Abigail Spanberger’s inauguration as Virginia’s 75th governor offers an opportunity to reflect on the 2025 statewide elections in the Old Dominion.
Disclaimer: I worked on policy for Lt. Governor Earle-Sears’s gubernatorial campaign from June to September, and before that I interned for Attorney General Miyares’ campaign. The views I express in this article do not necessarily reflect the views of either politician or their campaigns.
On Nov 4th, Virginia held its three off-year statewide elections for governor, lieutenant governor, and attorney general. Governor Glenn Youngkin, who won in an upset in 2021, was term-limited, opening the door for Republican Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earle-Sears to run for the top job. As results poured in, it became clear that Earle-Sears and the Republicans had been wiped out by Virginia Democrats at all levels. Governor Abigail Spanberger won by a little under 15 points, Lt. Gov. Ghazla Hashmi won by over 11 points, and Attorney General Jay Jones won his race by 6 points. Democrats gained 13 state House seats, a devastating blow to Republicans that will give Democrats enormous power to determine the course of the Commonwealth over the next two years.
In light of Spanberger’s recent inauguration on Jan. 17, and drawing on my experience as a Virginia native who worked with several of these Republicans, I aim to analyze how this happened. While the results can be traced to Earle-Sears’s underperformance in rural Virginia and Spanberger’s dominance in Northern Virginia, these patterns point to a deeper problem for Virginia Republicans of a fragile coalition that proved difficult to mobilize in an off-year election increasingly shaped by national politics rather than state-level governance. Taken together, the results suggest that federal issues, partisan identity, and internal divisions came to dominate the race and overwhelm the Republican coalition Governor Youngkin brought together in 2021. These trends also affected the attorney general race that gained national attention due to Jones’ leaked private messages. I’ll also offer takeaways on where Virginia Republicans should go from here and what the Jones win means for our politics.
Governor
The Republican gubernatorial failure was a devastating combination of an inability to rally the rural base to come out and vote and federal government cuts that emboldened Northern Virginia voters.
On the first point, Earle-Sears struggled greatly to turn out reliable Republican voters in rural parts of the state. This came despite the campaign’s attempt to make rural Virginia a top focus, including Sears’s notable commitment to bring a governor’s office to Southwest Virginia. These trends look even worse when we crunch the numbers. The total number of votes each candidate receives is generally expected to go up every election as more people move to the state. But Earle-Sears came up nearly 230,000 votes short (13.7%) of Youngkin’s 2021 total vote count. Had turnout simply been on par with Youngkin’s 2021 count, Democrats would have gained only one House seat. As a few examples of the critical Southwestern Virginia counties where Earle-Sears failed to get strong turnout,1 in Wise County she came up 10% short of Youngkin’s turnout; in Buchanan County, 13%; in Smyth County, 11%.
Clearly, the base was lethargic. Part of this was fairly expected; Virginia Republicans had it good going into the election, with a Republican governor and president, while Democrats were searching for a big win to cling on to. The lack of a full-throated endorsement from President Trump likely hurt here too.2 Many voters who came out in droves for Trump just twelve months ago and Youngkin four years ago chose to stay at home. But more broadly, it appears that Earle-Sears struggled to energize a rural electorate whose turnout in recent cycles seems to have been driven less by generic Republican appeals and more so by Trump-specific enthusiasm. While she avoided open conflict with Trump, she also failed to generate the populist energy that has animated rural turnout in Virginia previously, leaving many voters unmotivated in an off-year contest where Trump himself was not on the ballot. This dynamic suggests that the rural GOP electorate in Virginia may be less uniformly Republican than it is Trump-aligned, a distinction that proved costly in this election.
On the second point, Spanberger saw significant overperformance in Northern Virginia. She gained 11.5% in Fairfax County, the largest county in the Commonwealth, beating the previous record set by her predecessor nominee Terry McAuliffe. She also saw a 20% increase in votes in Loudoun County, Fairfax’s heavily populated and more exurban neighbor to the west. These gains can be attributed in large part to Department of Government Efficiency-cuts from earlier this year and reductions in force made by the Trump Administration during the most recent government shutdown. It’s hardly an overstatement to say that Northern Virginia exists as a population hub because of the federal government, and its economy is as reliant on federal employment as Manhattan is on finance or Silicon Valley is on tech.
With the federal government beginning to slash worker counts, lower pay, and generally cause an uproar within the political establishment, anxious Northern Virginians looked to Spanberger for an answer as a potential source for change. Republicans struggled to counter this narrative, in part because responsibility for the shutdown was perceived as national rather than state-level, leaving Earle-Sears with little ability to separate herself from broader GOP governance in the minds of federal workers. Northern Virginia’s perennially high cost of living likely aided Spanberger’s margins here as well, though not as a uniquely decisive factor compared to past elections.
