By MAYA SWEEDLER, HUMERA LODHI, HYOJIN YOO, HANNAH RECHT, KATIE MARRINER, SIMRAN PARWANI and EUNICE ESOMONU, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — After voters swung toward Republican Donald Trump during last fall’s presidential election, states like Virginia and New Jersey swung back toward Democratic candidates at nearly the same velocity as 2024’s shift, an Associated Press analysis of election data from this week found.

From populous suburbs to big cities to military-heavy counties, this year’s electorate moved decisively toward the Democratic Party. Some of these areas had the largest shifts towards Trump last year, particularly in New York and New Jersey, but on Tuesday, the returns more closely resembled 2020 margins.

This came alongside relatively high turnout, at least compared to recent off-year elections, suggesting that one pattern of the last decade in American politics — Republicans doing well when Trump is on the ballot, and Democrats doing better when he is not — continues to hold.

The AP’s analysis is based off county- and precinct-level data. In all cases, 2025 margins are as of 10:45 a.m. on Nov. 7. Additional votes will be counted as election officials tabulate late-arriving mail and provisional ballots. Here are some of the findings.

Virginia and New Jersey, the two states that elect governors in the year following a presidential election, both have a tradition of moving against the party in the White House.

Starting in 1976, every time a party has won back control of the presidency, Virginia voters have chosen a governor from the opposing party the following year. And in New Jersey, voters elected a governor from the opposite party of the sitting president in every election from 1989 to 2017.

Democrats Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill continued this trend with double-digit victories.

Spanberger’s victory was especially notable for its scale. In the last 12 Virginia gubernatorial elections, the average margin of victory was 8.6 percentage points.

Spanberger’s 14.4-point win — coming a year after Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris won the state by just 5.8 percentage points — was bolstered by big margins in Northern Virginia, home to Washington, D.C., suburbs heavily affected by federal government cuts and the ongoing government shutdown. It also greatly exceeded former President Joe Biden’s 10.1-point victory in 2020.