by James A. Bacon
Gov. Glenn Youngkin yesterday blamed Tuesday’s shellacking of the Republican Party in Virginia on the government shutdown. “I firmly believe that the government shutdown was a very, very big challenge as we ran into this election,” he told reporters. “We have 330,000 government workers here that weren’t getting paid. That is a real challenge heading into an election.”
Youngkin’s proposition is a not-implausible hypothesis of what happened Tuesday. But does it hold water?
Government workers were never Trump fans to begin with. They have always been true blue. Did the DOGE (the Department of Government Efficiency) layoffs and then the government shutdown change a lot of minds? Perhaps a few. But I suspect other factors were at play.
According to Virginia Public Access Project data, the big change between 2021, in which Republicans swept the statewide offices, and 2025 was a decline in voter turnout among predominantly red localities — not a surge in turnout in government worker-heavy blue districts.
Turnout in Democratic-leaning localities trended more or less the same as four years ago. By contrast, enthusiasm in red localities was down across the board — in literally every locality. Whatever was ailing Republicans Tuesday was statewide in nature. It’s hard to imagine that the loss of 300,000 federal jobs in Virginia weighed heavily on the minds of Republican-leaning voters in, say Patrick County in Southside Virginia (turnout down 8%) or Giles County in western Virginia (also down 8%).
An alternative hypothesis would suggest that Republican voters just weren’t excited about the Republican candidates. Winsome Earle-Sears never cozied up to Trump, and he never endorsed her. That had to hurt her with the MAGA wing of the GOP. Similarly, many conservative evangelicals said they could not vote for lieutenant-governor candidate John Reid, a gay man tainted by accusations of photos he allegedly posted on a website years ago. (Reid denied the accusations, but the other statewide GOP candidates kept an arms-length distance during much of the campaign, and he badly trailed his Democratic opponent in fundraising.)
Against that argument, one might observe that Attorney General Jason Miyares did garner a Trump endorsement, and he remained widely popular within the GOP, yet he, too, got pulled in by the undertow.
Another striking result of the election was the geographic uniformity of the shift in voter sentiment from Republican to Democrat in the gubernatorial election. This VPAP map shows the shift in voter preference between 2021 and 2025 — every single locality (in contrast to some reports showing that five rural parties incrementally increased their votes for GOP candidates).
In other words, two things happened; Voters shifted from GOP to Dem in every Virginia locality, and voter turnout declined in those jurisdictions where Republicans were strongest.
Source: Virginia Public Access Project. Click on the interactive map here to see details for each locality.
The percentage-point shift in Northern Virginia commuter shed, where federal workers are concentrated, was strong, to be sure — a 16.8 percentage-point gain for Democrats in Fairfax County, 17.7 points in Loudoun, 18.8 points in Prince William, 22 points in Stafford, and 22.7 in Spotsvlvania.
Was the driving force the ire of government workers, though, or was it a suburban thing? Chesterfield County swung 21.6 points and Henrico 19.9 points in favor of Democrats in the Richmond region, while in Hampton Roads Virginia Beach shifted 18.8 points, Chesapeake 18.5 and Suffolk 19.9 points.
An equally plausible hypothesis is that suburban voters repudiated Republicans even more forcefully than did their peers in center city locales (which were heavily Democratic to begin with) and in the non-metro counties where MAGA rules. One cannot exaggerate the vehemence with which many suburban women have come to detest Donald Trump. Their hatred overwhelmed any concerns they had about AG candidate Jay Jones’ fantasies of violence against his political enemies. The fact that Jones, who campaigned on using his office to fight Trump, won him a handy victory over a competent and untarnished incumbent speaks louder than any statistic that VPAP can publish.
Republished with permission from Bacon’s Rebellion.
