Northern Virginia voters headed to the polls Tuesday to fill the late Democratic Rep. Gerry Connolly’s seat in the 11th congressional district.
Democratic candidate James Walkinshaw, a Fairfax County supervisor, is running against Republican Stewart Whitson, a former FBI special agent. Walkinshaw previously served as Connolly’s chief of staff and was endorsed by the congressman prior to his death. Polls closed at 7 p.m. local time.
The district is just outside of Washington, D.C., and includes the city of Fairfax and most of Fairfax County. The district is reliably Democratic: In the 2024 election, Connolly won reelection 67% to 33% and former Vice President Kamala Harris won Fairfax County 65.6% to 30.9%.
A Walkinshaw win would further narrow the House GOP’s majority to 219-213. As of right now, there are four vacancies in the House, following the deaths of Connolly and two other Democrats, and the resignation of Republican Rep. Mark Green of Tennessee.
The special election comes less than a month before an end-of-September deadline for Congress to either pass a new federal funding package or face a government shutdown.
President Trump’s sweeping cuts to the federal workforce, led by the Department of Government Efficiency, are also a key issue in Virginia’s 11th congressional district. Some 12% of the district’s workers are employed by the federal government — more than almost any other district in the country, according to a 2024 Congressional Research Service report.
“The dominant issue in this race has been job cuts caused by Donald Trump, and I think that’s meaningful for the rest of the country,” Walkinshaw told CBS News. “So every single person in our community now knows somebody who’s lost their job because of those [cuts].”
Asked by Fox News about the cuts, Whitson called federal workers “wonderful people” with “great experience,” but added: “The people in our district who have lost their job or who are worried about losing their job, they don’t need sympathy, they need solutions.”
He said that he planned to work with the Trump administration and, “if there are good federal workers that have been pushed out of the federal workforce, I want to find a way to get them back in.”
