“Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.”
— Mark Twain, 1897
We have an election change: After Election Day, it appeared that Abigail Spanberger had won Lynchburg, making her the first Democrat to do so in a governor’s race since Tim Kaine 20 years ago.
Not so fast, buckaroo.
Once the provisional ballots were added in late last week, Republican Winsome Earle-Sears wound up with the most votes in Lynchburg. That won’t change the statewide results, of course, but it does alter our understanding of what happened on the ground level in the Hill City.
The final results:
Earle-Sears 13,508 50.41%
Spanberger 13,231 49.38%
That’s a margin of 277 votes. Earle-Sears’ victory in Lynchburg can be attributed to provisional ballots from the Third Ward Second Precinct — which is where Liberty University students vote. In other college towns, provisional ballots from college students went overwhelmingly Democratic. In Lynchburg, they go the opposite way. In this case, the provisionals from the precinct went for Earle-Sears 733 to 16 — a margin of 717 votes, which was enough to put Earle-Sears into the lead in Lynchburg. No other Lynchburg precinct had anywhere close to that many provisional ballots. Fourth Ward First Precinct had 31 provisionals, which broke 20 for Earle-Sears, 11 for Spanberger. First Ward Fourth Precinct had 30 provisionals, which went 26 for Spanberger, four for Earle-Sears.
To give some sense of the partisan lean of the Third Ward Second Precinct, the vote there went 96.31% for Earle-Sears, 3.36% for Spanberger. I’m waiting for some further analysis statewide, but this could well be the most Republican precinct in the state. It was even more Republican in the other two statewide races. In the lieutenant governor’s race, this precinct went 96.52% for John Reid and 2.95% for Ghazala Hashmi. In the attorney general’s race, it went 96.68% for Jason Miyares and 3.18% for Jay Jones. In the House of Delegates race, Republican Wendell Walker went a few decimals higher: 96.72% to 3.14% for Democrat Rise Marie Hayes.
No wonder that political analyst Chaz Nuttycombe of State Navigate posted: “Spanberger won pretty much every swingy precinct in Lynchburg but Liberty is a tactical nuke.”
What do these revised results tell us about Lynchburg? Let’s step back and take a longer view. Here’s how the results in gubernatorial races have gone:
Year Democratic candidate Democratic vote Republican candidate Republican vote Percentage, D and R 2001 Mark Warner 9,314 Mark Earley 8,132 53.0 % to 46.3% 2005 Tim Kaine 8,329 Jerry Kilgore 7,708 50.9% to 47.1% 2009 Creigh Deeds 7,713 Bob McDonnell 12,503 38.1% to 61.8% 2013 Terry McAuliffe 7,923 Ken Cuccinelli 10,632 39.9% to 53.6% 2017 Ralph Northam 10,047 Ed Gillespie 10,959 47.2% to 51.4% 2021 Terry McAuliffe 11,000 Glenn Youngkin 13,668 44.2% to 54.9% 2025 Abigail Spanberger 13,231 Winsome Earle-Sears 13,508 49.38% to 50.41%
Let’s draw a line through that list above — pre-Trump and post-Trump (2017 would be the first state election after Donald Trump was elected president).
From 2001 to 2013, the Democratic vote in Lynchburg declined by 1,391 votes — or -14.9% from 2001 levels.
During that same period, the Republican vote in Lynchburg grew by 2,500 votes — or +30.7%.
From 2017 to 2025, the Democratic vote in Lynchburg has grown by 3,184 votes — or +31.7%.
During the same period, the Republican vote in the city grew by 2,549 votes — or +23.3%.
From those numbers, it would appear that Trump has been better for Democrats than for Republicans in Lynchburg.
What’s notable is that while Earle-Sears’ vote in Lynchburg was lower than Youngkin’s four years ago, it wasn’t that much lower. This fits a pattern I wrote about in a column last week: Earle-Sears did a decent job of retaining the Republican vote with more affluent voters; where she bombed was with blue-collar voters. The result: She ran better in Lynchburg than in many rural areas where the Republican vote dropped precipitously.
Now let’s move on to presidential races:
Year Democratic candidate Democratic vote Republican candidate Republican vote Percentage, D and R 2000 Al Gore 10,374 George W. Bush 12,518 44.1% to 53.3% 2004 John Kerry 11,727 George W. Bush 14,400 44.5% to 54.7% 2008 Barack Obama 16,269 John McCain 17,638 47.4% to 51.4% 2012 Barack Obama 15,948 Mitt Romney 19,806 43.8% to 54.3% 2016 Hillary Clinton 14,792 Donald Trump 17,982 41.5% to 50.4% 2020 Joe Biden 18,048 Donald Trump 17,097 49.6% to 47.0% 2024 Kamala Harris 16,664 Donald Trump 19,574 45.0% to 52.9%
From 2000 to 2012, the Democratic vote in Lynchburg grew by 5,574 votes — or +53.7%.
During that same time, the Republican vote grew by 7,288 votes — or +58.2%.
During the Trump era from 2016 to 2024, the Democratic vote grew by 1,872 — or +12.7%.
During that same time, the Republican vote grew by 1,592 — or +8.9%.
Taken together, what we see is that in the most recent (Trump-era) election cycles, we see both Democrats and Republicans growing their vote in Lynchburg, with Democrats growing somewhat faster than Republicans.
However, what we see in this most recent election — which was a good year for Democrats and a bad year for Republicans — is that even in those circumstances, Lynchburg still narrowly winds up on the Republican side.
That should be a sobering reminder for Lynchburg Democrats as they look ahead to 2026 and the at-large city council elections. If I were better at math, maybe I could figure out at what point this somewhat faster Democratic growth in Lynchburg will tip the Hill City more permanently blue — but this year’s results show that hasn’t happened yet. The long-term question is whether that tipping point ever comes. Once Trump passes from the political scene, will these trends continue or revert to their pre-Trumpian norm? That’s a question not just for Lynchburg, but perhaps the whole country, too.
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