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Polls close at 7 p.m. in the City of Fairfax and Fairfax County, Virginia, in a special election to fill the U.S. House seat of the late Gerry Connolly.
Democrat James Walkinshaw will be the newest member of Congress, winning a special election in Virginia’s 11th Congressional District to replace Gerry Connolly, who had held the U.S. House seat representing the City of Fairfax and much of Fairfax County since 2009 and died in May.
Walkinshaw served as Connolly’s chief of staff and is serving his second term as the Braddock District supervisor on the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors. Connolly endorsed Walkinshaw as his successor before his death.
Walkinshaw beat out Republican candidate Stewart Whitson, a former FBI special agent and Army veteran. The Associated Press called the race at 7:36 p.m., 36 minutes after polls closed.
As of that time, Walkinshaw had earned nearly 75% of the vote to Whitson’s 25%. Approximately 37% of the vote had been counted, according to the AP.
His campaign also raised far more than Whitson’s, totaling over $1 million, compared to Whitson’s $224,469, according to the Virginia Public Access Project.
“What stands out the most for me about this election result is that it is in line with the wide margin that the late Rep. Gerry Connolly won by in 2024,” WTOP Capitol Hill Correspondent Mitchell Miller said.
Connolly was reelected in 2024 by close to a two-to-one margin.
“This result should be encouraging to Democrats, who needed a big win to indicate that they are energized heading into the 2026 mid-term elections,” Miller said.
The victory for Democrats means they now hold 213 seats in the House of Representatives, while Republicans hold 219. Miller cautioned that Democrats should not read too much into Tuesday’s victory, as Walkinshaw was heavily favored to win the race in the deep-blue district that Kamala Harris also won in the 2024 presidential election, with 65.4% of the vote.
Walkinshaw patterns his politics after his predecessor as a “pragmatic progressive.”
As a Fairfax County supervisor, he’s led efforts to ban guns from libraries and rec centers, improve pay and benefits for working families, extend tax relief to seniors and military families, and fight climate change, according to his campaign.
As he prepares to be sworn in as a member of Congress, Walkinshaw said he’s ready to challenge the Department of Government Efficiency and President Donald Trump’s mission to shrink the federal workforce.
“I want to take on the Trump agenda. I want to end DOGE and I want to deliver results for our community, as I did when I was Gerry Connolly’s chief of staff, as I have on the board of supervisors,” Walkinshaw told WTOP.
He said going through this special election process has had its challenges.
“It’s been a whirlwind,” Walkinshaw said. “It obviously started with a very hard loss of a close friend in Gerry Connolly. We had a sprint to the primary, a 10-way primary. So we sprinted to that, and now we’ve sprinted to this special election. But I’ve enjoyed most every minute of it, had the opportunity to meet thousands and thousands of folks here in the 11th District, and talk about their experiences and their challenges and their hopes and their dreams.”
As of 3 p.m., approximately 20% of the district’s voters had turned out to vote, with nearly 11% of them voting early and just under 9% voting Tuesday. During the last election for the 11th District seat that didn’t coincide with a presidential election, more than 55% of registered voters in the district cast a ballot.
Special elections traditionally have lower turnout.
This is a developing story and will be updated.
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Thomas Robertson
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