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A surge of early voting in Northern Virginia over the past week has reshaped the state’s early voting trends and made them look closer to years past, although they still have a higher rural component than usual.
Since early voting in Virginia began Sept. 20, the Virginia Public Access Project has been publishing those figures — and I’ve been remarking on how they don’t look like the trends we’ve become accustomed to.
Our experience with high levels of early voting is only a few years old, and our current congressional districts have only been in place since 2022, so that really just gives us two data points to go by: 2022 and 2023.
In both those years, though, the heaviest early voting came in Northern Virginia, and some of the lowest came in rural districts, particularly the 6th in the Roanoke Valley/Shenandoah Valley and the 9th in Southwest Virginia. That made sense: Northern Virginia votes Democratic and the Shenandoah Valley and Southwest vote Republican — and Democrats have been more open to early voting than Republicans have.
This year, though, the first four weeks of early voting trends saw rural (which is to say Republican) districts outvote the traditionally Democratic ones. We have no way of knowing, of course, who is voting — but when a 70% Republican district is outvoting a 70% Democratic one, well, that does get my attention, no matter how much I (along with others) warn about reading too much into early voting trends.
All those numbers, though, came before many localities opened satellite early-voting locations, which has made it easier for voters in Northern Virginia, in particular, to cast early votes in person. In the first week that those satellite locations have been open, we’ve seen a big jump in the number of early votes cast in Northern Virginia. We can’t necessarily say that’s a big Democratic vote — Gov. Glenn Youngkin has been urging Republicans to embrace early voting, and 11th District Republicans have made a particular push for their supporters to sign up for mail ballots. I’ve also seen chatter online that Democrats are now drifting back toward day-of voting while Republicans are shifting the other way. Until we see the actual results, we just won’t know.
What we do know is that there’s been a big spike in early voting in the 11th District (which covers part of Fairfax County) and smaller spikes in the other two Northern Virginia congressional districts, the 8th and the 10th. That’s left the latest early voting figures looking more like normal, although not exactly normal.
In 2022, the top three early-voting districts were the 1st, 2nd and 10th (with the 11th close behind), and the three lowest early-voting districts were, in descending order, the 6th, 9th and 3rd.
In 2023, the 1st also recorded the most early votes, but the 10th and 11th were second and third, while the bottom three were, in descending order, the 6th, the 9th and the 3rd.
Here are the latest early voting numbers:
District Currently held by: Geography Early votes through Oct. 20 1st R (Wittman) Chesapeake Bay to Richmond suburbs 121,421 5th R (Good) Southside, Lynchburg, Charlottesville 107,001 11th D (Connolly) Northern Virginia 96,943 7th D (Spanberger) Piedmont, Fredericksburg, part of Prince William 96,853 6th R (Cline) Roanoke Valley, Shenandoah Valley 94,740 10th D (Wexton) Northern Virginia 94,100 8th D (Beyer) Northern Virginia 91,963 2nd R (Kiggans) Hampton Roads, Eastern Shore, part of eastern Southside 91,711 9th R (Griffith) Southwest Virginia 85,629 4th D (McClellan) Richmond, part of eastern eastern Southside 83,555 3rd D (Scott) Parts of Hampton Roads 59,284
As of Oct. 15, the 11th District ranked ninth out of 11 districts. Now it’s in third place.
On Oct. 15, the 10th District ranked 10th. Now it’s moved up to sixth.
Looked at another way: In the space of five days, the 8th District’s vote total went up 45.2%, the 11th District’s increased by 49.3%, the 10th District’s went up 33.4% while the 1st District’s went up 18.5% and the 5th District’s went up 23.8%.
If these are Democratic voters driving the turnout in those districts (and we don’t know that, we just know that these are Democratic districts), this would seem to be good news for Team Blue, especially if they continue. On the other hand, the Republican-voting 5th District remains higher than one would expect, based on past elections. Ditto the Republican-voting 6th District.
All we can really say is we know what we know and we don’t know anything more: I pointed out one example last week of a House of Delegates district in Prince William County last year where the Republican candidate won the early voting, but the Democratic candidate carried the day-of voting (and the mail voting) and won the election.
