Democrats on Tuesday night vastly overperformed their 2024 margins in a special election for Virginia’s 11th congressional district, which includes some highly educated, wealthy Virginia suburbs. The results in the district — which may have been driven, in part, by President Trump’s federal firings earlier this year — are a bright sign for Democrats leading up to the November gubernatorial election. 

The district became vacant earlier this year when Congressman Gerry Connolly passed away due to complications from cancer. His former chief of staff, James Walkinshaw, won the seat in a special election Tuesday night by a margin of 75 percent to 25 percent. 

In November, Connolly won the district by 34 points, meaning Democrats overperformed on Tuesday by 16 points. 

“This victory belongs to all of us, but tonight this victory is just the beginning,” Mr. Walkinshaw told supporters at his victory party Tuesday. “Speaker Johnson: I want you to know, I will be at the Capitol at 9 a.m. tomorrow morning, ready to be sworn in and go to work.”

With 219 Republicans and 213 Democrats now in the House, Mr. Johnson can only afford to lose two members on any party-line measure in the chamber. Two other deep-blue districts — one in Texas and the other in Arizona — will hold special elections this fall following the deaths of the districts’ respective congressmen. A deep-red district in Tennessee is expected to hold a special election in December following that representative’s resignation. 

The implications of the election in Virginia are twofold — first, for the Virginia Democratic Party, which is trying to win back control of the state’s governorship in November. The Democratic nominee for governor, Abigail Spanberger, who served for six years in the U.S. House, is currently leading in the polls by about nine points, based on the Decision Desk poll aggregator. 

The state will also elect a new lieutenant governor and state attorney general. All three of those offices are currently held by Republicans. 

Second, the results on Tuesday could be seen as a bellwether for the midterms next year, though the 11th district in Virginia looks far different than the country as a whole. The district had the sixth-highest percentage of federal employees of any congressional district in the country, with more than 12 percent of the total population being employed by the federal government as of 2024, though we do not have data from 2025 detailing how the Department of Government Efficiency affected each congressional district. 

By raw numbers, Virginia as a whole had the second-highest number of federal employees living within its boundaries of all 50 states, behind only to California. In total, more than 144,000 federal employees lived in Virginia as of 2024.