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VIENNA, Va. — Gov. Glenn Youngkin spoke for a lot of Virginia Republicans last week when he invited voters “on a little walk down memory lane.”
The man who’d led Virginia’s Republican Party out of exile four years ago returned to the trail for a packed July 1 rally inside a fire station for the statewide ticket. He called on Republicans to unite and recapture, almost beat for beat, the platform that worked for them in 2021.
“Virginians came together and said: ‘No more will we allow our schools to be teaching our children what to think, as opposed to how to think,‘” Youngkin said, recalling one of his brightest memories from Richmond: “Sitting on the steps of the Capitol, surrounded by children, signing that bill that said ‘Parents, take the masks off your kids.‘”
The GOP is clearly betting that it can run a Biden-era campaign in Virginia this year. Led by Youngkin in 2021, the party swept every statewide office and flipped the House of Delegates with a simple formula: Compete in racially diverse suburbs, drive up turnout with rural conservatives, and watch Democrats struggle to defend their record on crime and gender.
But this year, Democrats doubt that the issues that bedeviled them four years ago — like post-pandemic learning loss, public school gender policies, or higher crime that got blamed on criminal justice reform — will be on the ballot again.
They see Virginia as a proving ground for their post-Biden campaign strategies. And they see a backlash coming against elements of President Donald Trump’s second-term agenda that have hit the state especially hard, starting with his sweeping federal workforce cuts.
“People are focused on issues of affordability — in housing and in health care and in energy,” former Rep. Abigail Spanberger, the Democratic nominee for governor, told reporters after a stop on her statewide campaign bus tour last month.
Spanberger, one of the stars of the Democrats’ first anti-Trump congressional class in 2018, previewed a sort of sequel to the first “resistance.” By making her Youngkin’s successor, Virginians would get a chance to save their jobs and health care from the Republicans across the Potomac.
“At a time when we have more than 320,000 federal employees who call Virginia home, and their jobs, their livelihood and our state’s economy are under threat, we need a governor who will stand up for them,” Spanberger said at a late June rally in Fairfax.
Know More
Democrats started the 2021 election with shaky optimism about their chances. They nominated ex-Gov. Terry McAuliffe, who’d left office with high approval ratings, over younger and less well-known rivals; they started the summer with a narrow polling advantage over Youngkin.
The Republican proved to be a natural on the trail, and he exposed McAuliffe’s rust. Personally wealthy from his tenure at the Carlyle Group, Youngkin doubled the GOP’s campaign coffers and ran a cheerful “change” message, with memorable promises like an inflation-busting end to the grocery tax.
His team quickly identified the political backlash building to the handling of race and gender in Loudoun County’s public schools — which McAuliffe, like most Democrats at the time, blew off as a Fox News distraction.
“I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach,” McAuliffe said at the end of a debate exchange with Youngkin about the county school board’s policies. Youngkin turned that into a slogan, “Parents matter,” that would shape his governing agenda.
Republicans outside Virginia took lessons from Youngkin. Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, now Spanberger’s opponent, rode his coattails, as did state attorney general Jason Miyares, who unseated a progressive Democratic incumbent.
Youngkin became a kinder, gentler version of Florida’s Ron DeSantis, scratching out progressive COVID and race policies. His No. 2 hopes to govern in that mold.
“We need a governor who understands we’re not going back,” Earle-Sears said at last week’s rally. “We haven’t come this far to only go this far.”
Yet unlike DeSantis, Youngkin couldn’t translate his initial momentum into more Republican power. The party lost the state House in 2023, the first local Virginia elections since the reversal of Roe v. Wade, when Republicans tried to run on a 15-week abortion ban.
When Trump reclaimed the White House, Youngkin — who had steered clear during the 2021 campaign — celebrated his executive orders on DEI, immigration, and “boys in girls’ sports,” while assuring Virginians that anyone fired by DOGE would find high-paying jobs elsewhere.
The latter promise may not play out the way he hopes; one recent University of Virginia study projects 32,000 jobs will be lost in the state this year, driven by Trump’s federal cutbacks.
While Republicans portray a state they saved from California-style decline, now at risk of backsliding, Spanberger’s Democrats describe a state whose greatness is being threatened by the Trump administration — one in need of a governor who will fight back.
“We see terrible legislation moving through the Congress that would take health care away from hundreds of thousands of Virginians — adding insult to injury, because we are already experiencing increases in prices because of irregular and chaotic trade policy,” Spanberger said in Fairfax.
The View From Democrats
Public polling in Virginia is sparser than it was four years ago, when McAuliffe held a narrow lead after the primary and lost it in the fall. But Democrats see Earle-Sears as a far weaker candidate than Youngkin, operating a worse environment for the GOP.
In tight June primaries, they nominated Ghazala Hashmi for lieutenant governor and Jay Jones for attorney general. That duo helped then-Gov. Ralph Northam pass a suite of progressive bills.
“We fought to expand civil rights. We expanded Medicaid,” Jones told supporters when the Spanberger campaign bus stopped in Manassas Park last month. “As my friend and mentor Gov. Ralph Northam will tell you, when Democrats are in charge, good things happen.”
Each Democrat is running as a bulwark against the new administration, which they describe as a fount of job loss and culture war. Jones has said he’d sign on to anti-Trump lawsuits that Miyares has declined; Hashmi has emphasized her work to expand abortion rights and contraception, which advanced under Northam but was halted under Youngkin.
Republicans believe that her support for trans-inclusive school policies is a vulnerability; Hashmi disagrees.
“I love grammar. I love parts of speech. And I’m especially fond of pronouns,” Hashmi said at the Fairfax rally. “The very first word in our beloved American constitution is a pronoun, and it is ‘we!’”
David’s view
Democrats have planned their Virginia comeback since the moment Youngkin won, attributing that to McAuliffe’s own failures as a retread candidate. (At one Spanberger stop last month, in Fredericksburg, local Democrats told me that McAuliffe had never even bothered to campaign there.)
According to the exit poll on Election Day 2021, 55% of voters called Virginia’s economy “excellent” or “good.” But one in three of those voters voted for change and chose Youngkin.
This time, Democrats are running as a culturally tolerant party that won’t screw up the economy. It’s a tactic Spanberger helped hone: She previously defended the state’s pre-Trump policies of letting transgender women play in women’s sports, a right that few Virginians ever took advantage of.
Lately she simply dismisses the entire matter as a divisive GOP tactic, saying that it’s time to “get the culture wars out of our schools.”
At the heart of Spanberger’s advantage is the difficulty Republicans face in running as if it’s still 2021. With the Trump administration taking race and gender issues off the board with executive orders — Thomas Jefferson’s university abandoned DEI and its health network briefly paused gender care for minors — Democrats can’t be easily cast as the culture-war aggressors.
And since Trump has done what Republicans asked of him on social issues, while executing DOGE layoffs that hit vote-rich northern Virginia, that leaves Republicans with less to run on.
They’ve got a decent economy, which could be stronger; public safety, which Democrats may be vulnerable on; and the spirit of 2021, which feels further away than four years ago.
Room for Disagreement
On the stump, Youngkin’s aspiring successors clearly see power in “memory lane.”
“If you remember where we were in 2021 — yes, they were bad times,” said Earle-Sears. “COVID shut down our schools? No, COVID didn’t do that. It was the governor who shut down our schools, shut down our businesses, shut down our houses of worship.”
Miyares, the only statewide official seeking reelection to his current job, denounced Jones’ criminal justice reform advocacy, linking it to a sexual assault case that Republicans blamed on Loudoun County’s inclusive gender policies.
“He literally voted for the bill that ended the mandatory reporting requirement of sexual assault in our schools, which led directly to what we saw up in Loudoun County,” said Miyares.
He warned that all of the gains Republicans had made on public safety — often by letting the state move in to take cases “woke” local prosecutors had dropped — could be lost.
Notable
- In the Richmond Times-Dispatch, David Ress and Andrew Cain preview Youngkin’s July 17 trip to Iowa, where he will “get to see my very good friend Kim Reynolds,” and reignite speculation about his post-Virginia plans.
- For Virginia Public Media, Hannah Davis-Reid looks at how Spanberger is running on abortion, an issue that hadn’t flared up in 2021 — the last year before the Dobbs decision. “It’s also important that we have a governor who will say unequivocally, ‘I may be someone in elected office, but I do not have a right to dictate the conversations that you can have with your doctor.‘”
- In CNN, Eva McKend asks whether Earle-Sears can still use Youngkin’s 2021 playbook. “Core to Earle-Sears’ election argument is that she is part of a winning team that has delivered the past four years in Virginia on everything from pro-business deregulation to reopening schools after the pandemic.”