Early ads from Sears and Ciattarelli reveal GOP strategies: cultural fights in Virginia, cost-of-living in New Jersey.

Labor Day has come and gone, and the off-year campaign season is underway in earnest. In New Jersey and Virginia, both of which will hold legislative and gubernatorial elections this year, the major-party nominees are making their first pitches to voters with TV spots backed by significant ad buys. They give us some sense of how those races are shaping up.

First, let’s check in with Virginia Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earle-Sears. Her first ad against her Democratic opponent, Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger, goes negative — which you might expect from a figure who has been a fixture of statewide politics for years and needs no introduction. But the way in which it goes negative is revealing:

The spot is all culture war, focused entirely on trans issues and, specifically, on biological men competing in women’s sports. This is an issue that has served Republicans well in recent years to a degree that renders the Virginia GOP victims of their own success. State- and municipal-level educational institutions have been steadily ramping up restrictions on the ability of males to access female-only spaces. But the Virginia legislature has not acted, which gives Sears an opportunity to land a clean hit on Democrats.

“Our LGBTQ neighbors have the same legal rights as anyone else,” Spanberger is quoted in the ad — a proposition that, like not allowing men to covet women’s trophies, is generally not controversial. Sears manages a more effective attack at the end of the spot, highlighting her opponent’s opposition to parents’ sovereignty over their school-aged children.

Nevertheless, the ad is a base play, indicative of the challenges the Republican ticket is having mobilizing its own voters in advance of November’s general election. Polling in the race is sparse, with Spanberger enjoying single-digit leads in most surveys. The race is not yet the Democratic candidate’s to lose, but Sears’s spot does not convey the GOP’s confidence.

For her part, Spanberger’s first major ad of the general election channels negative sentiments in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which is perhaps most resented among current and former federal employees along the Old Dominion State’s northern border.

While the demagogic spot is also a base play — insisting that the bill steals services from the needy “so billionaires can pay less” — its focus on “raising costs” under Republican presidential and gubernatorial leadership is also an attempt to court persuadable voters.

Meanwhile, in New Jersey, Jack Ciattarelli’s campaign has put $1.8 million in reservations in New York City and Philadelphia’s pricey media markets to air this ad throughout the first half of September:

I have a soft spot for this one, since it was filmed in one of my favorite hometown diners and features waitstaff who know my children’s names. Nevertheless, I will attempt impartiality.

“We all know it,” the candidate begins. “New Jersey’s a mess, and all [Democratic gubernatorial nominee] Mikie Sherrill wants to talk about is President Trump. Come on.”

Whereas Sears’s ad provides Democrats with the opportunity to accuse Republicans of ignoring the “big issues” facing voters, Ciattarelli’s ad turns that accusation against his Democratic opponents. “What does the president have to do with rising property taxes and higher electricity bills?” he asks. It’s Democrats who “care more about pronouns and sanctuary cities than they do solving our problems.”

That’s an ambitious ad, and it should make Democrats nervous. This is not a spot for Republicans, which is smart given the degree to which they are outnumbered in the Garden State. Indeed, that disparity should put New Jersey’s governor’s mansion out of Republicans’ reach. But it has not. Once again, there have not been many polls of this race, but those that were released over the summer show Ciattarelli’s numbers creeping up while Sherrill’s are going south, albeit at a glacial pace.

Skyrocketing utility costs in New Jersey have put Sherrill on the defensive in recent weeks. Therefore, her answer to Ciattarelli’s spot (no word yet on the amount of money her campaign has put behind it) is both biographical and defensive:

Oddly, the advertisement focuses primarily on a sad state of affairs in New Jersey as “a 20 percent utility rate hike crushes New Jersey families.” That’s a strange thing to hear from a Democrat running for a seat that another Democrat has occupied for the past eight years. Odder still is her insistence that a state of emergency and utility price freezes are the answer to what ails New Jerseyans. Even voters who aren’t much for economics might ask themselves why, if that is the Democratic Party’s solution to the problem, they have to wait until next January before this “emergency” is properly managed.

Republicans don’t often win statewide races in New Jersey, but when they do, it often has a lot to do with rising costs and tax burdens under Democratic leadership. And there’s not as much time left in the campaign as the calendar might suggest. Mail-in ballots go out to New Jersey homes on September 20.