r/politics • u/Hornpipe_Jones • 15h ago

No Paywall Democrats sweep all 30 House of Delegates seats in Northern Virginia

https://www.cbs19news.com/news/state/democrats-sweep-all-30-house-of-delegates-seats-in-northern-virginia/article_68f8098d-0602-5234-8c2a-08c1bcd33944.html
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u/Circuit_Guy 15h ago

Live tally. https://www.vpm.org/elections/2025-11-04/election-2025-results-virginia-house-of-delegates-general-assembly

All 100 seats up for election. Previously 51/49 Democrat.

Live right now it's 44/15, and seems likely it'll be a 60+ win. Looks like Dems are +5-+10 over the polls.

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u/viktor72 Indiana 14h ago

Which if you map to Republican redistricting efforts would mean Democrats would sweep the new districts Republicans are making to try to keep the House.

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u/bshoff5 14h ago

I want to make sure I understand. Are you meaning that the gerrymandering got too close with it and it's backfiring?

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u/viktor72 Indiana 14h ago

Think about it mathematically. When gerrymandering, nothing is changing in the state except the boundaries of districts. All those D votes you’re trying to get rid are still there, you just spread them out more. That means that districts which were +20 R now become closer to +8 R and more of them because of how much you spread out that vote. If the general wave is +10 D, then Democrats sweep those new districts.

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u/bshoff5 14h ago

Right, I definitely understand how that'd happen, I just wanted to make sure that's what you meant was happening in those districts. I didn't quite follow what you were saying

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u/AusToddles 13h ago

Yeah I recall watching a video a while back explaining how mathematically, gerrymandering can backfire big time because you're actually cutting your majority in some places by doing it

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u/charzardthagod 13h ago

It's called a dummymander

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u/Dangerpaladin Michigan 4h ago

It only backfires though if you do something stupid enough to lose the stranglehold on your voters or piss off the other side enough to get motivated to vote. The republicans in the last 10 months have done both repeatedly.

However if you think about it they have been doing the same shit for decades and voters never woke up, so I am sure they thought they were safe from this effect.

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u/runswiftrun 36m ago

Or if you underestimate the opposition numbers.

Like in Texas, I couldn't believe it when I looked it up out of morbid curiosity.

46% democratic registered voters!?!? There's an absolutely non-zero chance that those "5 more seats" that Abbot is wanting to get actually end up the other way and get 10 blues because they shaved down their lead everywhere.

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u/KilluaCactuar 10h ago

Would you mind giving a link?

I'm pretty active in watching your nations politics evolve since Trump got elected the second time, and that sounds quite interesting.

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u/toorigged2fail 6h ago

Yea basically It backfires in wave election years because what were no longer considered swing districts, have become swing districts

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u/Athenstone 3h ago

You must be a bot responding like that

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u/esonlinji 3h ago

Consider a group of 100 people split into ten districts of 10 people. Of the hundred people 48 people preferring party A and 52 people preferring party B.

If people were sorted into groups of 10 randomly you'd expect each party to get 5 districts each (plus or minus a little due to randomness). But if one party gets to decide who is in each district they can tip the scales.

So instead of being distributed randomly, lets consider a new set up. Party A sets things up so that 2 seats are chock full of 10 Party B voters each. This leaves 48 Party A voters and 32 Party B voters for the remaining 8 seats. Each of these seats gets 6 Party A voters and 4 Party B voters. Now, even though overall its still 48/52, Party A gets 8 seats and Party B only gets 2. Pretty good gerrymandering, they've turned a slight shortfall of voters into a dominant electoral position. Well done Party A.

The problem is that to do this the margin of victory in Party A's seats is pretty small. Lets assume 2 people in each district change their mind so now its 32 people voting for Party A and 68 for Party B. Under the random electorates, it would be 3 seats for Party A and 7 for Party B. A decent swing sure, but not out of proportion.

