The calendar on the wall may still say 2024, but for Virginia politics, it’s already 2025.
Oh, and the governor’s race and 100 House of Delegates races are already underway.
It’s not just that both parties already know who their gubernatorial nominees will be: Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears for the Republicans, retiring 7th District Rep. Abigail Spanberger for the Democrats.
And it’s not just that we’re already seeing House candidates announce. We’re already seeing Republicans try to “shape the battlefield,” as they say in the military, with a series of moves designed to box in Democrats on some issues where Republicans believe they have the advantage: immigration and unions.
The 2025 campaign would seem to begin on favorable terrain for Democrats for at least three reasons.
1. Virginia’s general tilt these days is Democratic.
Sen. Tim Kaine was reelected this fall with the second-highest percentage of any of his five statewide runs. Even with many Democrats sitting out the race, Kamala Harris still carried Virginia, and Democrat Eugene Vindman won a closely contested race for the 7th District seat that Republicans hoped to flip.
2. Harris carried eight House of Delegates districts now held by Republicans.
The House of Delegates is nearly evenly split between 51 Democrats and 49 Republicans. However, Republicans start on the defensive. Even with a less-than-spectacular showing, Harris won eight Republican-held House of Delegates districts, according to calculations by the website State Navigate. Historically, non-presidential elections have brought out an older, more conservative group of voters — or, perhaps more accurately, failed to galvanize a lot of liberal voters. Still, Democrats have reason to believe that, if they can generate better turnout, they can pick up seats.
That brings us to the real wild card:
3. Donald Trump is about to become president, and last time he was president, that was a disaster for Virginia Republicans.
When Trump became president in 2017, he produced a voter backlash in Virginia that saw Democrats sweep statewide offices — and made the biggest gains each party had made in the legislature in a single election since 1899. Two years after that, with Trump still in office, Democrats won control of the General Assembly. As soon as Trump was out of office, Virginians elected a Republican governor and a Republican House of Delegates. That history suggests that, with Trump once again moving into the White House, Virginia voters may once again show their distaste by punishing every Republican they can at the polls.
The big question there is whether Democrats, who are now back in control in the House (barely), have already made all the gains they can. Maybe voters are now numb to Trump. Certainly, some Democratic voters weren’t so alarmed in November; otherwise, they wouldn’t have stayed home.
If you’re a Republican, these are all things to be concerned about. Still, they have three things they can be optimistic about, as well:
1. Virginians generally think the state is headed in the right direction.
The latest Roanoke College poll finds 52% think the state is “on the right track.” With divided government in Richmond, it’s hard to attribute those good feelings to either party, but Republicans are certainly going to say that’s because of Republican governance.
2. Virginians like their Republican governor.
It helps that Youngkin is popular. His approval rating isn’t huge — 52% — but he’s never been below 50%. That’s a big asset for Republicans going into an election year. Earle-Sears is quite naturally making the case that if you like Youngkin, and want to keep things going the way they are, you should vote for her.
Youngkin is in a position to help Earle-Sears in other ways. Last week, he held a news conference, with all the flourishes, to announce a proposed amendment to the state budget that would require local governments to cooperate with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — and withhold funding from localities that declare themselves to be “sanctuary cities.”
Virginia has no formal sanctuary cities, so this seems a matter of trying to ban something that doesn’t exist. The policy may not really be the point, though. The politics may matter more. Youngkin probably doesn’t expect the Democratic-controlled legislature to adopt this amendment. For Republicans, it’s probably better politically if Democrats deep-six the measure; that would give them something to run on in the fall. It’s no accident that standing next to Youngkin at the announcement was House Minority Leader Todd Gilbert, who would like to trade that title for his former position as speaker of the House. “The safety of our communities cannot be sacrificed just so that Democrats can feel good about themselves at cocktail parties,” the Shenandoah County Republican declared in a statement.
Whatever the merits of the policy, that’s a great campaign line. The fall elections showed just how powerful the immigration issue is for Republicans. Harris didn’t have a good response for it; will Spanberger and other Democrats? Meanwhile, the “cocktail parties” reference seems rhetorical genius because it plays up something else we just saw in the fall election: Democrats losing ground with working-class voters. Both parties are fine with a little class warfare when it suits their purposes.
