UPDATE: Spanberger declares victory after taking 5,100-vote lead over Freitas

UPDATE: 5:47 P.M. – Seventh District Democratic Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger has declared victory in her race against Republican Nick Freitas.

"Tonight, the Seventh District affirmed its commitment to leadership in Congress that puts Central Virginia first, works for everyone, and focuses on expanding opportunity for the next generation of Virginians," she said in a statement. "Serving the Seventh District in Congress has been my honor, and I look forward to continuing our work to strengthen and protect our communities."

UPDATE: 5:31 P.M. – The processing of about 49,000 additional absentee ballots from Henrico and Spotsylvania counties this evening has erased a 1,300-vote deficit and given Seventh District Democratic Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger about a 5,100-vote (or 1%) lead in her race with Republican challenger Nick Freitas.

Spanberger earned 18,582 of Spotsylvania’s absentee votes to Freitas's 16,217. She also widened her lead in Henrico when it reported about another 14,000 absentee votes. A total of nearly 450,000 votes have been reported in the race.

The Virginia Public Access Project suggested that as many as 19,000 additional absentee ballots still could factor into the race but still called the race Wednesday evening for Spanberger, since the likelihood of those additional ballots changing the results is very low. They could, however, pull the vote close enough for a recount.

UPDATE: 3:15 P.M. – We now have an approximation of how many ballots potentially remain in the Seventh District race between Abigail Spanberger and Nick Freitas: the Virginia Public Access Project pegs it at 69,001. That includes 56,505 ballots it says are known to have been cast and another 11,927 sent to voters that will be counted if they were postmarked by yesterday and returned to the appropriate registrars' offices by Friday at noon.

According to VPAP, "the overwhelming majority of potential votes are mail ballots." Spanberger earned about 61% of the absentee vote among those votes already processed, according to the organization; that would appear to bode well for her odds of winning re-election.

Another 569 provisional ballots were cast in the race, according to VPAP.As of mid-afternoon Wednesday, Freitas held a lead of 1,353 votes among the more than 400,500 reported.UPDATE: 11 A.M. – As of late morning Wednesday, much remains to be decided in the Spanberger-Freitas race for Virgnia’s Seventh District seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.

The Associated Press is reporting that Freitas is up by about 3,000 votes among about 401,000 tallied, but at least another 34,000 absentee ballots remain in Spotsylvania County and likely thousands more mailed-in absentee ballots from throughout the district – including Henrico – will arrive to registrars this week. (Ballots postmarked by Election Day must arrive to the appropriate county registrars by Friday at noon to be counted.)

It’s unknown at this hour whether Henrico has reported all of the absentee ballots its officials had in hand as of 7 p.m. yesterday or whether others are being counted today. The Virginia Public Access Project is reporting that some 21,000 absentee ballots apparently received by Henrico County were not included in the absentee totals reported by the county early Wednesday.

Also unknown: how many potential mail-in ballots might arrive between now and Friday at noon.

Countywide in Henrico, there were slightly more than 10,000 absentee ballots that had been mailed to voters but not yet received back as of Monday morning. It wasn’t immediately clear how many of those were in the Seventh District.

In Spotsylvania two years ago, Spanberger earned about 44% of the vote overall. She's currently at about 26% there prior to the absentee votes. So far this year, she's earned a very similar percentage in most other localities to what she earned in 2018, though slightly less in several cases.

If the same roughly pattern follows in Spotyslvania, that might mean she’d earn about 18,500 or so of the outstanding absentee votes there to about 16,000 for Freitas, increasing her overall share of the vote there to about 43%, pulling her within a few hundred votes of Freitas.

Conversely, if Freitas pulls a stronger number among Spotsylvania absentee voters, the election would swing in his favor, pending the outcome of other absentee votes.

Either way, the election appears headed for a possible recount.

– Tom Lappas

UPDATE: 5:30 A.M. –Democratic Representative Abigail Spanberger appears likely to win her Seventh District race against Republican Nick Freitas after closing about a 50,000-vote gap by earning a 26,000-vote advantage among absentee voters in Henrico and a 24,000-vote advantage among those in Chesterfield. With nearly 400,000 votes reported, Freitas leads by just 273 votes, but the lone remaining precinct to report is the absentee precinct from Spotsylvania County, which also is expected to go to Spanberger. Depending upon that margin, a recount may be in play. Spanberger earned 44% of the vote in Spotsylvania two years ago; she has just 30% today, prior to the absentee ballots reporting, which is why it appears she'll earn enough of a margin to win. The Virginia Public Access Project estimates there are about 34,000 absentee ballots to report the, though it had slightly underestimated the number of absentee ballots in Henrico and Chesterfield.

(ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED NOV. 4, 12:53 A.M.) – Rare is the Election Day on which a 48,000-vote lead at midnight in a state Congressional race isn’t considered safe, but such seemed to be the case Tuesday in the Seventh District race between incumbent Democrat Abigail Spanberger and Republican challenger Nick Freitas.Freitas held the lead – with roughly 138,000 votes to Spanberger’s nearly 90,000 – with all but four precincts reporting. But those “precincts” were central absentee precincts from Henrico, Chesterfield, Spotsylvania and Powhatan counties, which combined represented nearly 226,000 votes, or more than half of the votes cast in the election.

Freitas built his lead largely on the back of a pro-Republican electorate that voted in person Tuesday, but whether he could hold off Spanberger in what was expected to be a substantial Democratic vote remained to be seen.

Among Election Day voters in Henrico, Freitas held an advantage of about 5,100 votes (54% to 45%) over Spanberger. His lead among similar voters in Chesterfield was just more than 9,000 (61% to 38%).

But two years ago, Spanberger won the two jurisdictions by a combined margin of more than 30,000, and a total of about 181,000 votes in the district from the two counties remained unreported as of 12:30 a.m.

State election officials had suggested that absentee counting would end at 11 p.m. and that localities would report whatever numbers they had shortly thereafter, but that wasn’t the case.

Among the absentee votes from the six counties in the 7th District that had reported them shortly before midnight – all six Republican-leaning – Spanberger held a 758-vote lead. That would suggest what many pundits had predicted – that more Republicans voted in person on Election Day, while more Democrats voted early.

It also seemed to suggest that once the additional absentee ballots rolled in, Spanberger would erase much of the lead Freitas had built. Whether she could overcome the deficit entirely or not remained to be seen.

In signs that could be interpreted positively for Spanberger supporters, she gained 2.5% in Goochland this year compared with her total in 2018 and lost just 1% in Louisa County, about about 0.5% in Amelia County, 0.25% in Nottoway and just 0.1% in Orange County.

Speaking to supporters late Tuesday, Freitas said that he was encouraged by the results in some individual precincts and was confident that he would fare well when the absentee ballots were reported.

Earlier Tuesday, both candidates spent time greeting voters in Henrico. Spanberger began the day at Tucker High School (her alma mater) before moving on to Johnson Elementary and later Henrico High School, while Freitas also campaigned at Johnson Tuesday morning.

Overall, Election Day voters in Henrico cast a slight majority of ballots for Republican President Donald Trump over Democratic challenger Joe Biden (35,672 to 33,607), all but ensuring a Biden win once the absentee ballots were totaled up. It would be the fourth straight time Henrico voted for the Democratic presidential candidate.

Biden was projected as the winner in Virginia by the Associated Press, an expected outcome heading into the election.