The Democratic nominee, Lieutenant Governor Tim Kaine, the son-in-law to Linwood Holton, won the election.

Kaine led in some polls for the first time in October 2005, and held his lead into the final week before the election.

He promised homeowner tax relief, centrist fiscal leadership, and strong support for education.

[6][7] The election was the most expensive in Virginia history, with the candidates combined raising over $42 million [8] Kilgore resigned as attorney general in February 2005 to run for governor (as is the convention in Virginia) and easily won the primary election against Warrenton Mayor George B. Fitch to become the Republican nominee.

This apparent public moderation of his previously open and hard-line stance on abortion troubled some of his conservative supporters.

He was further criticized for failing to limit his negative advertisements to 50% of his campaign's total publicity as Kaine proposed.

One such advertisement featured a father whose son had been murdered by a man who was on Virginia's death row; the father expressed doubt that the sentence would be carried out if Kaine were elected and alleged that Kaine would not even have authorized the execution of Adolf Hitler, based on an interview with the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

[9] The negative reaction to the mention of Hitler combined with Kaine's pledge to carry out the death penalty and explanation of his personal opposition as arising from his Catholic faith helped to neutralize what many observers thought would've been a potent issue for Kilgore.

Kaine's campaign had many political advantages, including his association with the state's popular Democratic Governor Mark Warner and defense of Warner's 2004 budget priorities, his "response ads" to Kilgore's death penalty advertisements where he spoke to voters about his religious convictions and as mentioned above, reminded them about how a large cross-section of Virginia media strongly condemned Kilgore for his negative death penalty ads, his relentless in-person campaigning across the state, and his opposition to tax increases.

[11] In contrast, Kilgore's campaign had many political disadvantages, including a backlash over the death penalty ads that Kilgore's campaign ran in the fall, the relatively low poll numbers of then-President George W. Bush at the time of the election, and a bitter division between the moderate and conservative wings of the Republican Party over tax and spending priorities.