All the seats in Virginia’s closely-divided General Assembly will be on the ballot in November, and after Tuesday’s primary elections, both parties have a clearer idea of which candidates will be competing in swing districts — and who will sail to victory in safe Democratic or Republican seats.

In Northern Virginia, the question on Tuesday night was whether a quartet of Democratic incumbents in the state senate could hold on against well-funded primary challengers running to their left — and with most of the results in, it appeared that two had lost their seats.

Fairfax County School Board member Stella Pekarsky defeated Sen. George Barker in the Senate District 36 race with 52% of the vote to Barker’s 48%. Barker, a 16-year veteran of the senate, is the co-chair of the powerful Senate Finance Committee, a post that will likely now go to a lawmaker who is not from Northern Virginia.

Sen. Chap Petersen, in Senate District 37, also lost his seat to Saddam Salim, a Fairfax Democratic party stalwart, in an unexpected upset. In November, Salim will likely be the first Bangladeshi-American person elected in Virginia.

“This was a truly grassroots movement and we can all be proud of how far we’ve come,” said a statement from the Salim campaign late Tuesday night.

Petersen conceded Wednesday morning, saying the outcome was “not what we expected” and congratulating Salim.

“My term in office and my season in politics is coming to a close. I want to thank everyone who helped me in any way along this long and winding journey, especially over the last six months,” Petersen wrote. “We ran a positive campaign for re-election based on my past record as a Senator. It didn’t work this time and I bear all responsibility.”

Sen. Dave Marsden survived his primary challenge and won the Democratic nomination for Senate District 35, despite a new district and a well-funded challenge from Obama alum Heidi Drauschak. In Senate District 29, in Prince William County, Sen. Jeremy McPike, the incumbent, and challenger Del. Elizabeth Guzman are less than 100 votes apart, with 99% of the votes counted on Wednesday morning.

“There’s definitely a shake-up tonight,” said David Ramadan, a former Republican member of the House of Delegates who is now a professor of practice at George Mason University’s Schar School of Public Policy.

Meanwhile, in a hotly-contested race for the open 33rd Senate District seat, former Del. Jennifer Carroll Foy, a public defender in Prince William County, defeated former Del. Hala Ayala. Both women previously ran for statewide office: Ayala was the Democratic Party’s nominee for lieutenant governor in 2021, and Carroll Foy ran for the party’s gubernatorial nomination in the same year.

In Loudoun County, prosecutor Russet Perry won the Democratic primary in Senate District 31, a key swing seat, setting her up to go head-to-head with Republican Juan Pablo Segura in the fall. Ramadan predicted that the contest may be the state’s costliest senate race on record.

Elsewhere in Virginia, two notorious incumbent senators also lost their seats: Sen. Joe Morrissey, a conservative Democrat who has said he’d remain open to a possible 15-week abortion ban, went down to Del. Lachrecse Aird in the Richmond area. Sen. Amanda Chase, the self-styled “Trump in heels” Republican firebrand, lost in a three-way primary to former Sen. Glen Sturtevant in Chesterfield.

Ramadan said Morrissey and Chase’s losses are “an indication that centrism remains to be the direction that Virginia voters want Virginia to stay on.”

The primary shake-ups in Northern Virginia will add to dramatic turnover in the region’s delegation to Richmond, after redistricting prompted several key lawmakers to retire.

Redistricting also helped several primary challengers, including Pekarsky, by drawing incumbents like Barker into unfamiliar districts, dimming the advantage of voter familiarity and name-recognition that they usually enjoy. Ninety-three percent of the voters in the 36th District were new to Barker, while Pekarsky had represented a large percentage on the school board.

Most of those challenges came from the left, with candidates calling out what they saw as incumbents’ moderate stances on issues like campaign finance transparency, gun control, and labor policy.

The primary challengers tended to be decades younger and more racially diverse than the older white male incumbents they ran against. They made the case that Virginia Democrats need new blood to advocate more forcefully on issues like abortion, voting rights, and public schools, all of which are expected to feature heavily in the campaign for control of the General Assembly in the fall.

In the 37th District, for instance, Petersen lost to Saddam Salim, a first-generation immigrant whose family was displaced from Bangladesh due to climate change. Salim’s campaign argued that the district was due for a senator as progressive as the local electorate. Petersen is a centrist Democrat who supported Republican efforts to end mask mandates in schools in 2021.

On Wednesday, Senate Democratic leadership touted the diversity and energy of their crop of nominees heading into November.

“Finally, the Virginia Senate is going to start looking like Virginia,” said Sen. Jennifer Boysko, the party’s finance chair, who will be running in northern Fairfax’s Senate District 38 in the fall. Boysko spoke at a press conference Wednesday afternoon. She highlighted a laundry list of Democrats’ legislative goals going into the fall election, including protecting abortion rights, voting access and LGBTQ+ rights, lowering prescription drug costs, supporting labor, funding public schools, and addressing persistent shortages of law enforcement officers in the commonwealth.

