This year’s governor’s race was, by any measure, a blowout of historic proportions.
With 57.34% of the vote, Abigail Spanberger won the highest percentage of any Democratic candidate for governor since Albertis Harrison in 1961, which takes us back to a pre-modern era of Virginia politics.
With 42.46% of the vote, Winsome Earle-Sears won the lowest percentage of any Republican candidate for governor since Linwood Holton took 38.3% in a four-way race in 1965.
Why was it such a lopsided election? I laid out 13 reasons in my initial post-election analysis, all of which are still quite valid. Since then I’ve taken a magnifying glass to the returns and found another explanation to add to that list: Earle-Sears failed to excite the blue-collar voters who, in recent years, have become a core Republican constituency.
The numbers I see cannot explain why she didn’t motivate those voters. For that, we can only resort to speculation, which I’ll get to at the end. However, the numbers do show quite clearly that the magnitude of the Republican defeat was, in mathematical terms, due primarily to the collapse of blue-collar support. White-collar Republicans generally stuck with her; it was working-class Republicans who stayed home (and, perhaps in some cases, defected to Spanberger).
Here’s how I arrive at these conclusions.
Let’s use the city of Roanoke as our example. Overall, Roanoke is a Democratic city. Think of Roanoke as a molecule. Roanoke is composed of 20 precincts, most of which are, like the city overall, quite Democratic. Some, though, are strongly Republican. Think of these precincts as atoms. To really understand the election, we need to look at the atomic level, not the molecular level.
In a more perfect world, we’d be able to compare this year’s precinct results with those four years ago, but we can’t. The pandemic, and the laws that expanded early voting, meant that an unusual number of voters then cast early ballots — which were counted as part of an absentee precinct, not the voters’ actual precinct. That completely skews the results. A bill sponsored by state Sen. David Suetterlein, R-Roanoke County, has fixed that — early votes are now attributed to the voters’ precinct. But the results for 2020 and 2021 are simply useless at the precinct level because they only show the results for the day-of voters.
We can compare county-level and city-level numbers in 2021 with 2025, but we can’t compare precinct-level data.
For that reason, my point of comparison for the 2025 gubernatorial results is the 2024 presidential results. A governor’s race always attracts lower turnout than a presidential race, so the question I set out to explore was how much of the 2024 presidential vote did each party’s gubernatorial candidate retain in 2025? There’s an obvious flaw in this analysis: I’ve got no way to account for voters who switched sides. I’d love to know how many Donald Trump voters cast ballots for Abigail Spanberger but the numbers can’t speak to that. We work with what we have. Let’s not let that problem get in the way of some pretty obvious findings.
We know that statewide, Spanberger retained 83.2% of Kamala Harris’ vote in Virginia while Earle-Sears retained only 69.3% of the Trump vote in the state. Upon closer inspection, we see that Spanberger pretty consistently retained the Democratic vote from one precinct to another, while Earle-Sears held onto some voters easier than others. The ones she failed to connect with were working-class voters. The Republican vote was down everywhere but it was down most sharply with those voters.
The Roanoke precinct results tell the tale.
First, let’s look at some of the most affluent neighborhoods.
In the South Roanoke precinct, Spanberger retained 84.1% of the Harris vote while Earle-Sears retained 83.7% of the Trump vote — virtually the same.
In the Crystal Spring precinct next door, Spanberger retained 76.6% of the Harris vote while Earle-Sears retained 72.7% of the Trump vote — a wee bit lower but not all that much different.
In the Deyerle precinct, Spanberger retained 88.3% of the Harris vote while Earle-Sears retained 81.9% of the Trump vote — again, lower but not that much so.
Now let’s look at some of the city’s predominantly white working-class precincts — precincts that years ago were Democratic but in more recent times have become solidly Republican as our politics have realigned.
In the East Gate precinct, Spanberger retained 84.4% of the Harris vote but Earle-Sears’ retention rate was only 65.1%. Where Spanberger’s retention rate in South Roanoke was just 0.4 percentage points higher, in East Gate it was 19.3 percentage points higher.
We see similar trends in other white working-class precincts.
In Garden City, Spanberger retained 79.0% of the Harris vote while Earle-Sears held onto just 58.8% of the Trump vote — a difference of 20.2 percentage points.
In Preston Park, Spanberger retained 80.3% of the Harris vote while Earle-Sears’ share of the Trump vote was 58.7% — a difference of 21.6 percentage points.
In the Southeast precinct, Spanberger retained 77.9% of the Harris vote while Earle-Sears managed just 54.4% of the Trump vote — a gap of 23.5 percentage points.
What about precincts with large numbers of Black voters? If we look at those precincts through the lens of affluence rather than race, and regard them as working-class precincts, we see the same thing happening.
In Eureka Park, Spanberger held onto 76.0% of the Harris vote, about what she did in predominantly white and affluent Crystal Spring, while Earle-Sears’ share of the Trump vote was 60.5% — a difference of 15.5 percentage points.
In Forest Park, Spanberger retained 73.3% of the Harris vote, while Earle-Sears managed just 50.6% of the Trump vote.
