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Election Day Voting
Voting signs outside of the Alexandria City High School in Alexandria, Virginia.
The lights have long since gone out on the marquee political contest of the year in Virginia. No other major challengers emerged to take on the presumptive leaders in the governor’s race: former Democratic member of Congress Abigail Spanberger, and the Republican incumbent Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears. So the Old Dominion’s gubernatorial primary contest disintegrated, leaving the two women to focus on November.
Spanberger, who was also a CIA employee, has high polling numbers, fundraising advantages, and a moderate image. Those favorables add up to an advantage in this purple Upper South state, a portion of whose electorate has been battered by federal employee job losses. Earle-Sears, a Marine veteran and ultraconservative culture warrior, will find herself starting from a defensive crouch as the campaign season gears up.
Housing affordability and the cost of living, central themes in the governor’s contest in New Jersey between recently crowned nominees U.S. Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D) and former state Rep. Jack Ciattarelli (R), are factors in Virginia too. But the federal government constitutes only a sliver of the New Jersey economy. An added issue for Virginia voters, from the northern suburbs of Washington to the Hampton Roads region that headquarters Naval Station Norfolk, is the fallout from the turmoil that DOGE and the White House have unleashed on federal workers and contractors.
In Virginia, the Defense Department is the state’s largest employer. Hating on the feds, whose purchasing power fuels the wider economy, doesn’t get anyone very far in the DMV. Federal workers are hard-working, respected bulwarks of the middle class in these regions and they are increasingly mad and sad as hell—and everybody and their neighbor knows it.
Which may be the reason why early Democratic voters in Virginia, despite the void at the top of the ticket, have set an all-time primary record, with casting about 135,000 ballots since the beginning of May.
Earle-Sears’s experience as lieutenant governor may help her do well in the red strongholds of southwest Virginia and Southside (in the center of the state along the North Carolina border), but she’s operating in the deep shadows of President Donald Trump, who is tremendously unpopular in Virginia overall. Medicaid cuts have stirred fears in the poorer sections of the state, and there’s no indication Earle-Sears’s hard-right stances will get her very far with the middle-of-the road voters who’ll hold the keys to victory.
The lieutenant governor can’t run on the conservative-lite credentials that Glenn Youngkin carried to victory on in 2021. Even Youngkin’s once-healthy approval ratings have disintegrated in recent weeks. The excess baggage of Earle-Sears’s problematic pronouncements on social issues, ranging from abortion, to LGBTQ issues, to comparing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs to slavery, won’t help. And her slowness in picking up on certain issues, such as getting rid of the state’s car tax, a major revenue source for localities, may not be a winning formula for her or Spanberger, who has also touted it. Overall, Earle-Sears’s hesitant campaign has caused a fair amount of consternation among Republicans Party leaders.
Spanberger has campaigned deep in MAGA country, going where many Democratic candidates for statewide offices nationwide still fear to tread. She may find receptive audiences, having served on the House Agricultural Committee and cultivated a reputation for responsive constituent services, before she even gets to tougher issues like Medicaid.
Polling has showed Spanberger in good shape, which would continue a trend that’s held for 11 of the past 12 elections, where the gubernatorial winner in Virginia is one party and the occupant of the White House is in the other.
TWO OTHER STATEWIDE OFFICES up are for grabs in even lower-key contests. Beyond stepping up to governor unlikely event of the illness, removal, or death of the governor, the average voter probably doesn’t know much about lieutenant governor’s day job. In Virginia, the lieutenant governor presides over the Senate, steps in to vote in case of ties in the chamber, and serves on state councils and boards. And as Earle-Sears might tell you, it’s also a convenient stepping stone for the governor’s office. (In a commonwealth quirk, the governor cannot serve consecutive terms; quirkier still, the lieutenant governor can run for reelection.)
This year there’s a crowded field of six Democrats, a Republican, and one independent in contention, with the top three Democrats jockeying for position with less than a week to go.
Levar Stoney, the former mayor of Richmond and protégé of former Democratic Governor Terry McAuliffe, moved over to the lieutenant governor’s race once Spanberger locked up her support. He’s come out on top in fundraising with $2 million in his war chest. Stoney did earn kudos in 2020 for removing Confederate statutes after the George Floyd protests. But today, kind words about Stoney are hard to find.
As one Redditor put it: “My goal is to inform for those Virginians who are otherwise uninformed that Levar Stoney sucks and has a poor track record as mayor in Richmond.” A destination casino proposal Stoney backed narrowly lost a citywide vote in 2021. Rather than wait for a more propitious moment, he turned right around to pursue a second vote. In 2023, Richmond voters dropkicked the casino question again by nearly 25 percentage points. In early January, days after he left office, Richmond suffered a water treatment plant failure after a winter storm. During the weeklong crisis that found residents using melted snow for hand-washing and toilet flushing, Stoney, who left office just days before the storm, refused to answer questions about the episode. State officials later faulted the city for its abysmal oversight of the 100-year-old plant: “The water crisis should never have happened and was completely avoidable.” Yet for some strange reason, Pete Buttigieg, President Joe Biden’s transportation secretary, endorsed him.
Sen. Aaron Rouse (D-Virginia Beach), another lieutenant governor front-runner, recently took a swipe at Stoney’s record, noting that as a Virginia Beach city councilor he made sure that his constituents had clean drinking water. Rouse, a former NFL player with the Green Bay Packers, New York Giants, and the Arizona Cardinals, has $1.8 million in in the bank. Though his advocacy for extending time for rental and mortgage payments for federal workers after government shutdowns was popular, his support for “skill games” at small retailers and past support for a casino in Northern Virginia suburb of Tysons Corner (a casino bill failed for the third time in the legislative session that just ended) could be fatal in these vote-rich areas.
The only Democratic woman the mix, state Sen. Ghazala Hashmi (D-Chesterfield) who hails from the Richmond suburbs, is the first Muslim to serve in the upper chamber. She’s been a critic of data center siting, which has proven to be a controversial issue in a state with the largest numbers of such facilities.
The Democratic winner meets MAGA Republican John Reid in November. He’ll be likely to prevail in Southwest Virginia and Southside, but that may not be enough to seriously to dent the vote total of the three major Democratic candidates. The Richmonder is the first openly gay man to run on a statewide ticket, checks all the ultraconservative boxes on issues like guns, diversity, education, and immigration, and has managed to outpace a sex scandal.
In the attorney general race, two Democrats are vying to run against incumbent Republican Jason Miyares. Jay Jones, a former state delegate, comes from a well-known political family, but he lacks the legal experience that his Democratic opponent Shannon Taylor, a commonwealth (district) attorney with actual trial experience, has. She has been nicked, but so far not bloodied, by a Clean Virginia attack ad blasting the campaign contributions that she’s accepted from Dominion Energy. The sum, $650,000, is most ever for a state attorney general’s race. Twelve members of the General Assembly and a current and a past member of Congress have called on her to recuse herself cases from involving the energy giant if she takes the race. They support Jones.
The Virginia Primary is Tuesday, June 17. Polls close at 7 p.m. Eastern time.
