A deep-dive analysis reveals how Democrats’ superior online infrastructure and execution created a structural advantage that Republicans could not overcome in key legislative races.
A new, comprehensive report from the Center for Campaign Innovation has dissected the digital operations of Virginia’s 2025 House of Delegates races, and the findings deliver a stark verdict: a wide and deep digital capabilities gap directly contributed to Republican seat losses. The report, titled “Digital Campaign Tools and Performance in Virginia’s 2025 Elections,” moves beyond surface-level fundraising numbers to reveal how foundational choices in technology, advertising strategy, and basic digital hygiene created a structural advantage for Democrats.
Screenshot from Center for Campaign Innovation
The analysis of all 168 races shows that while a few GOP campaigns demonstrated digital competence, the party as a whole is operating with a fragmented, inconsistent, and under-resourced approach. In today’s political environment, the report makes clear, digital capacity is no longer a niche component of a campaign; it is a direct and reliable proxy for its overall strength, professionalism, and ability to win.
In modern politics, a campaign’s website functions as its digital headquarters. It is the central hub for donations, volunteer recruitment, voter education, and message control. The Virginia 2025 data make clear that website infrastructure was not a cosmetic choice but an early indicator of a campaign’s operational seriousness and capacity.
As the Center for Campaign Innovation notes:
“Website platform choice was one of the clearest indicators of campaign strength in the competitive districts.”
Among the twenty-one most competitive House of Delegates races, defined as contests decided within eleven percentage points, candidates who invested in professional-grade WordPress websites consistently outperformed their peers. Eighteen candidates in this cohort relied on WordPress, a platform that typically requires professional design support, technical configuration, and ongoing maintenance. Twelve of those eighteen candidates won their races, producing an average margin of victory of +2.2%, the strongest performance of any website platform examined.
Screenshot from Center for Campaign Innovation
The contrast with campaigns that opted for do-it-yourself website builders was stark. Eleven competitive campaigns used Wix, but only four were successful, and their average margin was a negative 1%. Squarespace users fared worse still.
Of eight candidates using the platform in competitive races, just two won, and the group suffered an average margin of minus 3.4%. The Center for Campaign Innovation cautions against simplistic conclusions but highlights the consistency of the pattern:
“The differences do not necessarily imply causation, but they strongly suggest that campaigns with the resources or staffing to deploy a more robust platform tended to be more competitive.”
The implication is not that WordPress itself delivers votes, but that platform selection reflects upstream decisions about staffing, planning, and investment. WordPress sites are rarely accidental. They signal the presence of professional vendors, campaign technologists, or in-house digital staff capable of building, testing, and optimizing online infrastructure. By contrast, Wix and Squarespace are designed for speed and self-service, often appealing to under-resourced or late-start campaigns.
This distinction matters because a campaign website is often the first and only point of contact for a potential donor or volunteer. A slow-loading page, confusing navigation, or amateur design introduces friction at the precise moment a campaign is asking for money, time, or trust. As the Center for Campaign Innovation’s performance data suggest, these frictions accumulate.
Technical performance reinforced the same conclusion. Among Republican candidates, winners had substantially faster websites than losers. Winning GOP campaigns averaged a Google PageSpeed desktop score of 92, compared with just 70 for those who lost. The Center for Campaign Innovation summarizes the pattern succinctly:
“Higher-performing websites may reflect stronger digital execution overall, offering voters a smoother browsing experience and giving campaigns more opportunities to engage supporters effectively.”
Even small markers of digital hygiene correlated with success. Candidates who used their full name in their domain URL outperformed those using only a last name by roughly 13 points on average. This is not because voters reward URL structure, but because such details are proxies for campaigns that plan ahead, coordinate branding, and treat digital infrastructure as a core function rather than an afterthought.
Nowhere was the Democratic advantage more pronounced or impactful than in grassroots fundraising. The report’s financial analysis reveals a chasm between the two parties. Across all races, Democrats outraised their Republican counterparts five-to-one from small-dollar donors. Even more stunningly, they mobilized a donor army that was 17 times larger, with nearly a thousand individual grassroots donors on average, compared to fewer than fifty for the average Republican.
This is not just a rounding error; it is a strategic catastrophe for the GOP. This financial gap had a direct and devastating impact in the districts that decided control of the chamber. In the 13 seats that Democrats flipped, their candidates raised an average of $2.2 million. This was more than double the $842,821 averaged by their GOP opponents. This financial dominance allowed Democrats to fund more advertising, hire more staff, and run more robust get-out-the-vote operations in the final, crucial weeks of the campaign.
The roots of this fundraising failure can be traced back to the most basic element of digital organizing: building an email list. In the competitive districts, every single Democratic campaign had a mechanism to collect email addresses on its website. It was a standardized, non-negotiable part of their digital infrastructure.
“Email remains the backbone of digital fundraising and volunteer engagement, and Democratic campaigns demonstrated a clear operational advantage by consistently prioritizing list-building.” – Center for Campaign Innovation
Among Republicans, however, nearly a quarter of candidates failed to include this fundamental tool. This simple omission is a self-inflicted wound. A campaign that does not collect email addresses cannot build a list. Without a list, it cannot cultivate supporters. And without a cultivated list, it cannot build the low-dollar fundraising base that has become the financial engine of modern political movements.
If fundraising shows the resource gap, advertising reveals the strategic one. The report’s analysis of Facebook advertising shows that while most candidates were present on the platform, Democrats treated it as a core and indispensable part of their communications strategy. In the competitive districts, Democratic campaigns ran an average of 34 distinct ad creatives, signaling a disciplined commitment to A/B testing messages, images, and target audiences. This approach allows a campaign to refine its persuasion and mobilization efforts in real-time.
Republican campaigns, by contrast, averaged just 19 ads, suggesting a more sporadic and less strategic use of the platform. The most damning statistic is this: every single Democrat who won a competitive race had run a sustained and active Facebook ad program. The same was not true for winning Republicans, of whom only six had used the platform.
In the 13 flipped seats, this strategic disparity became an avalanche. Democratic candidates generated an average of 525,000 impressions on Facebook, more than tripling the 151,000 impressions their Republican opponents managed. This meant that in the districts that mattered most, the Democratic message was seen three times as often.
While GOP campaigns were technically online, their opponents were running more sophisticated, better-funded, and vastly wider-reaching digital ad programs that ensured their message dominated the online conversation and reached voters where they spend their time.
The 2025 Virginia elections must be seen as a clear and urgent warning for the GOP. The granular data from the Center for Campaign Innovation’s report proves that digital incompetence is not a marginal issue but a direct cause of electoral defeat. Democrats are not simply raising more money; they are running disciplined, institutionalized campaigns with a mature and integrated digital ecosystem that is replicable and scalable from the state house to the White House.
As both parties look toward the 2026 midterm elections, the lessons from Virginia are stark and unavoidable. To be competitive, Republican campaigns and party committees must undertake a serious and systematic effort to professionalize their digital operations from the ground up. This means standardizing around effective platforms like WordPress, enforcing universal email list-building on every campaign website, and treating social media advertising as a core strategic imperative, not a last-minute add-on.