Both parties face challenges this year in Virginia. Here are some of the big ones.

We now have a Democratic statewide ticket to go along with the Republican ticket that was already in place. 

We think of general election campaigns as the “fall” campaign but, with early voting, the first votes will be cast in what is still officially summer. Early voting begins Sept. 19, so three months from today it will already be underway.

Every campaign faces challenges, some bigger than others. Here are 10 challenges in this year’s campaign, four unique to each party and two that confront both parties. We’ll start with the Democrats, then look at the Republicans.

Challenges the Democrats face

1. Hubris

I have yet to meet a Democrat who wasn’t confident about this year’s election. They talk of a statewide sweep and picking up seats in the House of Delegates, where they currently hold a 51-49 majority. They have good reason to be confident. The last time Donald Trump was president, the party won big and picked up seats in the House (only to lose them, and the majority, once Trump was out of office). Polls consistently show gubernatorial candidate Abigail Spanberger with a lead over Republican Winsome Earle-Sears. Eight House districts currently held by Republicans were carried by Kamala Harris last fall; they seem ripe for the picking, but Democrats are officially targeting 13 districts for possible takeovers. Democrats have a huge money advantage over Republicans: The most recent campaign finance reports show Spanberger has five times as much cash as Earle-Sears. In five House races for seats now held by Republicans, the Democratic candidate has significantly more money. In House District 41, which covers parts of Montgomery and Roanoke counties, Democratic challenger Lily Franklin has more than three times as much money as Republican incumbent Chris Obenshain. In House District 82 in the Petersburg area, Democratic challenger Kimberly Pope Adams has more than eight times as much money as Republican incumbent Kim Taylor.

Strike up the band and play “Happy Days Are Here Again,” right? Not so fast. The problem with such confidence is that it can easily turn into overconfidence. Not a single vote has been cast yet. The polls are closer than they might seem. Yes, the Roanoke College poll showed Spanberger with a lead of 17 percentage points — among registered voters. However, we know that not every registered voter will bother to actually vote; only about half will. Among likely voters, her lead shrinks to about 4 percentage points, according to a poll (conducted jointly by Democratic and Republican pollsters) for the business group Virginia FREE. As late as September 2021, Glenn Youngkin was still down 7 percentage points. 

Yes, things look favorable for Democrats — but the campaign must still be run and campaigns can be unpredictable things. Just ask Thomas Dewey.

2. The party could go too far left 

Both parties have activist bases that can pull them too far to one side or another. Spanberger has done a good job of positioning herself as a center-left candidate as opposed to purely a candidate of the left — the website GovTrack ranked her as the 8th most moderate Democrat in Congress. In this campaign, witness her declaration that she doesn’t favor a “full repeal” of the state’s “right-to-work” law that bans compulsory payment of union dues if there’s a union in the workplace. We don’t know what something less than a “full repeal” looks like, but we know that sounds different than what all six of the party’s contenders for lieutenant governor said during the primary — they all favored a repeal, no equivocation. I’m not convinced that “right-to-work” is the potent issue that Earle-Sears thinks it is — nine years ago voters rejected an attempt to write that law into the constitution. Many otherwise conservative rural areas voted overwhelmingly against the amendment. 

Still, there may be plenty of other issues where Democrats could get out of sync with independents, and suffer the electoral consequences. In Tuesday’s primary, Democrats nominated candidates for lieutenant governor and attorney general who might be perceived as more liberal than their opponents. The key word there is “perceived” but no matter who they nominated, Democrats should always worry about getting further left of the Virginia electorate, just as Republicans should worry about getting too far right.

3. Weakness with working-class voters

Democrats nationally have suffered with working-class voters, specifically working-class men. How is this ticket going to fare? The primary showed yet again the party’s decline in working-class communities. Take Covington. This was once a Democratic stronghold, so strong that statewide candidates made the pilgrimage every Labor Day for a parade. It was a two-fer day — the Buena Vista parade in the morning, the Covington parade in the afternoon.

In 1977, the Democratic primary that year saw 1,176 votes cast in Covington, 634 in Buena Vista.

This year, with a statewide turnout of about the same size, there were just 96 votes cast in the Democratic primary in Covington, 110 in Buena Vista. 

The danger for Democrats is not that they’ll lose Covington and Buena Vista in the fall — they will — but that these declines are warning signs about working-class voters elsewhere, in bigger communities that Democrats count on. Likewise, Democrats need to remember how Youngkin won four years ago: He generated big margins out of rural areas with relatively small numbers of votes. The result: His margin in Bedford County wiped out his deficit in Loudoun County, with some left over, even though Loudoun had four times as many voters.

