is thus HD-99, which is largely Attorney General Jason Miyares’s old House seat. It’s a largely white, college-educated, wealthy district in the northeastern part of Virginia Beach that trended to the left on the presidential level in 2024 thanks to Kamala Harris’s strength with white, college-educated, wealthy voters. It still possesses a large chunk of Black, Latino, and Asian voters along the Virginia Beach-Norfolk Expressway, which is why it swung to the right by a hair in 2024 (0.5%).

All in all, it’ll take a bit of luck and investment for Democrats to create a supermajority in the House of Delegates this year. Currently, it doesn’t seem likely, especially without investment in the Supermajority Three.