It’s that time of year again. Congressional Republicans and White House officials are racing to negotiate a funding deadline before the government runs out of money on September 30.

As Rich joked on Friday’s Editors podcast, these news cycles typically find a way of resolving themselves after weeks of dramatic headlines. But as things stand, Republicans in the House, Senate, and White House are currently pursuing different strategies about how to negotiate a deal, and one has to imagine that Senate Democrats aren’t exactly overjoyed about the prospect of helping Senate Republican break a filibuster without exacting major legislative concessions in return.

And just outside the Beltway, there’s an important tranche of Republicans who are extremely on edge about how everything will shake out: GOP candidates on the ballot this fall in Virginia.

The Northern Virginia suburbs are home to thousands of federal workers. Republicans in the state are aware that a shutdown would be catastrophic to their already dwindling chances of holding statewide offices and stemming the bleeding in the House of Delegates.

“If we go into a government shutdown, I mean, pack it up, right? It’s going to hurt,” one Republican political operative in Virginia told National Review. It’s important to note that early voting begins September 19, meaning many Virginians will cast their ballots before the funding deadline comes around. But even still, this GOP operative added, a shutdown would “have a deleterious effect on the ticket” and could even turn the Commonwealth into “D +9” territory.

Of course, historical trends have long suggested that the political environment was already tricky this year for Virginia Republicans in blue-leaning Virginia, especially now that there’s a Republican in the White House. And as NR recently reported, the GOP ticket had a rough start to the summer amid public and private tensions between Winsome Earle-Sears (the lieutenant governor and 2024 gubernatorial nominee) and her lieutenant gubernatorial running mate, John Reid. Republican operatives in the state tell NR that Earle-Sears’s latest staff shakeup has given her campaign a much-needed reboot and has helped the GOP ticket project a more united front heading into November.

But even still, holding the governor’s mansion, attorney generalship, and lieutenant governorship in Virginia will be a tough climb for Republicans this fall. Add government shutdown to the equation, and the electoral environment would look much, much trickier.