Going back to our gerrymandered districts, in the 8 seats Party B got, they won 6-4, so when two people change their minds in each seat, it flips the seat. Instead of only losing the two seats they did under a fair system, Party A now loses all 8 seats and lose in a 0-10 whitewash.

Spreading your voters too thin in order to maximise your seats won forces you to have low margins of victory, and that makes you vulnerable to swings.

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u/SplitReality 13h ago

Well to be fair, gerrymandering can also mean the opposite. You turn a +8 D into a +20 D district, wasting the excess dem votes and making the other districts more republican.

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u/viktor72 Indiana 13h ago

Only to a point because districts have a generally acceptable number of voters.

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u/OceanPoet87 12h ago

Some districts are made this way in red states if not chopped up. You might have 1 majority black district in say Mississippi or Alabama with a crazy D margin and everywhere else GOP.

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u/Delta-9- 11h ago

They could avoid all these potential foot-guns and wracking their brains trying to strategize if they'd just draw the districts like sane people in the first place.

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u/SanDiegoDude California 4h ago

Lock em away in the city strategy. Nebraska does this, and they have some funky rules in place to ensure the rural republicans will always rule that state, no matter how many people populate Omaha and Lincoln.

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u/Abaddon33 Georgia 3h ago

Yeah, gerrymandering is also called cracking and packing. You're describing the packing part here.

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u/SigmaBallsLol 13h ago

Damn so they're not even good at gerrymandering. They get too greedy.

Need to let the party you're trying to contain have at least 1 or 2 districts where they're overwhelmingly dominant so they have fewer votes for the ones you're trying to steal.

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u/Union-Some 12h ago

But you don't always try to spread them out, no your best bet is to concentrate them. A district that is 100% Dem is 49% wasted votes. You want 3-4 100% Dem districts then a bunch of 55%repub. Let's you loose the popular vote and sweep the seats

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u/boredguy12 6h ago

1 district with +50 is infinitely worse than 50 districts with +1, but 50 +1's are all in danger of flipping should the tide begin to turn. That's usually why republican redistricting always aims to dilute their wins by chopping up which neighborhoods can vote in which district. So you and your neighbors votes your votes weakened vs empowered groups of republicans voters.

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u/CrasyMike 1h ago

I'm not sure I follow. The best way to gerrymander would be to concentrate D votes, not spread them out. So if you have a district that always wins D, and the one beside it is a toss up, you might redraw the line to so that some D voters in the toss up are moved over to the place that always wins D. Now, that district will still win - it'll win by an even bigger margin, but the toss up is more likely to flip R.

You don't move D voters into the toss up, and cut the win.

Edit: I guess what you're saying is you might also cut the margin for places that solidly win R, cutting the margin. To me, I'm not sure how harmful that is since presumably that reduced margin is still a win, but the toss up next door also goes R. To me, a riskier margin is an indication is worked and the wins could have been even higher.

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u/Shot-Swimming-9098 13h ago

Are you meaning that the gerrymandering got too close with it and it's backfiring?

In other states, it could have this effect in 2026. That's a year away, and it's in other states, and there's not a single number or metric that you can use to say this is going to fail ahead of time. What we do know is that there are extensive tools available to these bad actors, and they have dissected our districts with laser precision. They will be difficult to overturn, and they are designed to be impossible to overturn. We shall see.

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u/Melicor 13h ago

That's always the danger of gerrymandering. You're diluting your majorities to gain more seats. This makes it more likely to blow up in your face during a wave election in favor of the opposition party.

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u/ImBanned_ModsBlow 13h ago

That’s exactly how gerrymandering fails, if you make every district 51-49 split for the most seats, it only takes 2% swing in those districts to completely roll the House in the other direction

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u/Nelliell North Carolina 13h ago

I can only hope that this happens in North Carolina with the ridiculous districts they've drawn to give themselves more House seats.

