The first major electoral test of President Donald Trump’s second term takes place right across the Potomac River as Virginians head to the polls to pick a new governor in a couple weeks.
Along with the gubernatorial contest in New Jersey, the Virginia race represents one of the most closely watched off-year elections this November and may offer a referendum on the direction of the country ahead of the 2026 midterms, though both states are more to the left of center than other contests at play next year.
Voters in the Old Dominion State, heavily impacted by the issues in Washington, tend to swing against the party in the White House. This year Democratic former representative Abigail Spanberger and Republican lieutenant governor Winsome Earle-Sears are sparring over the economic outlook and thorny social and cultural questions, including how schools are handling transgender students.
A down-ballot scandal, with the Democratic nominee for attorney general fantasizing in leaked texts about the death of a Republican politician, has also disrupted the race and invoked already-prescient questions of political violence.
“It is a fairly nationalized race,” said Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball, a newsletter from the University of Virginia Center for Politics.
While next year’s battles feature more purple and red states compared to New Jersey and Virginia, political watchers are still paying close attention to how the campaign tactics and messages are landing with voters, Kondik said. Sabato’s Crystal Ball rates the race as “likely Democratic.”
While Earle-Sears’ campaigning around education has resonated with Republican evangelicals, Christian Democrats appreciate Spanberger’s focus on jobs, with this year’s aggressive downsizing of the federal workforce hitting the state particularly hard.
Virginia has the highest population of federal workers—147,358—outside Washington, DC, and California, and researchers expect the state will lose 9,300 of those by the end of the year. The ongoing government shutdown may cause additional strain. Each gubernatorial candidate has sought to point blame at the other for the standoff unfolding in the US Senate.
As the pastor of a Black church in Northern Virginia, Michelle Thomas said the cuts especially hit hard for members of her community. For years, government work offered stable, meaningful work for Black Virginians, something that has changed seemingly overnight with the change of administration.
Families are “shaken” by the loss, said Thomas, who leads Holy & Whole Life Changing Ministries International in Loudoun County and serves as president of the county NAACP chapter. “People want their lives back.”
Job seekers try to build up their resumes for the job search, while parents affected by the downsizing wrestle with whether they can afford to send their children to college. Together with the loss of jobs, sticker shock and high inflation have left people wanting change.
“Voters are looking for leaders,” Thomas said. “They’re not just looking for partisan rhetoric. They’re looking for people to show up with a plan. They want solutions to bring jobs back, solutions to bring prices down.”
Part of Spanberger’s plan to address economic concerns focuses on increasing agricultural exports, developing student apprenticeships, building in-state job training for sectors facing shortages, and investing in infrastructure and rural broadband. To help federal workers and contractors specifically, she’s proposed using the state’s Board of Workforce Development to set up mentoring partnerships and to place workers with private-sector jobs based on transferable skills.
“The chaos coming out of Washington isn’t just bad policy, it’s creating real harm for Virginia families and businesses,” Spanberger said at Virginia Chamber of Commerce’s Education and Workforce Conference earlier this month.
Earle-Sears has largely stayed away from talking about federal workers. She’s highlighted the jobs the administration added to the state during Governor Glenn Youngkin’s tenure: By June 2025, Youngkin saw 263,700 jobs added since he took office in 2022, according to an analysis by Cardinal News. Virginia also launched online resources to connect federal workers with new jobs. Earle-Sears also plans to cut taxes and get rid of some business regulations.
The Republican candidate has put the spotlight on school policies around students who identify as transgender. She deployed the Trump campaign’s 2024 election playbook by airing an ad that states, “Spanberger is for they/them, not for us.”
Earle-Sears wants to continue policies the Youngkin administration issued in 2023 that held that students should use facilities like bathrooms or locker rooms based on biological sex. Youngkin’s guidelines require parental permission before official school records can refer to a minor by a different name or pronoun, and make schools provide alternative facilities for students who request to opt out of single-sex spaces with transgender students.
Not all districts have complied with Youngkin’s plan. Several school districts continued to use previous guidance allowing students to use bathroom and locker facilities according to the gender they identified with, which has led to confrontations with other students and in some cases escalated to lawsuits.
