The next governor won’t have an easy term. Here are 3 reasons why.

Every so often, a political candidate — Glenn Youngkin, four years ago, was the most recent — makes the case that electing someone to office is the same as hiring them.

For Youngkin, that was a good way to frame his background as a business executive. 

There’s much to be said for looking at things that way; a governor is, after all, our chief executive — the CEO of Virginia, if you will. The problem is that a political campaign plays out very differently from the way a corporate hiring decision would.

Consider a hypothetical company whose revenues in the coming years are very much uncertain due to changes in a turbulent marketplace, and whose expenses are projected to rise dramatically.

The hiring committee for that CEO position would demand that job candidates discuss — in detail — how they’d address the major challenges the business expected to face in the coming years. They certainly wouldn’t accept applicants who gave vague answers or tried to change the subject.

That, though, is the situation we now face in Virginia. That hypothetical company is not so hypothetical — it’s us. A recent economic forecast issued by the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service at the University of Virginia paints a dark picture of Virginia’s economy in the coming years. If that forecast holds, our next governor will spend the first half of her term dealing with a “stagnant” economy, to quote from the forecast. 

Democrat Abigail Spanberger was quick to blast out a news release blaming the Trump administration (and trying to tie Republican Winsome Earle-Sears to Trump’s policies of cutting the federal workforce and imposing tariffs — the two things that the economists say are throwing Virginia’s job growth into reverse). However, getting the candidates to provide details about what they’d do in office is difficult, at best. I’ve interviewed both candidates now but still don’t have a good sense of what either would do in office. The political process does not reward specificity; it rewards sloganeering and, to use the modern lingo, “vibes.”

The larger problem is that campaigns often don’t relate to the problems that the winner will face. Journalists bear some of the blame there, for sure, but so do candidates who limit the options to ask them serious questions. In a traditional campaign for Virginia governor, we’d have already had one debate, before the Virginia Bar Association — but neither candidate agreed to that — and the prospect of others to come. Instead, it looks like we might just get one debate, as Cardinal’s Elizabeth Beyer reported earlier this week. (Here’s where I feel duty-bound to point out that neither campaign responded to the invite, and multiple follow-up inquiries, about a proposed debate in Bristol that would have been sponsored by the Appalachian School of Law, Cardinal News and PBS Appalachia. Also: The invitation still stands, by the way.) 

The confluence of all these events — the Weldon Cooper Center economic forecast, the prospect of just a single debate — prompts this list. Here are three of the issues that the next governor will face, even if they don’t get much attention in the course of the campaign.

1. Stagnant job growth for at least half her term

What’s the fun of being governor if there are no ribbons to cut or groundbreakings to attend? That’s the future that Virginia’s next governor will face, according to the Weldon Cooper Center economic forecast. Because of federal workforce reductions and tariffs, the center foresees Virginia losing jobs this year, having essentially flat job growth in 2026 and then in 2027, only slow job growth — the slowest outside of the pandemic in 11 years. 

The next governor is going to face an economic challenge: How do we defy those trends to prompt more job growth? Specifically, how do we diversify the Northern Virginia economy so it’s not as dependent on the federal government as it has been? If we were truly hiring a chief executive, we’d look for someone with a background in economic development, especially someone skilled in building a new economy. 

2. The state budget likely will get tight

Virginia’s treasury right now is flush with cash, with $1.7 billion carried over from the previous fiscal year and a rainy day fund of $4.7 billion. All that could go away quickly. We don’t know yet what the fiscal impact of the One Big Beautiful Bill will be on Virginia, particularly in terms of Medicaid funding. I’ve heard legislators mutter that the 2026 session of the General Assembly might be fine, but by 2027, things could be pretty tight. 

If the Weldon Cooper Center forecast is right — and it mirrors national forecasts such as the one by the Moody’s financial services firm, so it’s hardly an outlier — we’ll see that the lack of job growth takes place within the context of a slow economy. Youngkin got the happy job of being able to report healthy surpluses; the next governor may not be able to. On the contrary, she may have to do some painful budget cutting. Nobody ever runs for office saying they look forward to being able to cut out of the budget all the things they promised supporters they’d want to include, but some hard choices may lie ahead.

3. Energy demands are rising. So are energy prices. 

It was always going to be a challenge for Virginia to meet the goals of the Clean Economy Act, which calls for the state’s two biggest utilities to go carbon-free. Now it’s going to be even harder. The Clean Economy Act was passed during a time of relatively slow growth in power demands. Now we’re seeing power demands spike, driven largely (but not entirely) by data centers. We need more power, but nobody wants a power source near them. Every form of energy is controversial in some ways. We’ve seen explosive growth of solar power across Southside Virginia, but some localities have now made it clear they’re fed up — they don’t want to be paved over with what some see as industrial blight.

I’ve asked both candidates about this. You can read their answers — Earle-Sears here, Spanberger here — but I came away unsatisfied from both interviews. While the two candidates have clear preferences in terms of power sources, their solution to this conflict between the need to develop more energy sources and neighborhood opposition to almost every energy project is to say we’ll have to figure it out. Yes, we will.  

Maybe there’s simply no answer they can give. Governors don’t run the power grid; utilities do. Governors don’t approve or disapprove data centers; local governments do. Governors don’t decide where energy projects go; energy developers do — and it’s local governments that approve their siting, not the state. That’s also part of the problem. The state has to manage consequences that somebody else has set in motion. There are certainly policies the state can adopt — to encourage or discourage data centers, or this type of energy versus that type — but we really don’t know much about what Earle-Sears or Spanberger would do beyond broad outlines. Whoever wins, though, is going to have to deal with the details.

Meanwhile, the One Big Beautiful Bill eliminates tax incentives for the forms of energy that Virginia law promotes: renewables. That’s also going to raise the price of power. We know that Republicans don’t like the Clean Economy Act and Democrats do, but even some Democrats now seem open to tweaks. How, though, should the law be changed? Or should it be?

Let’s think about things this way: Instead of looking one or two years into the future, let’s look ahead four. It’s 2029, and the term of either Gov. Earle-Sears or Gov. Spanberger is coming to an end. It’s time to evaluate what kind of legacy she will leave. A large part of that legacy will be how she handled the lack of economic growth, the budget challenges that economic slowdown created and the energy crisis. What should the candidates be telling us now about how they’d deal with those? And what should voters be keeping in mind as they decide which of those candidates is best-suited to deal with those problems?