Spirit of Virginia, Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s political action committee, saw the results differently.

“It is clear the radical progressive left is now in complete control of the Democratic Caucus in Virginia,” wrote PAC chairman David Rexrode in a memo summarizing the GOP perspective. “Gone are the reasonable Democrats who would put Virginia first. They have been replaced with new nominees who would find like-minded comrades in the most liberal legislatures in the country.”

Senate Democrats have acted as a self-described “blue brick wall” to much of Youngkin’s agenda. Youngkin successfully won major tax cuts in last year’s budget deal, but the split legislature has stymied his push for a 15-week abortion ban, sweeping school choice legislation, and more.

Some Senate Democrats raised concerns during the primary campaign about how a loss of seniority in the local delegation to Richmond could impact legislators’ ability to bring home state investment and advocate for regional issues.

Democrats in Northern Virginia have already seen several high-profile retirements after older members were drawn into new districts together. Those included Senate Majority Leader Dick Saslaw (D-Fairfax), Finance Committee chair Sen. Janet Howell (D-Fairfax), and former Speaker of the House Eileen Filler-Corn (D-Fairfax) — departures that could affect the region’s influence in Richmond next year.

“There’s no question that we lost about thirty years of seniority last night,” said Sen. Scott Surovell, the vice-chair of the caucus, who is also running for re-election in Fairfax, in Senate District 34. But Surovell pointed to what he called the party’s “deep bench,” with some Northern Virginia lawmakers, including himself, likely in-line to chair committees in the next legislature.

Surovell and caucus chair Sen. Mamie Locke also noted that two of the party’s Northern Virginia nominees — Suhas Subramanyam, who won a senate primary in Loudoun County, and Carroll Foy — have legislative experience from service in the House of Delegates.

In the state senate, ten lawmakers are retiring, a more than twenty-year high, according to analysis from the Virginia Public Access Project. In the House, one in four delegates are either retiring or running for a new seat in the state senate, per VPAP, setting the stage for some highly competitive races.

In the House District 7 race in western Fairfax County, Karen Keys-Gamarra emerged victorious in a field of four Democratic candidates, and in nearby House District 15 Laura Jane Cohen prevailed over two other candidates. Both Keys-Gamarra and Cohen are members of the Fairfax County School Board. In House District 19, which covers portions of Fairfax and Prince William counties, Rozia Henson is narrowly leading as of Wednesday morning.

Several of the competitive Democratic primary races in the region also featured a campaign finance duel between power company Dominion Energy, which supported mostly center-left Democratic incumbents, and Clean Virginia Fund, which put its money toward more progressive challengers. Clean Virginia funded candidates on the condition they pledge not to take Dominion money. (Multimillionaire Michael Bills founded and supports the Clean Virginia Fund.)

Clean Virginia’s contributions appear to have paid off in several races: The group gave Pekarsky more than $100,000, and it poured an additional $100,000 into Carroll Foy’s race. (Ayala received $125,000 from Dominion.) Carroll Foy’s top donor was Bills’ wife, Sonjia Smith, who gave her nearly $140,000.

On Wednesday morning, the group took a victory lap.

“Today’s election results definitively show Virginians are ready for a new era of politics — one in which everyday Virginians, and not corporate monopoly interests, come first,” said Clean Virginia executive director Brennan Gilmore in a statement.

Clean Virginia’s spending wasn’t successful everywhere, however. It didn’t pick off Sen. Dave Marsden, despite putting nearly $500,000 into the campaign of his primary opponent, Heidi Drauschak, who ran on good-government principles like campaign finance reform. Clean Virginia and Smith were far and away Drauschak’s top donors, and she outspent Marsden by about $100,000 — but still lost the race.

For many of tonight’s winners in safe Democratic districts, the primary campaign represented most of the heavy lifting. They’ll likely cruise to victory in November, when a handful of hard-fought contests — including a few in the Northern Virginia exurbs — will determine which party wins control of both chambers of the General Assembly.

The body is currently closely divided, with Republicans controlling the House and Democrats in charge in the Senate, a dynamic that has stalled all but the most bipartisan legislation and stymied significant aspects of Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s agenda on school choice, voter access, and a 15-week abortion ban.

Ramadan thinks both parties can learn lessons from Tuesday’s results.

“Local issues matter. Grassroots matter. Working with constituents matters. And money matters,” he said. “It’s going to be a game of who can raise more money, who can have a better ground campaign, and who is more connected with their constituents versus going to the extreme left or the extreme right.”

This story had been updated with more results from Wednesday morning and with comments from state Sen. Chap Petersen, nominee Saddam Salim, Senate Democratic leadership, Spirit of Virginia PAC, and Clean Virginia.