Republicans may be starting on the weaker political ground in 2025 for the reasons outlined above, but they’re coming out playing offense. That’s just good politics. That brings us to a third reason that could be in Republicans’ favor:
3. The Democratic coalition may not be as stable as it seems.
In Congress, Spanberger was regarded as something of a centrist. That may play well with independent voters but not necessarily with Democratic activists who may regard her as insufficiently to the left. We just had an election where a noticeable number of Democrats sat out; and now there’s some chatter that Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Newport News, may challenge Spanberger for the nomination. If Republicans can do anything that weakens the Democratic coalition and causes some Democrats to lose interest, that’s almost as good as picking up their votes.
Earle-Sears herself signaled another line of attack she and other Republicans will pursue: The state’s so-called “right-to-work” law, which means workers aren’t required to pay union dues just because there’s a union at their workplace. Many Democrats see that as an obstacle to labor rights, but the prospect of repealing this law completely freaks out the business community. They see it as vital to the state’s “good business climate.” As a purely factual matter, Virginia’s main economic development rivals other states that also have these laws. Would abolishing the law make it easier or harder for Virginia to attract new employers? Spanberger is smart to avoid this issue, and Earle-Sears is smart to highlight it. Or is she?
The politics of the “right-to-work” law aren’t quite as straightforward as they seem. In 2016, the Republican-controlled General Assembly passed a measure to enshrine it in the state’s constitution. To their surprise, it was defeated, 54% to 46%, the only time this century that voters have rejected a proposed constitutional amendment and one of the few times ever.
The localities in yellow all voted against the proposed constitutional amendment that would have made "right-to-work" part of the state constitution. Only the ones in green voted in favor. Hover over each locality and you can see the percentage who voted "yes."
More surprising was the way the amendment went down. Democratic localities voted against it, of course — 66.6% in Hampton said no, 66.4% in Charlottesville, 65.8% in Petersburg. The shocker was how many Republican localities also voted no, or came close to voting no. The state's southwesternmost counties long ago realigned themselves as Republican, but they apparently retain a fondness for unions. Only one coal-producing county approved the measure, and Buchanan County didn't do so by much — 51.1% said yes. Next door in Dickenson County, 63.1% said no.
That means a higher share of voters in conservative, Republican-voting Dickenson voted against the amendment than did voters in liberal, Democratic-voting Arlington County (62.5% in Arlington said “no”). Across Southwest and Southside, where Republicans typically run up big margins, voters rejected the amendment.
Even in places where the amendment passed, it's clear a lot of Republicans voted against it. Take Bedford County, which had the second-highest share of “yes” votes in the state — 58.0% voted in favor of the amendment. However, 72.1% of Bedford voters cast ballots for Trump. Clearly, a lot of Trump voters weren't on board with this. What was going on? Technically, someone might have approved of “right-to-work” but felt it didn’t need to be in the constitution. That’s more nuance than we usually see in elections, though.
More likely, what we saw was part of the makeover of the Republican Party from a business-class party to a working-class party. That realignment was underway before Trump came along, but he's accelerated that trend. This produces an interesting tension: Republican donors and Republican leaders may love the "right-to-work" law, but a lot of their voters may not. They had a chance to guarantee its survival and pretty plainly said, “Nah, let's not do that.” Perhaps they were thinking that someday they may need to unionize and don’t want any legal obstacles in their path. That’s not something we’d have expected Republican voters to be thinking, but we now have a new Republican Party.
This is part of what makes politics so unpredictable — and so much fun.
Virginia soldiers made history 250 years ago
This month marks the 250th anniversary of a landmark event in American history that most of us never learned about in school: The time when Virginia soldiers returning home from fighting Native Americans along the Ohio River declared they were also willing to fight for American liberty. They met in a camp in Ohio and passed a resolution called the Fort Gower Resolves that made them the first to make such a declaration. That's one of the things we'll look at in this month's edition of Cardinal 250, our history project that looks at the little-known aspects of Virginia's role in the lead-up to the Declaration of Independence, which turns 250 years old in 2026.
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