Four years ago, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) was able to ride education and parents’ rights as campaign issues straight to victory. But current Republican nominee Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears isn’t getting the same traction.
Earle-Sears has positioned transgender Virginians in women’s locker rooms and on women’s sports teams in schools as a top issue, slamming her Democratic opponent, former Rep. Abigail Spanberger, multiple times during their only debate on Thursday.
But Earle-Sears has been struggling in the polls, and other issues appear set to dominate the off-year race, leading observers to ask: Have Virginia voters shifted on education, or is the cycle friendlier to Spanberger for other reasons?
Earle-Sears used an aggressive approach at the debate on Thursday, asking Spanberger directly about her stance on transgender children in girl’s locker rooms in schools.
“Are you going to change in a gym where men are nude in the locker rooms? Are you going to do that?” Earle-Sears asked her opponent.
“My answer is that in each local community decisions should be made between parents and educators, and teachers in each community. It shouldn’t be dictated by politicians,” Spanberger responded.
The Hill has reached out to both campaigns for further comment.
Earle-Sears is leaning heavily on the issue, sending out ads saying Spanberger wants “boys to play sports and share locker rooms with little girls.”
The strategy mirrors Youngkin’s back in 2021 when education and transgender issues hit center stage after a controversy in Loudoun County schools when a girl was sexually assaulted by a male student in a skirt.
The issue became an even bigger flash point in Youngkin’s race when his opponent, Democrat Terry McAuliffe, said at a debate that parents shouldn’t be telling schools what to teach.
“It’s just as though she looked at Youngkin’s campaign four years ago, said, ‘That worked really well. I think I’ll do that too,’ but did not take into account that the political environment is so different than four years ago,” said Mark J. Rozell, dean of George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government.
“The education issue is not playing as powerfully in this election as it did four years ago. The political context is very different this time. Four years ago, there was a swirling controversy over parental rights and public schools, as well as those horrible events in Loudoun County that got widely reported, threw a lot of fuel on the fire about the education issue, and Glenn Youngkin used it very effectively against his opponent,” Rozell added.
In a Christopher Newport University’s Wason Center for Civic Leadership poll released Monday, Spanberger is leading the race at 52 percent with Earle-Sears at 42 percent. In Emerson College polling from Oct. 2, Spanberger also had a 10-point lead.
“I’m not convinced the education issue ‘isn’t working’ as much as it’s that education has fallen further down the priority list for voters. The state’s issue agenda is far different now than it was four years ago coming out of COVID,” said Robert Blizzard, a Republican political strategist.
Others say education is still a highly relevant campaign issue, though the ground has shifted significantly under President Trump’s second administration. Trump’s Education Department has threatened the federal funding of five Northern Virginia school districts due to policies allowing transgender students in girl’s sports and locker rooms, part of a long list of states, colleges and districts to face such threats from his administration.
Youngkin has also ordered a criminal investigation into alleged school-funded abortion in Fairfax County.
“Education has played a pretty big role in this race, particularly when comes to Fairfax County and what’s happening in the school systems in Northern Virginia when it comes to parents rights, and when it comes to men in women sports,” said Jimmy Keady, a Republican political strategist with prior experience in the Virginia legislature. “Education has been a large issue, in particular, when it comes to the social issues.”
But polling has shown voters in purple Virginia have other, more economic, concerns.
Twenty-one percent of voters in the commonwealth said in September inflation and cost of living was a top concern, while only 18 percent put education in that spot, according to a Christopher Newport University poll.
Trump’s government layoffs and the federal shutdown have hit Washington’s Northern Virginia suburbs particularly hard, and Spanberger has repeatedly tried to tie Earle-Sears to the White House on the issue.
And most recently, news of Virginia Democratic attorney general nominee Jay Jones‘ leaked text messages in which he talks about violence towards former Virginia House Speaker Todd Gilbert (R) has dominated the conversation surrounding the race.
“She’s pivoted to Jay Jones text messages, and that is just an opportunity that the Republicans didn’t expect to have in this election, but otherwise the state of the economy, public health issues, these are very big, powerful issues in the electorate right now,” said Rozell. “The schools issue just seems to be under the radar compared to what it was four years ago.”