The race to succeed Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) is entering its crucial final weeks, and a new Washington Post/Schar poll shows nothing but headaches ahead for Republican nominee and Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears. Not only is her campaign broadly unpopular among voters, it’s also out of touch with the issues most Virginians want their next governor to prioritize.
Earle-Sears can thank her own running mate for steering her campaign into the ditch. In a radio interview last month, John Reid, who is gay, criticized Earle-Sears for being “100 percent against” gay marriage. If that wasn’t enough, Reid was also recently linked to a pornographic website specializing in Nazi fetish material. Yikes! (Reid denies the allegation.)
Social issues have remained an anchor for Earle-Sears as she prioritizes vague fights against transgender Americans ahead of kitchen table issues like healthcare affordability, jobs and the ongoing federal shutdown. Virginia voters are hurting after Youngkin’s mismanagement and President Trump’s sweeping federal layoffs — Earle-Sears and her GOP colleagues have come up empty-handed on meaningful solutions.
The Washington Post-Schar poll conducted late last month found that nearly one in five Virginia voters listed the economy, jobs and concerns over the cost of living as their most important issues ahead of next month’s election. More concerning for the Republicans, 12 percent of voters explicitly said their most important issue was to vote against Republicans and the MAGA agenda, behind only their concerns about the economy.
A candidate facing tough economic headwinds can use creative methods to distract voters from their anxieties, whether that involves highlighting future economic plans or lambasting the press for creating a false media narrative. That kind of persuasion is nearly impossible, though, when voters are mobilized to vote specifically because they think your political party has failed.
For Earle-Sears and the Virginia Republicans, the economy isn’t the problem — the scandal-plagued Republicans who wrecked the economy are.
Reid already highlighted one major problem during his radio interview last month: Earle-Sears’s fixation on social issues seems out of sync with the times even among her Republican colleagues. Her strong anti-abortion position is only a top issue among 5 percent of Virginia voters. Her strident defense of gun rights — Earle-Sears once campaigned with an AR-15 slung across her back — is the top issue for a slim 1 percent of voters.
Although Earle-Sears has focused on crime and social issues that rank in the single digits, her Democratic opponent, former Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D), has centered her campaign on addressing Virginians’ most pressing concerns. Not only has Spanberger managed to open up a 12-point lead in the Post-Schar poll, but her messaging has flipped the script on a Virginia Republican Party that once drew high marks from voters.
According to the poll, most voters now trust Democrats to handle big-ticket issues like managing health care costs, improving public education and overseeing the economy. In 2023, just 37 percent of Virginians trusted Democrats to manage the state’s nearly $600 billion economy. Today that number stands at 45 percent.
It doesn’t help Earle-Sears that Youngkin’s popularity has suffered over the last year due to a mix of economy-stalling state policies and his full-throated support for a MAGA agenda that most Virginians blame for making them poorer. Youngkin’s net approval rating has fallen by 15 points since last October, from plus-19 to plus-4 points. He now enjoys the approval of a bare 50 percent of registered voters.
Faced with long-term economic problems for which they have no real answers, Earle-Sears and the Virginia GOP are instead turning to old-fashioned mudslinging tactics that already look to be backfiring.
Although Trump is about as popular as a toothache in the Old Dominion, the president weighed in on social media to demand Democrats’ nominee for attorney general, Jay Jones (D), drop out of the race following the release of his tasteless text messages about former Republican state House Speaker Todd Gilbert. In a post to Truth Social, Trump melted down, dismissing the candidate as “sick” and “demented.” The weekend outburst only served to re-inject the unpopular president into the statewide news cycle.
Spanberger couldn’t have asked for a better way to remind voters that her opponent simply lacks the attention span to focus on issues that actually matter to the Commonwealth’s working families.
Maybe Trump’s gambit would have upended the race if the economy was in better shape. But it isn’t, and Virginians can feel that pinch in their bank accounts every time they head to the grocery store or fill up at the pump. Spanberger and the Virginia Democrats have offered voters a credible offramp from the Republicans’ political muck and mismanagement. The data shows they are eager to take it.
Max Burns is a veteran Democratic strategist and founder of Third Degree Strategies.