Before the election, there had been a lot of speculation as to how well Earle-Sears would do with Black voters. She bombed.
I could go on (and on and on) with other precinct results, but the picture should be clear by now. No matter the type of precinct, Spanberger retained a pretty consistent share of the Harris vote while Earle-Sears saw big drops that were concentrated in working-class precincts.
We can also see this more broadly when we look at whole communities.
In some of the well-to-do suburbs around Richmond, Earle-Sears had high retention rates. In Goochland County, she held onto 83.9% of Trump voters; in Hanover County, 79.1%; in Chesterfield County, 74.1%.
In rural areas — which are generally more working-class — her retention rate plummeted. In Buchanan County, Earle-Sears managed just 53.4% of the Trump vote. In all those places, Spanberger’s retention rate was higher than Earle-Sears’ — from 92.6% in Goochland to 71.2% in Buchanan. That means Earle-Sears’ retention rate in Goochland ran just 8.7 percentage points behind Spanberger, but in Buchanan County her retention rate was 17.8 percentage points behind. Earle-Sears still won those places because they’re all quite Republican, but with reduced margins.
Earle-Sears would have lost even if she had matched Spanberger’s retention rates — Harris got more votes in Virginia than Trump — but Earle-Sears lost so badly because her retention rates were so low with working-class voters. It was that collapse which also brought down Republican Attorney General Jason Miyares, who ran the closest race of the three Republicans but couldn’t overcome the hole that Earle-Sears’ failure to generate turnout put him in.
All this raises the question of “why?” Why was Spanberger’s retention rate so consistent while Earle-Sears’ was so inconsistent?
Here are some possibilities:
1. Republicans rely too much these days on low-propensity voters.
Voter turnout is often linked to education and income. As Republicans and Democrats have traded certain voter blocs — with Democrats picking up suburban voters and Republicans gaining working-class voters — Republicans have given up the voters most likely to vote in an off-year election while picking up those less likely to. In political science terms, Republicans now rely on a lot of “low-propensity” voters who are more inclined to turn out in a presidential year but not an off-year election. More than a year ago, a Republican legislator expressed concern to me about the 2025 House elections for that very reason; his fears came true.
One big flaw in this theory is that Spanberger generated high retention rates from the same types of voters that Earle-Sears didn’t, which suggests the problem was more about Earle-Sears than the voters.
2. Earle-Sears’ campaign did little to nothing to appeal to these voters.
Polls consistently showed that the top concern voters had was about the cost of living, and it stands to reason that working-class voters would feel more economically squeezed by higher prices than more affluent ones. Spanberger ran her whole campaign on the theme of “affordability,” Earle-Sears didn’t. She lurched from one issue to another but mostly presented herself as a culture warrior when voters seemed more concerned about economics. Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised, then, that voters didn’t respond.
This is the answer that makes the most sense to me. The Earle-Sears campaign was the worst gubernatorial campaign I’ve seen. Republicans need a big turnout from the western part of the state. Roanoke is the biggest media market in that part of the state. How many times did Earle-Sears have a public event in Roanoke? Until the day before the election, just two — and both were on weekends when the number of people watching television news is low. Gun-related issues are a key motivator for many rural voters; Earle-Sears never raised those. Her campaign basically went silent in early September. This may not be the sole reason for this voter drop-off, though.
3. Trump wasn’t on the ballot.
Trump may have a unique ability to excite the voters who plainly weren’t excited this year. He didn’t endorse Earle-Sears, which meant she had the worst of both worlds. Democrats fired up their voters by linking Earle-Sears to Trump while she couldn’t fire up Trump devotees with an endorsement. We’ve seen indications in previous elections that Republicans may have trouble with turnout if Trump isn’t running. If that’s really the case, that’s a long-term problem for the party because Trump won’t be around forever.
4. Race and gender played a role.
I’ve had several readers — all Democrats — ask if I thought racism and sexism hurt Earle-Sears. My answer: I’m not so naive as to believe those -isms don’t exist but I’ve got no way to measure them. If Earle-Sears had been a better candidate and run a textbook-perfect campaign and still lost, maybe we could attribute a defeat to these factors. However, her campaign was so bad we can explain her defeat without citing any of these factors, even if they did play a role at some level.
We can also flip this around and ask why Spanberger ran so well with working-class voters, a constituency that Democrats have had difficulty with in recent elections. I’d be very cautious about advancing this theory. Spanberger did do a better job retaining working-class voters than Earle-Sears did. And in rural areas, Spanberger increased the Democratic vote over what it was four years ago. However, in raw numbers, she didn’t increase it that much — the percentages look tighter simply because Earle-Sears did so poorly, not because Spanberger did all that well. Still, she did improve Democratic numbers, reversing a downward slide we’ve seen in previous elections. Her ability to motivate Democratic voters of all types was impressive — but Earle-Sears’ unique failure with working-class voters helped turn a clear margin for Spanberger into a pretty catastrophic one for Republicans that cost the party the attorney general’s office and probably some House seats.
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