Virginia’s executive mansion in Richmond. (Style Weekly)
A little over one year before the 2025 gubernatorial election, Republican Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears and U.S. Rep. Abigail Spanberger, D-Prince William, the two leading declared candidates for governor, are tied at 39% support each, according to a new statewide poll by the University of Mary Washington’s Center for Leadership and Media Studies.
The remaining 22% of respondents in the survey of 1,000 adult Virginians said they were undecided, did not plan to vote, would back another candidate or refused to answer.
The poll is in line with the results from another UMW survey that also found Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump locked in a tight contest in Virginia, with the Democrat edging her Republican opponent by 48-46%.
Spanberger, who has represented Virginia’s 7th Congressional District since 2019, was the first candidate to announce her gubernatorial bid in November 2023. Earle-Sears, the first Black woman in the commonwealth to hold statewide office, and the first woman to attain such a role since Mary Sue Terry’s tenure as attorney general in the 1990s, launched her campaign earlier this month.
Attorney General Jason Miyares, another potential Republican candidate for his party’s gubernatorial nomination, would be equally competitive in a general election, the poll found. In a possible match-up between Spanberger and Miyares, 40% of survey respondents backed Spanberger while 39% favored Miyares, well within the survey’s margin of error.
Miyares has not yet announced his intentions for 2025, but Virginia attorney generals often either run for re-election to the commonwealth’s top legal office or campaign to become governor.
Republican Glenn Youngkin, the current governor, cannot run for re-election next year because of Virginia’s one consecutive term limit for governors.
“Virginia elections are often close, and the look ahead to next year suggests more of the same in the campaign for governor,” said Stephen J. Farnsworth, a political scientist at the University of Mary Washington and director of UMW’s Center for Leadership and Media Studies. “The big challenge for these potential candidates is becoming better known across the commonwealth.”
Virginians were more negative about the direction of the nation than about the direction of the commonwealth, with 24% saying Virginia was headed in the right direction and 26% saying it was headed in the wrong direction. The rest offered mixed views.
For the nation overall, 51% of those surveyed said that things in the country were headed in the wrong direction, with only 16% saying the nation was on the right track.
Virginians in this new survey said they approved of Youngkin’s job performance by a 46 to 34% margin. As for President Joe Biden’s job performance, 37% of survey respondents approved while 53% disapproved.
“Elections never stop in Virginia, and 2025 looks to be another very interesting electoral year in the commonwealth,” Farnsworth said.
The UMW poll was conducted by Research America Inc. between Sept. 3 and 9, 2024. The survey included a total of 1,000 Virginia residents, consisting of 870 registered voters and 774 likely voters. The margin of error is +/- 4.1%.
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