Lyndon B. Johnson Democratic Richard Nixon Republican The 1968 United States presidential election in Virginia took place on November 5, 1968.

For over sixty years Virginia had had the most restricted electorate in the United States due to a cumulative poll tax and literacy tests.

[2] Virginia would be almost entirely controlled by the conservative Democratic Byrd Organization for four decades,[3] although during the Organization's last twenty years of controlling the state it would direct many Virginia voters away from the national Democratic Party due to opposition to black civil rights and to the fiscal liberalism of the New Deal.

At the same time, the postwar Republican trend of the Northeast-aligned Washington D.C. and Richmond suburbs, which had begun as early as 1944, would accelerate[5] and become intensified by the mobilisation of working-class Piedmont whites against a national Democratic Party strongly associated with black interests.

Regardless, all candidates had strong regional support in the state; Nixon's votes came mostly from Northern Virginia and the Appalachian Mountain areas, while Humphrey's votes were mainly from the Tidewater region and unionized coal counties in Southwest Virginia,[19] which had both benefited from increased voter registration under the Voting Rights Act and been centres of opposition to the Byrd Organization in previous generations.