When the Virginia General Assembly reconvenes in January, there will be a record number of women in the House of Delegates, a majority of them part of a blue wave of women.
When District 14’s Vivian Watts was first elected to the Virginia House of Delegates in 1982, she was one of 19 women. You have to search to find her among the men on the 100 member composite.
“Up until that point there had only been 21 total women who had ever served in the Virginia legislature since women got the right to vote,” Watts said.
It wasn’t until the 2017 election that the first surge came, with many of the newcomers from Northern Virginia. But Election Night 2025 was an even bigger breakthrough.
For women House of Delegates candidates, 37 Democratic women won their election, some of them defeating Republican men and flipping seats from red to blue. They will be joined by five Republican women.
“One, it was the women who stepped up,” said District 66 Delegate-elect Nicole Cole.
Cole, a school board member, flipped a Seat in the Spotsylvania area, defeating a veteran incumbent. She believes women won, in part, because they better connected with voters. She also thinks voters were looking for candidates who would back a constitutional amendment backing reproductive rights.
“As a woman,I don’t even want a politician to be making my health care choices for me,” Cole said.
Watts believes in these stressful economic times, women candidates did a better job of talking to and listening to voters.
“They’re not just there telling you, ‘This is the way it is, and I’m your candidate, and you should vote for me,’” Watts said. “They’re much more apt to listen, they’re much more apt to empathize, they have community experience and that’s what we elected over and over again last Tuesday.”
And 10 of the new Democratic House members also had early training with an organization known as Emerge Virginia, founded in 2014.
“So that Democratic women could basically get in the same room together and talk about the very real things Democratic women face on the campaign trail, learn about all the techniques it takes to run a winning campaign and then do it,” said State Sen. Danica Roem, who is the executive director of Emerge Virginia.
The next Emerge class of women is already getting started.
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