That’s gotten the Trump administration involved. The US Department of Education determined that the policies of five Northern Virginia school districts violate Title IX, a federal civil rights law barring sex-based discrimination in education. The DOE said allowing transgender students to access facilities on the basis of gender identity “violate the sex-based protections” of the law.
“The more parents see these schools defying the guidelines, the more they want change from liberal elected officials,” said Victoria Cobb, president of The Family Foundation of Virginia. “They certainly don’t want those policies rolled back at the state level.”
Pastor Jonathan Avendano has heard concerns from parents in his community and his congregation, Iglesia Maná del Cielo in Northern Virginia.
“They’re just not comfortable, and obviously even their students, their kids, are not comfortable,” Avendano said. “We need to bring changes in what is happening in the school systems and especially make parental rights in the forefront of all that.”
Avendano is also a member of Youngkin’s Latino Advisory Board and has hosted Earle-Sears at his church.
Kondik said Spanberger’s “mainstream Democrat” brand may protect her from attacks that proved effective in the presidential election.
“If you look at the ads that Trump and his allies did against Harris, they did have video of Harris talking about sex-change operations for inmates. They don’t have video of Spanberger saying that,” Kondik said. “Spanberger has provided less ammunition on that and other issues.”
The Democratic candidate has danced around specifics on transgender policies and schools. In one ad, Spanberger highlighted that she’s a mother of three daughters and said, “As a law enforcement officer, I went after child predators, so it really angers me to hear these lies about who I am.” She added that “we need to get politics out of our schools and trust parents and local communities.”
Over 60 percent of Virginians identify as Christians, a number that has dropped 10 percent over the last decade, according to Pew Research Center’s Religious Landscape Study. Of those, 25 percent told Pew they identified as evangelical Protestant, and another 10 percent identified as historically Black Protestant.
A former CIA agent, Spanberger won election to the House of Representatives in the 2018 midterms in a longtime GOP Virginia district Trump carried by six points. She became part of the “mod squad,” short for moderate, in part due to opposing Nancy Pelosi’s bid to be House speaker. In 2020, Spanberger went viral asking members of her party to stop talking about defunding the police or about anything to do with the word socialism. Other times, she voted squarely with the rest of the party, including when it came to supporting Trump’s impeachment.
Earle-Sears, a Marine Corps veteran who immigrated from Jamaica in the 1970s, is Virginia’s first Black woman to serve as lieutenant governor. She used to direct a Salvation Army homeless shelter and had owned an appliance-and-plumbing-repair store. She served one term in the statehouse. She also served as vice president of the Virginia State Board of Education.
As lieutenant governor, she supported alternatives to public schools, and the Youngkin administration opened 15 College Partnership Laboratory Schools, also known as lab schools. Similar to charter schools, lab schools are tuition free and able to set their own curricula and budgets, and they are connected with public higher-education centers or eligible private colleges and universities.
Earle-Sears sought to tie Spanberger to a down-ballot scandal that surfaced in the campaign’s final days. National Review reported on text messages sent by Democratic attorney general nominee Jay Jones in 2022 fantasizing about the deaths of the then–House speaker Todd Gilbert and his children. Jones apologized but resisted calls from Republicans to withdraw from the race.
At a contentious debate at Norfolk State University, Earle-Sears said Spanberger should call for Jones to leave the race: “What would it take? Him pulling the trigger? Is that what would do it, and then you would say he needs to get out of the race, Abigail?”
Spanberger said voters would have to make up their own minds about who to support and reiterated that she condemned the violent rhetoric in the texts: “I denounced them when I learned of them, and I will denounce them at every opportunity.”
National figures have gotten involved, with former president Barack Obama planning a November 1 campaign event with Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill, the Democratic candidate for New Jersey’s gubernatorial contest. So far, Trump has not explicitly endorsed Earle-Sears, but he said Monday that “I think the Republican candidate is very good, and I think she should win, because the Democrat candidate is a disaster.”
Neither campaign responded to interview requests. Early voting began September 19. The election will take place November 4.