Speaking of Prince William County, I used the example of the 7th Congressional District in a previous column to illustrate how much the vote in some localities was down. The 7th seems a good example because it’s a swing district whose incumbent, Democrat Abigail Spanberger, is leaving to run for governor next year. It’s one of the most closely contested races in the country this year, with a high-spending contest between Republican Derrick Anderson and Democrat Eugene Vindman. It’s also a district where the Democratic vote is concentrated in two localities: Prince William County and Fredericksburg. Two counties are swing counties (Caroline and Spotsylvania), while the rest are strongly Republican.
When I looked at this district before, I found that, as a share of the overall vote, the vote in the two Democratic localities was way down. Prince William accounts for 32.6% of the voters in the district but in early October, accounted for only 19.4% of the ballots cast. Fredericksburg accounted for 3.5% of the voters in the district but only 0.04% of the ballots cast. Now, that’s changed: Prince William now accounts for 28.5% of the ballots cast while Fredericksburg comes in right on the nose of its voter share overall.
Locality Locality represents this percentage of the district’s voters Locality represents this percentage of the district’s early vote so far How the county voted in 2020
Prince William (partial)
32.6%28.5%* Democratic 62.6% Stafford 20.4% 20.4% Democratic 50.5% Spotsylvania 19.2% 21.0% Republican 52.3% Culpeper 6.8% 7.6% Republican 59.1% Orange 5.2% 5.3% Republican 59.9% Caroline 4.2% 3.5% Republican 51.2% King George 3.6% 4.4% Republican 59.4% Fredericksburg 3.5% 3.5% Democratic 66.2% Greene 2.7% 3.6% Republican 60.7% Madison 1.9% 2.2% Republican 65.2% Albemarle (partial) 0.01% –* Republican 63.7%**
* Since we don’t know how many of Prince William’s votes are in which congressional district, we can’t directly know a number here. However, by adding up all the other localities, we can indirectly figure out Prince William’s current share of the vote. Because the Albemarle County share of that district is so small (just 36 votes), I’ve left it out because even if all 36 voters there have cast early ballots, that’s not going to change the general picture.
** The Free Union precinct in Albemarle is split between the 5th and 7th congressional districts. Overall, Albemarle is a Democratic county; it voted 65.7% Democratic in 2020. However, the Free Union precinct voted 63.7% Republican.
If you’re a Democrat, and assume (rightly or wrongly) that these localities are early voting the way they’ll vote overall, you have reason to feel better about these numbers than the ones earlier this fall. Still, close elections are won around the margins. Should that gap between Prince William’s potential share and its actual share worry Democrats? Maybe. Maybe not. While Prince William accounts for 32.6% of the total voters in that district, in the 2022 midterms, Prince William accounted for 28.9% of the votes in the 7th District. Put another way, Prince William undervoted two years ago and the Democratic candidate still won, so if Prince William is at 28.5% now, that’s not a danger sign for Democrats. They could still lose the election, but it would be for other reasons (swing voters swinging the other way, for instance), not because of the inherent “shape” of the electorate.
We also need to be mindful of the other things we don’t know.
How big will mail voting be?
As I pointed out in last week’s column, Democrats like mail balloting a lot more than Republicans do. I think their faith in the postal service to deliver ballots on time is misplaced (especially ones that have to go through the troubled Richmond mail distribution center), but they did not ask me. How many more mail votes will we see beyond the ones received so far? We don’t know. More to the point: Will voters who previously voted by mail shift to in-person early voting or day-of voting? Will we see overall mail vote numbers go up or down? We don’t know that, either. All we know is that historically the mail voting has gone heavily Democratic and have no real reason to believe it will be much different this year, but we don’t know if we’re talking just a few bags of mail or a lot.
How much is the early vote cannibalizing day-of voting?
This is a particular question for Republicans, given their push for early voting. Will this increase overall turnout by Republicans or simply rearrange when those Republican votes are cast? As with the mail voting (which primarily involves Democrats), we don’t know the answer to this, either.
After Nov. 5, we will. Of course, after Nov. 5, we’ll know a lot of things.
We’ll look at these trends again in our Friday newsletter
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