Who does the unrest in Los Angeles hurt most politically? Here’s what history and polls tell us about Virginia.

The president federalizes the state’s National Guard — and then sends in the regular U.S. military to an American city to deal with a crisis. 

This action comes against the backdrop of a governor’s race in Virginia.

The year was 1957, when President Dwight Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne to Little Rock, Arkansas, to enforce the integration of Little Rock Central High School.

In Virginia that year, Republican Ted Dalton of Radford was mounting the second of his two gubernatorial campaigns that challenged the iron grip of Sen. Harry Byrd’s political machine on Virginia. Four years before, Dalton had come closer to winning than any Republican ever had in Virginia. Come 1957, Dalton was trying again. He was thought to be doing well — there was no real polling in those days — but then came the Little Rock crisis that September. 

The federal intervention was highly unpopular with white voters in Virginia, and they took out their anger on the nearest Republican they could find: Dalton. He lost in a landslide. After the election, he lamented: “Little Rock knocked me down to nothing. It wasn’t a little rock; it was a big rock.”

The circumstances between federal intervention over integration in Little Rock 1957 and federal intervention over immigration in Los Angeles 2025 are quite different, but what’s happening in LA raises the same question that Virginians had 68 years ago: What impact will this have on the governor’s race? 

We know the answer to the Ted Dalton-Lindsey Almond race then; we don’t know yet about how this will play out in the race between Abigail Spanberger and Winsome Earle-Sears.

Who will Virginians blame for Los Angeles? Is this a case of President Donald Trump manufacturing a crisis (as California Gov. Gavin Newsom contends) or Trump responding to a crisis (as he contends)? And will this influence who Virginians vote for at all?

There’s been no immediate public polling (too soon for that), but we have two recent Roanoke College polls that give us some sense of what people were thinking as they watched these recent events unfold.

If we try to apply those findings to recent events, we may find they are somewhat contradictory.

1. Trump is more unpopular than he’s ever been in Virginia.

Trump has never been popular in Virginia — he lost the state three straight times — but the most recent Roanoke College poll (in May) found his unpopularity is rising. In October 2020, his disapproval rate in Virginia was 56%. When Roanoke College asked about this again in February of this year, it was up to 59% — although that change isn’t all that statistically significant. Come May, though, it was up to 65% — which suggests that Virginians haven’t liked what Trump has been doing in his second term. If Virginians aren’t favorably disposed toward Trump to begin with, are they more likely to see the confrontations in Los Angeles as his fault? Hold that thought.

2. Virginians have been in favor of increasing deportations.

The February version of the Roanoke College poll asked multiple questions about immigration. Taken together, the answers present a more nuanced view of immigration policy than either party seems likely to offer. See some of that nuance in the accompanying box.

The most relevant answer to the current situation: In February, while 59% said they disapproved of Trump, 59% also said they were in favor of increasing deportations — a signature Trump policy. Those likely aren’t the same 59%, of course, but to get to the 59% in favor of increasing deportations, there have to be some people who disapprove of Trump but still approve of his immigration policies.

That February Roanoke College poll offered some insight as to who some of those people are: Democrats.

The poll found that 41% of respondents who identified as Democrats said they were in favor of increasing deportations.

That seems to run completely counter to what we’d expect Democratic officeholders and candidates to say, but there’s the number anyway. Even if that specific number is off, it’s clear that some sizable chunk of Democrats have supported Trump’s deportation policies. Now, that was February, and this is now June, with parts of Los Angeles in flames. Whether those Democrats still feel that way is anybody’s guess, but it seems a mistake to assume that all Democratic voters are automatically against deporting people who don’t have legal status here. 

More importantly for Democrats’ purposes, that February Roanoke College poll found that 54% of independents were in favor of increasing deportations. Those independents didn’t like Trump (only 26% of independents approved of him then, only 25% in the May poll) but they liked his plan — in theory, at least. Do they still like it now? We don’t know.

The danger for Democrats is that independents, and even part of the party’s base, are so in favor of deportations that they see Trump’s response to federalize the National Guard and threaten military action as the correct one — and punish Democratic candidates in Virginia accordingly.

The danger for Republicans is that Virginians are so overwhelmingly anti-Trump that all this simply reminds them anew why they don’t like Trump — and they take that out on the nearest Republicans.

Of course, it’s also possible that political views today are so polarized that very little moves people off their strongly held views, in which case Los Angeles won’t matter in Virginia in 2025 the way Little Rock in 1957 did. 

We’ll find out either in the next poll, or in the one that counts in November.