Attorney General
Jason Miyares was a strong Attorney General over the last four years. His race for re-election gained national attention when private text messages exposed that his opponent, Jay Jones, had called for the death of the former Virginia Speaker of the House and his children. With those revelations, Miyares picked up considerable steam toward the tail end of the election season, but it was ultimately not enough to overcome the same dynamics that harmed Earle-Sears and bolstered Spanberger. His turnout fell too, but even if it had not, it would not have been enough to overcome Jones’s lead.
In the end, Jones won by a higher margin than Kamala Harris won Virginia in 2024. I spoke to one top political operative with knowledge of the Miyares campaign about how the text messages affected the campaign’s strategy. They noted that the texts mainly served to reinforce a message they were already hammering: that Miyares would be both more bipartisan and better for public safety than Jones. Apparently, while most voters were well aware of Jones’s texts (the operative showed me polls that as much as 80% of Virginia voters knew the content of his texts) many were nonetheless willing to put those concerns aside and vote for Jones anyway. This suggests that for a significant share of the electorate, partisan identity and opposition to the Trump Administration outweighed character-based concerns, even when those concerns were widely known. In effect, the attorney general race became less a judgment of Jones himself and human decency, and more so a referendum on national politics, reflecting a broader trend in which candidate-level scandals seem to be having less and less effect on voter behavior in the ever-increasingly hyper-partisan state of US politics.
Takeaways
My first takeaway concerns what Virginia Republicans should do next. These campaigns were lost for many reasons, but at the top of the list was the party’s inability to present a unified ticket. Across the ballot, Republicans failed to back each other in critical moments, leading to a lack of cohesion that did not go unnoticed by voters. At times, it felt as though Earle-Sears, Reid (the lieutenant governor nominee), and Miyares were running on entirely separate tickets. For example, Reid’s early scandals led to some conflict with Youngkin and Earle-Sears, and towards the tail-end of the campaign, Miyares, noticing Earle-Sears was unlikely to win, broke with Earle-Sears and encouraged split-ticket voting. Rather than containing losses, these fractures likely reinforced voter perceptions that the ticket lacked momentum and coherence, further depressing enthusiasm among marginal Republican voters. If the state GOP hopes to recover in 2027 (unlikely) or 2029 (more plausible), it must develop a stronger backbone and a clearer sense of internal messaging and discipline.
My second takeaway is on what Jay Jones’s victory means for the Commonwealth. I previously wrote an article arguing that there should be no unity with the people who celebrated Charlie Kirk’s death, as these people are openly comfortable with political violence. Sure enough, millions of Virginians turned out to vote for someone who had previously called for the death of his political opponent and his kids.3 Some may claim that they simply “bit the bullet” and voted for Jones to resist the Trump Administration. That’s hardly a good excuse; legitimizing, condoning, or becoming comfortable with direct calls for violence is always problematic. In general, the comfort with political violence, especially on the left, is reaching a critical point that I fear will continue to bear repercussions on innocent Americans. God willing, Jones has cast off his former endorsement of violence and filicide, but in any event, Republicans must become more vocal and resolute in their opposition to political violence than ever before.
In sum, the Virginia races will have significant effects on the future of the Commonwealth, and will necessitate that Republicans seriously rethink their strategy if they hope to remain competitive. More broadly, the results illustrate how off-year elections are increasingly nationalized, with federal governance, partisan identity, and coalition enthusiasm often playing a larger role than state-level candidate quality alone. While this election was primarily shaped by Virginia-specific factors, especially those affecting federal workers, “sleeper issues” such as data centers and healthcare cuts likely played a role as well. These are becoming increasingly common in the minds of voters nationwide, and will continue to resurface in future elections beyond Virginia.
1 This article from the Cardinal News does a great job at analyzing Spanberger’s win by the numbers.
2 President Trump has said previously that he “would endorse [Earle-Sears]” and that voters should turnout to vote for the “Republicans” in Virginia and New Jersey, but he never offered an explicit endorsement like he did for Attorney General nominee Jason Miyares or New Jersey Republican gubernatorial nominee Jack Ciattarelli.
3 Again, lack of knowledge is not a strong excuse here. Republicans dumped millions into ads blasting on every medium with Jones’s text messages. The operative I spoke with noted how the Miyares campaign repeated Jones’s messages across the entire Commonwealth, from TV ads to micro targeting.