Republican Barbara Comstock wins Northern Virginia race to succeed Frank Wolf

Republican Barbara Comstock handily defeated Democrat John Foust on Tuesday in the race to replace retiring GOP Rep. Frank R. Wolf, ensuring Republicans will keep a toehold in increasingly blue Northern Virginia.

Ms. Comstock won the race to represent Virginia’s 10th District, which stretches from the outer D.C. suburbs north and west to the West Virginia border, replacing Mr. Wolf, a 17-term congressman who announced he was retiring late last year.

The Associated Press called the race for Mr. Comstock shortly after 9 p.m., when she held a lead with 55 percent to 42 percent, with 74 percent of precincts reporting.

She easily dispatched a host of Republican challengers in a firehouse primary in April and rode a solid advantage in fundraising to the victory over Mr. Foust, a Fairfax County supervisor.

Democrats had tried to bring a national “war on women” campaign to Virginia by highlighting Ms. Comstock’s opposition to the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision and her support as a state delegate for a bill requiring women to undergo a transvaginal ultrasound before having an abortion.

They also portrayed Ms. Comstock, who served as counsel to a House oversight committee that spent the late 1990s investigating President Clinton and worked as an opposition researcher for the Republican National Committee, as a career partisan out of touch with voters in the district.

But Republicans seized on comments in August from Mr. Foust, who said he didn’t know if Ms. Comstock ever had a “real job” — a line he attempted to clarify but one the GOP labeled sexist and which colored much of the rest of the campaign.