Throughout the course of Virginia’s only gubernatorial debate, Abigail Spanberger fixed her eyes on the middle distance as Winsome Earle-Sears unleashed a relentless barrage of interruptions. Spanberger, a former Democratic member of Congress and CIA operations officer, and Earle-Sears, the Republican lieutenant governor, descended into a series of bizarre scenes so often that viewers were probably wondering what they’d stumbled into.
It had everything: exasperated moderators, rapid-fire questions on the government shutdown, the state’s controversial car tax, and more, followed by answers that had to clock in at 60 seconds. Earle-Sears even managed to insert herself into Spanberger’s closing remarks. If Saturday Night Live writers want to turn it into a skit, as they did with Sarah Palin in 2008, they won’t have to do much.
Most debates have at least a takeaway of substance or memorable answer that defines a candidate. For former Gov. Terry McAuliffe in the 2021 governor’s contest, it was the remark—“I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach”—that helped Republican challenger Glenn Youngkin define parental rights as an issue just enough to propel him into power.
There was no such defining moment in 2025. Earle-Sears’s attempts to bait a former federal law enforcement official into a major misstep failed miserably. An October 30 Roanoke College poll released last week found Spanberger going into Election Day with a double-digit lead.
Letting Earle-Sears’s ideas and demeanor literally speak for themselves was one way for Spanberger to center herself in a contest so far devoid of major surprises in a light-blue state. But a key updraft for her candidacy is that President Trump remains very unpopular in Virginia, along with increasing frustration with how his chaotic governance is causing grave problems in a state that is heavily populated with federal government employees.
Spanberger’s focus on the economy and potential as a steady hand have been at the core of her appeal.
Virginia shades Democratic—both houses of the legislature have small Democratic majorities. Kamala Harris won the state in 2024; so did Joe Biden in 2020, and Hillary Clinton in 2016. The last Democratic governor of Virginia, Ralph Northam, won his 2017 race by nearly nine percentage points and was the beneficiary of the wave of early discontent with Trump’s first term.
The economy, and especially housing costs, is at the top of voters’ concerns. Governors have next to no sway over pocketbook issues like food prices or the trade dealings that have affected soybean farmers in the southern regions of the state who’ve lost their export markets. Nevertheless, Spanberger, despite being universally described as a cautious moderate, has leaned into the voters’ white-hot fury about DOGE’s illegal mass layoffs, trade disruptions, and still-rising food costs.
In the vote-rich Northern Virginia suburbs of D.C., and the Hampton Roads region of central Virginia, most everyone knows someone who has been affected by the federal layoffs and the current government shutdown. Spanberger, who hails from the Richmond suburbs, has seen the other side of shutdown politics, having joined a group of Democrats to meet with Trump and White House officials during the 2019 debacle—all of which makes it easier for her to spotlight the second Trump administration’s swift undoing of Virginia’s economic advantages.
She’s also been campaigning in rural central and southwestern areas of the state, which stand to be hit hard by SNAP and Medicaid cuts and hospital closures. But David Toscano, a former Democratic minority leader in the House of Delegates, isn’t sure this will work.
“I thought the SNAP issues and the Medicaid issues would resonate in rural Virginia, and they may somewhat,” he says. “But the other thing is, soybean farmers in much of Virginia are hurting because of the tariffs. Are they going to switch their vote now? They may [instead] stay home, but I don’t see evidence of a huge swing to the Democratic side that is more than what our partisan breakdown in the state looks like, generally.”
Earle-Sears has stressed Gov. Youngkin’s job creation record and her administration’s support for nuclear energy and data centers as well as state assistance for unemployed federal workers. The Winchester resident also has tried to take a page out of Youngkin’s culture-war playbook by voicing strong opposition to transgender rights. But with deep fears about the economy surging throughout the state, voters have not flocked to this issue as they did to Youngkin on parental rights. The governor, who can read the polls as well as any ambitious politician, hasn’t spent much time on the campaign trail with her either. As for the president, his support for Earle-Sears has been lukewarm at best.
Can Spanberger carry the other Democrats on the ticket with her? That is certainly the question in the attorney general’s race. Virginia’s partisan fault lines have tossed this contest into the down-to-the-wire category. In 2022, during his tenure as a member of Virginia’s House of Delegates, Democrat Jay Jones sent a series of inflammatory texts to a Republican delegate about the then-House Speaker and his children that landed him in deep trouble and have upended that race.
It seems that candidates for political office have yet to grasp that texts and social media posts have an unlimited shelf life. Jones has apologized, but his texts combined with Spanberger’s distancing herself from his candidacy have only helped his Republican opponent Jason Miyares, the incumbent attorney general. The Roanoke College poll showed Miyares with an eight-percentage-point lead, 46 percent to 38 percent.
A Miyares win would complicate matters for Virginia lawmakers. The Democratic House of Delegates passed a measure last week that would allow the state to redraw its congressional districts if any other state does the same as a response to the Texas-led redistricting campaign. Republican lawmakers have already filed a lawsuit arguing that the move is unconstitutional. The state does have an independent redistricting commission.
These moves may force Spanberger voters who may be leery of voting for Jones to think twice before voting for Miyares or blanking the race. The attorney general also faces criticism for his failure to join a Democratic state attorneys general–led lawsuit over SNAP benefits. But last week, Youngkin announced a plan to replace SNAP funding with a new Virginia Emergency Nutrition Assistance initiative on a temporary week-to-week basis using state surplus funds, which may be a political calculation that may net Earle-Sears some votes.
Spanberger’s focus on the economy and her potential as a steady hand after ten months of the Trump administration and four years of Youngkin have been at the core of Spanberger’s low-key appeal.
Turnout as always is the tell: In-person early voting began on September 19, and the vote totals so far are outpacing the 2021 race: As of October 30, five days before the election, 1,216,528 voters have cast ballots, compared to 926,324 in 2021. There are nearly six million registered voters in Virginia.