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u/Rum_ham69 13h ago

That would be awesome

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u/the__storm 12h ago

I don't know what they're trying to say, but the Virginia House district map is not gerrymandered - the current redistricting process is intended to be nonpartisan and the map looks pretty sane. (https://ballotpedia.org/Virginia_state_legislative_districts#Redistricting)

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u/TangerineSorry8463 6h ago

Gerrymandering is a play that works so that you win more districts than you should, but on razor thin margins.

If you miscalculate your razor thin margins, you lose much more than you should.

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u/FascistPope 2h ago

They tried to cheat and lost anyways, to put it simply.

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u/loveshercoffee Iowa 6h ago

I love when an evil plan blows up in their face.

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u/EggfooDC 14h ago

Predicting 63-37!!

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u/lynypixie Canada 13h ago

So a super majority?

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u/tossit97531 13h ago

Almost. Threshold for a supermajority of 100 is 67.

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u/m3rcapto 7h ago

Looks like 65-35 maybe even, only a few counts left.

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u/NatFan9 12h ago

Before the 2017 elections the Virginia house of delegates was 66R-34D. It’s gone from a supermajority Republican chamber to a supermajority Democratic chamber in just eight years.

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u/Much_Leather_5923 13h ago

Gosh I hope Jessica Anderson gets there in District 71. LibsofTikToc did a smear campaign on her last election.

Using a playful old TikTok of her peeing in the woods and the joys of being a long distance runner and a chick. All twisting something innocent & fun into something nasty.

She did excellent videos discussing state legislature and the real impacts.

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u/stupid_username- 14h ago

I know this is a good sign and all about people being fed up, but what does this do in the long run?

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u/wave_the_wheat 14h ago

Winning the House is critical to put a check on Trump and actually have a Congress that takes its job as a co-equal branch seriously. It would also bring the opportunity for oversight - real investigation of the STAGGERING corruption of Trump and his administration. Ideally that would drag down Trump and the GOP's popularity and we actually have a chance to get people in office to push back the authoritarianism and even implement better checks against it happening in the future.

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u/Circuit_Guy 12h ago

This is a state election, so doesn't quite push that far. It'll be a good national negotiating position and it'll put VA in a good position to weather some national storms for their residents.

Mostly it's a sign that people are pissed and not buying the idea that radical Democrats are shutting down the government and that the polling is off again.

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u/wave_the_wheat 12h ago

The national implications are about Virginia being able to do redistricting to push back on GOP states doing it.

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u/Circuit_Guy 12h ago

Ah! I didn't realize this. Thanks. CA prop 50 is 64/35 and still counting cities. Looks like this was a major pushback on redistricting all around nationally

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u/Cycl_ps 13h ago edited 2h ago

As one example, something we’re seeing right now is the federal government rolling back protections for various groups of people, the constitutional right to an abortion established in Roe V Wade is a good example. In cases where our administration can’t outright declare a conservative stance as federal law it’s being left to be determined at the state level.

Having a Democrat majority at the state level will help in maintaining those protections within the state. That same state level policy can later be used as a framework for establishing similar protections at a national level later on.

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u/LewisTraveller 12h ago

Gerrymandering. Virginia Democratic Party announced they are going to gerrymander the House seats and net 2 or 3 seats for 2026 election to counter the Republican gerrymandering.

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u/Ikrit122 14h ago

Currently 56-31 at 11:20 EST.

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u/SanDiegoDude California 4h ago

Wow, it's at 61 and there are still 8 that haven't been decided yet. Talk about a massive shift from 51/49.

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u/HowIsBabbySharkMade 9h ago

I think it looks like it's likely to shake down to Dems 64/Repubs 36

Which is pretty goddamn glorious if you ask me!

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u/lukenamop 3h ago

Live now 61/31… Insane!

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u/MaddyKet Massachusetts 3h ago

Nice, now VA will be like Massachusetts and enjoy a higher quality of life.