Former U.S. Rep. Abigail Spanberger, who is seeking the Democratic nomination for governor, speaks at a Moms Demand Action gun safety rally in Richmond on Jan. 15, 2025. (Photo by Markus Schmidt/Virginia Mercury)
Were it put to a bet, a lot of people would have lost a lot of money betting against the political fortunes of Winsome Earle-Sears.
Virginia’s Republican lieutenant governor, who is vying for her party’s gubernatorial nomination this year, isn’t a historic trailblazer as the first non-white woman to hold statewide office for no reason.
She is a one-woman force of nature whose personality and life story translate superbly to elective politics. She chews up naysayers for breakfast and blows through low expectations and conventional wisdom like a runaway cement truck.
Which is why a very early poll by the Institute for Policy and Opinion Research at Roanoke College raised some eyebrows when it showed Earle-Sears trailing her likely Democratic opponent, former U.S. Rep. Abigail Spanberger, by 15 percentage points.
Since the poll was published, however, two hard-right MAGA disciples have jumped into the battle for the GOP nomination that, until this week, seemed to belong to Earle-Sears uncontested.
Former Del. Dave LaRock of Loudoun County and former state Sen. Amanda Chase of Chesterfield have both filed as candidates, though neither has presented petitions with sufficient signatures to qualify them for the ballot. They have until April 3 to do so.
Turmoil on the GOP front could be considered at least momentarily fortuitous for Spanberger, a Democratic moderate who at the moment is unopposed for her party’s nomination. She’s had the advantage of playing offense since Donald Trump’s disruptive and controversial second presidential term began six weeks ago. All of that is to say that while it’s a safe bet that Spanberger leads Earle-Sears in a head-to-head match-up, the Roanoke College result seems like a gaudy margin.
Virginia has never cottoned to Trump. Republicans have taken beatings in every statewide election when Trump was either on the ballot or in the White House. But now, free of concern about having to seek reelection, he has flooded the country with draconian executive decrees of dubious legality, from renaming the Gulf of Mexico to abolishing entire federal departments without the consent of Congress, which passed the laws that created them.
It’s the latter that economically threatens the commonwealth. Since Trump instructed the world’s wealthiest person, Elon Musk, to slash Executive Branch agencies and fire their workers at his whim, Virginia has taken it in the teeth.
As Charlotte Rene Woods reported for The Mercury recently, no state is more inextricably tied to Washington, D.C., than its neighbor across the Potomac with about 144,000 federal people working in Virginia, particularly the capital’s suburbs.
If last fall’s election told us anything, the economy motivates voters, and a hit like this — especially in the state’s most heavily populated trove of voters — from a Republican president is a mighty large albatross for Earle-Sears, LaRock and Chase to wear around their necks in this election cycle.
Recent nationwide CNN and Washington Post polls show majorities disapprove of the president’s performance so far. Fifty-eight percent of those the Post surveyed oppose the cold, haphazard mass federal terminations superintended by Musk, who seemed to celebrate his cruelty by brandishing a chainsaw on the stage of a Conservative Political Action Conference meeting. In the CNN survey, 62% (including 47% of Republicans) said Trump hadn’t done enough to reduce high prices — a major point in his favor in his election victory over former Vice President Kamala Harris.
It’s already put Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin in a tight spot. That was clear in a news conference this week where he strained credulity by asserting that jobs in Virginia were so abundant that they could absorb the rash of lost, good-paying federal jobs. He teased the launch of a new state website that links applicants to public and private sector Virginia employers who are hiring. He also helpfully debuted another website specifically for newly out-of-work feds with information about seeking unemployment benefits and enrolling in Virginia’s public health marketplace.
In his “remain calm, all is well” moment, Youngkin strove admirably to put the best face on things. “I don’t believe that the federal government downsizing is wrong,” he said.
To be sure, Trump was elected for a second time to shake things up, and in November, he won both electoral and popular vote majorities for the first time. Nothing about his first month suggests that the hardships and turmoil he’s unleashed have cost him a minute’s sleep, and there’s no reason to imagine he’ll take his foot off the gas.
But it should keep Earle-Sears, LaRock and Chase awake the next eight months or so.
Even if this wasn’t the most disruptive presidency since the Civil War, the GOP has the headwinds of modern Virginia political history to contend with. With just one exception, the party in the White House has lost Virginia’s Executive Mansion in every election since 1973 when Mills Godwin, a former Democrat, won a second term as a Republican a year after Richard Nixon’s reelection. (The exception was Democrat Terry McAuliffe’s victory in 2013, the first year of President Barack Obama’s second term.)
LaRock and Chase are both unapologetically pro-Trump. Both advance the “Big Lie” that Trump won the 2020 election and both attended his Jan. 6, 2021, “Stop the Steal” rally on the Ellipse in Washington. Both say they were not part of the violent siege on the Capitol that shortly afterward when a MAGA mob sought to halt Congress from the Electoral College vote tally that formalized Trump’s defeat.
Both have run afoul of their own party. But Trump relishes and rewards blind personal loyalty. (For the unconvinced, contact former Congressman Bob Good.) So Earle-Sears can’t afford to dismiss her primary rivals.
I’ve known and covered Earle-Sears for 24 years and she will bring her best game. She is a smart, fierce and tireless competitor. If she becomes the nominee, Democrats need to know that she will motivate every Republican out there, particularly in rural Virginia, and credibly appeal to persuadable, center-right independents. She’s done it before.
Nobody — including some in her own party — gave her a chance in 2001 when she challenged scandal-scarred Del. William “Billy” Robinson in a deeply Democratic House district in Democratic-voting Norfolk. She raised about half of Robinson’s total for the race yet finished with 53% of the vote.
In 2021, she had been out of politics for many years and was hardly the best-known or best-funded Republican, yet she bested longtime party insiders to emerge from a socially distanced, COVID-era “unassembled convention” with the nomination.
But as much as 2024 was a change election nationally, this is developing into more of a change election in Virginia. It’s the first actual voting barometer of the party in power in Washington, as Youngkin and the GOP know well. They benefited from early-onset Biden fatigue four years ago to sweep every statewide office and win control of the House of Delegates. This year, unless things change radically and soon, expect Virginia to be heard loudly — perhaps a primal scream.
Spanberger is a wily politician whose portfolio as maverick who bucks her party’s liberal orthodoxy has held up well in Virginia’s most competitive swing districts since 2018. She stands to be perhaps the biggest beneficiary of Trump and Musk.
Bob Lewis covered Virginia government and politics for 20 years for The Associated Press. Now retired from a public relations career at McGuireWoods, he is a columnist for the Virginia Mercury. He can be reached at blewis@virginiamercury.com.
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