Early in-person voting opened across Virginia on September 18 for the 2026 midterms, the first ballots cast in a state both parties see as a preview of whether Democrats can retake the U.S. House. Turnout in the opening hours ran ahead of the 2022 midterm pace in some localities: Alexandria reported more voters by midday than it saw over entire early-voting days four years ago, while Henrico County logged nearly 700 in-person votes by noon at its two government centers. Voting continues through October 31 ahead of Election Day on November 3, when all 11 of Virginia’s House seats and Mark Warner’s Senate seat are on the ballot.
The election is happening on a map Virginia Democrats didn’t want. After sweeping the state’s 2025 elections, the Democratic-controlled legislature passed a new congressional map this spring designed to shift as many as ten of the state’s 11 districts into Democratic hands, up from the current 6-5 split. Virginia voters approved the redistricting measure in an April referendum. In May, the Virginia Supreme Court struck it down, and the state reverted to the map already in use. Voters are now casting ballots under the district lines Republicans and Democrats have shared roughly evenly since the last redistricting cycle.
Warner, seeking a third Senate term, faces Republican challenger Bert Mizusawa. The more closely watched races are down-ballot. Republican Rep. Jen Kiggans in the Virginia Beach-based 2nd District is considered the most vulnerable incumbent in the state, in a rematch against Democrat Elaine Luria, who lost the seat to Kiggans in 2022. National analysts rate several of Virginia’s House races as competitive enough to move the overall balance of power in a chamber Republicans currently control by a narrow margin.
Virginia is one of several states, alongside California, Texas and Missouri, where a party controlling state government moved this year to redraw congressional lines mid-decade rather than waiting for the next census, in an escalating national fight over which side can convert control of a statehouse into extra seats in Washington. Virginia’s attempt was the one that a state supreme court actually blocked, on the grounds that the legislature and the ballot measure process it used didn’t satisfy the constitutional procedure for changing district lines outside the normal redistricting calendar.
That leaves Virginia’s outcome this fall to turn on the same lines that produced a 6-5 Democratic edge in 2022 and 2024, not the more favorable map the legislature and a majority of Virginia voters approved. Whichever party benefits from that in November will have the state courts, not the electorate’s stated preference on redistricting, to thank for it.
For Northern Virginia specifically, the stakes are close to home. The blocked map would have anchored a new, safely Democratic 7th District in the Northern Virginia suburbs, a swath of the D.C. metro area whose federal workforce has already absorbed the brunt of this year’s government layoffs and hiring freezes. Under the map actually in use, those same suburbs remain split across districts that are, on paper, more competitive, meaning the region’s federal workers, contractors and furloughed employees are voting in races both parties think they can still win.
Virginia votes first among the states holding 2026 midterms, and both national parties are treating turnout here as an early read on how the rest of the map behaves in November. Whatever the result, it will have been decided under lines a legislative majority and a ballot-measure majority tried to change and a court told them they couldn’t, a reminder that in the current redistricting fights nationally, who gets to draw the map has become as contested as what happens once voters go to fill it in.