The “unofficial” start to summer 2025 has arrived, and with it, Virginia’s campaign season with its national implications—it’s touted as a barometer for how the electorate feels about the party in power in Washington.
The state never has an “off year”—what pundits call election years without a federal or statewide elections. Every year in Virginia features elections that could change the course of the commonwealth or even the country.
So, the next few months will be full of young campaign volunteers showing up at Virginians’ doors asking (politely) if they have yet made a choice in the upcoming election, full of glossy mailers extolling the virtues and sometimes the vices of one candidate or another, and full of stock-in-trade phrases from pollsters like “outsiders” and “outside the margin of error.”
Virginia is home to two nationally renowned polling organizations, the Wasson Center at Christopher Newport University and the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, home of professor Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball, plus several well-known regional polling outlets, including those at Roanoke College and Virginia Commonwealth University. However, rarely have we seen such a wide disparity in early polls as the two released last week for this November’s Virginia gubernatorial race.
One, Roanoke College, showed Democrat candidate Abigail Spanberger with a 17% lead over Republican Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears. The other, conducted by Pantheon/HarrisX and commissioned by the nonpartisan group VirginiaFREE had Sears’ deficit at only 4%.
How could two polls be so different? And why does the legacy media only seem interested in reporting the results of the Roanoke College one showing Spanberger with a seemingly insurmountable lead?
The Daily Signal put those questions to Chris Saxman, former Virginia delegate and the founder of VirginiaFREE. Listen here: