At a Tuesday rally for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Abigail Spanberger, speaker after speaker hammered home one point: This election is about more than Virginia.

Virginia will “lead the way” into the 2026 midterms, trumpeted Bill Nye the Science Guy. It’s “pretty much the center of the political universe,” added former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.

“We know the stakes of this election,” Ms. Spanberger, a former CIA case officer who served three terms in the U.S. House, told the Charlottesville crowd of 1,300. “We can prove to the rest of the country … when we have the opportunity to make a change at home in our state, we will take it.”

Why We Wrote This

Virginia is one of two states holding a competitive race for governor this fall – a closely watched test of whether Democrats can find their footing after last year’s election losses.

Gubernatorial races in both Virginia and New Jersey – which take place the year after presidential elections – often get outsize attention, as pundits and party leaders sift through the tea leaves for takeaways about the mood of the country heading into the following year’s midterm elections. Those takes don’t always prove terribly predictive: Four years ago, current Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin was widely heralded as a post-Trump archetype for the GOP. Today, Governor Youngkin and his sweater vests are on their way out, while President Donald Trump’s dominance of the party appears complete.

So, at a time when Democrats in Washington are searching for a path out of the political wilderness, Ms. Spanberger’s campaign could represent a way forward. But with caveats.

The Republican in the race, Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, has eschewed traditional campaigning and fundraising, and has consistently trailed in the polls, often by double digits. Notably, President Trump has not campaigned on her behalf; the state GOP chair at one point had to assure a conservative radio host that her campaign was “not a clown car.” Ms. Spanberger has raised more than twice as much money as Ms. Earle-Sears and appears in a strong position to win on Nov. 4. But that victory could get chalked up to a weak GOP opponent rather than signaling a broader anti-Trump turn in the electorate that could put congressional Republicans on notice.

At the same time, Democrats might find themselves on Nov. 5 with very different models of winning candidates that do little to resolve the party’s own internal divide. The gubernatorial nominees in Virginia and New Jersey, where Democratic Rep. Mikie Sherrill is locked in a closer race against a repeat GOP candidate, are both moderate women with national security backgrounds and cautious campaign styles. Meanwhile, in New York, democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani could become the city’s first Muslim mayor, after a campaign built on viral social media clips and billion-dollar promises.

“People are looking [at Virginia] and are like ‘Is this going to predict a trend for next year? Is this going to be a model for next year’s races?’” says Kristy Muddiman, a civics teacher in Roanoke who drove to Charlottesville for the Spanberger event. “There’s this great division in the party right now: Do we go more moderate or do we go more progressive?”

Running on affordability

To be sure, running for mayor in a Democratic enclave such as New York City is very different from running statewide in Virginia, a swing state that has leaned more Democratic in recent years but which voted Republican for four decades of presidential contests before President Barack Obama flipped it blue in 2008.

And some in the party have been struck by the ways in which Ms. Spanberger and Mr. Mamdani’s campaigns are actually similar.

“The party’s most-centrist candidate and the most-left candidate actually agree on what the biggest issue is,” says Ben Tribbett, a Virginia-based Democratic strategist. “They are both running on an affordability message.”

How they talk about it, however, is different. In an eight-page PDF document, Ms. Spanberger pledges to address the cost of living by cutting red tape that hinders housing construction and bringing down energy bills. Mr. Mamdani proposes universal child care (which could cost $6 billion) and city-run grocery stores in TikTok videos.

Still, some voters say they appreciate that both candidates are focused on the problem – and are looking for solutions.

“Previous elections have been Democrats just rebuking Republicans,” says Zack Landsman, a Ph.D. student at the University of Virginia, waiting in line for Ms. Spanberger’s event. “But between [Spanberger] and Mamdani, and the clear actions they are talking about, it makes me very excited about them.”

Though Ms. Spanberger has run television ads tying Ms. Earle-Sears to the president’s “bad budget,” and calling her a “MAGA Republican,” Miles Coleman, associate editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics, has been struck by how little Ms. Spanberger mentions Mr. Trump in her press releases. “During the 2021 campaign, every other word out of [Democratic nominee Terry] McAuliffe’s mouth was ‘Youngkin is Trump’ and I think he overplayed it,” says Mr. Coleman. “In this race, DOGE has been a good proxy to not mentioning Trump by name.”

Mr. Trump’s mass downsizing of the federal workforce through his Department of Government Efficiency has been a defining issue in this race – Virginia is home to more than 155,000 federal employees, behind only California and Washington, D.C. And it’s been compounded by the government shutdown, now into its fourth week with hundreds of thousands government employees furloughed. The impact has been particularly severe in the northern Virginia suburbs where Democrats need big margins to win the state.

There were “red flags” when Mr. McAuliffe campaigned in northern Virginia in 2021, says Dominic Thompson, executive director of Fairfax Democrats. “We could tell that turnout was going to be rockier.” Now, “we see the firings of all our neighbors in NoVa. The national guard in D.C. This election is so nationalized because we were seeing the impacts. Normally it takes time to see those national impacts trickle down to people.”

Asked by the Monitor at a campaign stop in Williamsburg last week whether she was concerned that the federal layoffs and furloughs could affect the race, Ms. Earle-Sears responded that Ms. Spanberger should tell Virginia’s two Democratic senators to end the shutdown. “Abigail Spanberger has been playing political football with federal workers all summer long, playing that she loves federal workers more than anyone else on this Earth,” says Ms. Earle-Sears. “Love looks like keeping federal workers in their jobs.”

Campaign trail hurdles

That Williamsburg event – a brief appearance in a restaurant parking lot in front of a dozen or so supporters – was largely indicative of the campaign Ms. Earle-Sears has run, which has been characterized by high staff turnover and low party support. The event was focused on Virginia schools’ bathroom and locker-room policies for transgender students, an issue that the lieutenant governor has made a cornerstone of her campaign.

Ms. Earle-Sears has campaigned on the promise to “keep a good thing going” and continue many of Mr. Youngkin’s policies. She frequently speaks about her moral opposition to abortion – an important issue in the last southern state with no abortion ban. Although she has supported 15- and 6-week bans in the past, Ms. Earle-Sears said in the one gubernatorial debate earlier this month that the policy is “not going to be my view, it’s going to be the view of the majority.”

Even if Ms. Earle-Sears had run a more conventional campaign, she would likely have faced an uphill battle, given the national political currents and specific dynamics of this race. In every gubernatorial race here save one since the late 1970s, Virginians have favored the party outside the White House.

“We were happy with 2024,” says Matthew Hurtt, chairman of Arlington GOP, who acknowledges that the presidential victory makes it “hard” for Republicans this year. “Unless you are agitated in politics, you’re not prompted to get out and do something.”

Ms. Spanberger’s campaign hasn’t been entirely smooth sailing. For all the criticism on the right of how Ms. Earle-Sears has run her campaign, facing off against “a Black female Marine who has [already] been elected statewide” isn’t nothing, says Mr. Tribbett. Following the one gubernatorial debate, Ms. Spanberger was criticized for long, sometimes evasive answers.

In recent weeks, violent text messages from Democratic attorney general nominee Jay Jones, in which he fantasized about killing a Republican House speaker, have dominated the race. Ms. Spanberger denounced the messages but did not call for Mr. Jones to drop out. Still, she has run a campaign without “any mistakes of substance,” says Mr. Tribbett. He adds that her congressional voting record has made it difficult for Republicans to paint her as a Mamdani-style progressive running in a state that elected a Republican governor four years ago.

A mom of three from the Richmond suburbs, Ms. Spanberger is used to appealing to Republican voters: She flipped a GOP congressional district in 2018, the same year Ms. Sherrill was elected. (It was also the same year that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a democratic socialist like Mr. Mamdani, burst onto the scene by ousting a veteran Democratic congressman in New York.)

Ms. Spanberger, who was ranked as one of the most bipartisan members during her time in the House, criticized some of her colleagues’ calls to “defund the police.” In her run for governor, she has earned the endorsement of the Virginia Police Benevolent Association, which split its endorsement this year by backing Ms. Spanberger and the Republican candidates down ticket.

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Tanya and David Samples, who live outside Charlottesville, say Ms. Spanberger is the right person to capture the centrist votes needed to win a Virginia governor’s race. But like so many other Democrats in the state, they also hope she can jump-start a Democratic comeback nationwide.

“This is going to be a bellwether state with New Jersey,” says Ms. Samples, who came to hear Ms. Spanberger and Mr. Buttigieg at the Charlottesville rally. “I am praying that these two Democrats win the governors’ races, so that maybe the Republicans in the House will wake up.”