4. Running against Trump isn’t enough

We just came out of a primary campaign where the Democratic candidates for lieutenant governor and attorney general seemed to spend all their time running against Trump. That may have made sense in the context of a Democratic primary, but voters in a general election may not want more, even in a state where Trump lost all three of his presidential races. Spanberger has done a good job not basing her campaign on Trump, but her two running mates will now need to pivot and have a different message. They may well have one ready, but this is a move they’ll need to pull off. This may not be the biggest challenge, but it is a challenge,

Challenges the Republicans face

1. Trump is a dead weight for Republicans in a general election

Now we come to Republicans, and the flip side of the Trump factor we just mentioned. Trump is intensely popular with Republicans and intensely unpopular with everyone else. That’s not me saying that; that’s what respondents in the most recent Roanoke College poll said; Trump’s disapproval in Virginia is at its highest level ever. Earle-Sears (and Republicans in general) will have to motivate their MAGA base, but the issues that motivate Republican partisans are not necessarily the ones that appeal to swing voters. That’s often the case with both parties, but Trump is a special challenge for Virginia Republicans. Many of the things he’s doing won’t be helpful to them. He’s floated moving the FBI training center from Quantico to Alabama. His tariffs have interrupted trade patterns — bad for the port at Hampton Roads, not to mention elsewhere. Even the town council in deep red Marion is unhappy that Trump is closing the local Job Corps center. Trump is unpredictable (he seems to consider this a strength) but Virginia Republicans don’t want to find themselves at the mercy of an unpredictable president who is unpopular with the very voters they need to attract.

2. Earle-Sears is not particularly empathetic

Earlier this year, she said that “it’s not a huge, huge thing” if someone loses their job. Whatever her intent, she’s not coming across as someone who feels the pain of federal workers in Northern Virginia who find themselves without a job. Maybe those weren’t Republican voters anyway, but the language she’s using to describe that economic tumult doesn’t exactly convey the impression that she’d care about laid-off workers elsewhere, either.

Earle-Sears has a combative personality that might excite Republican partisans — she gave as good as she got with hecklers at the Labor Day parade in Buena Vista last year, and a Northern Virginia news site recently reported how she argued online with customers of her plumbing and electrical business who’d left a bad review — but that may not play well with the general public. She needs to find a better way to show her concern about the economy.

3. Republicans have fallen way behind in fundraising

Republicans are being outhustled for campaign cash. The most recent campaign finance reports show Spanberger has more than five times as much cash as Earle-Sears. The gap we’ve seen will surely close, but it’s still baffling. Earle-Sears has had four years to prepare for this race, Spanberger less than two. So why is Spanberger rolling in cash and Earle-Sears isn’t? 

This problem extends beyond the governor’s race, too. Republican lieuteant governor candidate John Reid has less money than some House of Delegates candidates. And speaking of House candidates, Democratic candidates have more money than five Republican incumbents they’re targeting.

4. The enthusiasm gap

Both the Roanoke College poll and the Virginia FREE poll show that Democrats this year are much more enthusiastic about voting than Republicans are. That’s often the case; the party in power gets complacent, the party out of power is fired up to get back into power. Republicans are not helped, though, by the knowledge that this enthusiasm gap fits historical patterns. They need to find ways to excite their base — without turning off the swing voters they need. Also of note: Democrats have candidates in all 100 House of Delegates races, Republicans don’t. Democrats have zero hope of winning in deep red districts, but having a House candidate does give them a local rallying point — and those candidates might help squeeze out some extra votes for the statewide ticket in those rural counties even if those candidates get wiped out themselves. Republicans may wish they had similar sacrificial lambs on the ground to help them in Northern Virginia. 

Challenges for both parties

1. Issues that don’t fit neatly into each side’s philosophy

Energy is a big one. A state study earlier this year warned that power demand in Virginia will triple by 2040 if data centers continue to grow without restraint. Meanwhile, Virginia has become the biggest importer of electricity in the country — and that power tends to be expensive and “dirty,” meaning, from fossil fuels. We need to generate more power but nobody wants a power generation site near them. Solving this is going to require some top-level political skills and, likely, a bipartisan approach. That won’t fit into the campaign pitches on either side.

Republicans warn that renewables can’t provide baseload power — reliable power that’s there all day long. However, adding that baseload power in the form of gas or nuclear takes a long time (there’s a multiyear backlog in parts for gas turbines, for instance), while solar is the only thing that can be added quickly. If we need power now, it will have to be mostly solar (and battery storage), whether people like that or not. 

That might make Democrats happy, but they run up against the reality that many rural areas simply don’t want solar farms cluttering their landscape. Right now, Virginia gets about 7% of its power from the sun and we see how controversial that’s become. How is that going to work if we try to ramp up that percentage? I don’t know what the engineering limits are for how much solar can go into the grid, but there sure seem to be some political limits as to how much we can produce. 

2. Unexpected events

Or, in the words of Donald Rumsfeld, the “unknown unknowns.” Nobody knows what outside events might pop up and influence the outcome. In 1957, Republican Ted Dalton thought he was doing pretty well in the governor’s race until President Dwight Eisenhower sent federal troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, to enforce an integration order. “Little Rock knocked me down to nothing,” Dalton said after the campaign. “It wasn’t a little rock, it was a big rock.”

By contrast, the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, seem to have had no impact on the Virginia governor’s race, even though some thought it might tilt things toward Republicans with President George W. Bush in the White House and security issues becoming more paramount. Democrat Mark Warner won anyway.

Between Trump’s aggressive immigration enforcement and the reaction to that in some communities, or a volatile international situation (such as, oh, a war between Israel and Iran), we simply don’t know what might erupt that could help or hurt one candidate or another in Virginia. I do see one that could potentially hurt Democrats: If an inquiry into this spring’s blackout in Spain and Portugal says the problem was too much renewable energy trying to flow into an outdated grid that couldn’t handle it (it’s a physics thing), that could potentially give Republicans a new talking point in Virginia. At least there, Democrats probably already have their talking points ready (the problem is the grid, not the power source, for instance). For other events, well, if they’re truly unknown, then neither side is prepared to handle them.