A diminished number of House Republicans meet this weekend to pick their leaders, and the top question is: Will they kick out their current leader, Terry Kilgore of Scott County, in favor of challenger Mike Cherry of Colonial Heights?
When parties lose, and especially when they lose big, it’s not unusual for them to change leaders. However, that raises this question: Was it Kilgore’s fault the party lost 13 seats in the election?
Not that I’m the ultimate arbiter of such things, but my post-election analysis listed 13 reasons why things turned out the way they did — and earlier this week I added a 14th: Winsome Earle-Sears’ inability to generate much turnout from blue-collar voters.
None of those cited poor leadership from Kilgore — or, for that matter, from state party chair Mark Peake, who is also under fire for the election results. From where I sit (out here in the woods of Botetourt County, watching the mourning doves chase off smaller birds from the feeder), Republicans began with an unfavorable political climate, President Donald Trump’s unpopularity in the state made it worse, and then a terrible campaign by Earle-Sears exacerbated things. I’m not sure there’s a thing the House minority leader or the state party chair could have done when the gubernatorial candidate — who is supposed to be the one driving turnout — is making such a mess of things. She rarely campaigned in the parts of the state where she needed to run up the Republican vote, she ran on issues that polls show voters weren’t particularly interested in, she wouldn’t meet with key business groups, she went inexplicably silent for long parts of the campaign.
That’s just what I think, though. What can we prove with actual numbers? Fortunately, the Virginia Public Access Project has provided some. It calculated the gubernatorial vote in each House of Delegates district in the state. With these numbers, we might be able to answer this question: How many House seats did Earle-Sears’ awful performance cost the party? Was it all 13 or some other number?
Here’s what we see: VPAP says it doesn’t have complete information for House District 86 in the Hampton area where Democrat Virgil Thornton ousted Republican A.C. Cordoza. In the other 12 districts, Democrat Abigail Spanberger got more votes than Republican Winsome Earle-Sears. Maybe that’s not surprising, but it did create this basic dynamic: Every Democratic House candidate in those districts benefited from Spanberger’s vote while every Republican was penalized by Earle-Sears’ poor performance.
Even so, all but one Republican House candidates in those 12 districts where data is available ran ahead of Earle-Sears. That’s somewhat surprising because usually there’s some drop-off further down the ballot. Indeed, on the Democratic side, all but one Democratic candidate ran behind Spanberger. Most of the time, they didn’t run that far behind her but those candidates profited from straight-ticket voting while the Republican candidates had to break that trend. All did, to some degree, just not enough.
Would it have been possible for some or all of those candidates to have won despite Earle-Sears’ historically low vote? That’s a hard question to answer. Anything that doesn’t violate the laws of physics is possible but, realistically, in today’s political climate, it’s hard to see a lower-ballot candidate polling that much differently from the top of the ticket. Let’s move on to a different, and to me more practical, question: How much better would Earle-Sears have needed to run for those House candidates to win? Maybe she still wouldn’t have won statewide, but maybe the party’s House losses wouldn’t have been so bad.
Let’s go through them district by district:
HD 22: Elizabeth Guzman (D) defeated Del. Ian Lovejoy (R)
Here’s the vote in that district, first for the House candidates, then the gubernatorial candidates.
Guzman 20,297, Lovejoy 16,624
Spanberger 20,774, Earle-Sears 15,740
Guzman ran 2.2% behind Spanberger while Lovejoy ran 5.6% ahead of Earle-Sears.
Guzman won by 3,673 votes. For Lovejoy to have generated that many extra votes, plus one, he’d have needed to run 28.9% ahead of Earle-Sears (or her campaign would have had to improve its vote by 28.9% in this district). Either way, that seems a heavy lift to me, but you can decide for yourself.
HD 30: John McAuliff (D) defeated Del. Geary Higgins (R)
McAuliff 22,179, Higgins 21,370
Spanberger 22,885, Earle-Sears 20,703
McAuliff ran 3.0% behind Spanberger while Higgins ran 3.2% ahead of Earle-Sears.
For Higgins to have won, he’d have had to run 7.1% ahead of Earle-Sears.
HD 41: Lily Franklin (D) defeated Del. Chris Obenshain (R)
Franklin 16,161, Obenshain 15,194
Spanberger 16,621, Earle-Sears 14,702
Franklin ran 2.7% behind Spanberger while Obenshain ran 3.3% ahead of Earle-Sears.
For Obenshain to have won, he’d have had to run 9.9% ahead of Earle-Sears.
HD 57: May Nivar (D) defeated Del. David Owen (R)
Nivar 23,894, Owen 19,158
Spanberger 25,868, Earle-Sears 17,287
Nivar ran 7.6% behind Spanberger, the biggest deficit of any of the Democratic candidates in these 12 districts, while Owen ran 10.8% ahead of Earle-Sears, which means he ran better than all but one of the losing Republican candidates. Update: He actually appears to have run better than any of the losing Republican candidates. See more info under HD 66 below.
For Owen to have won, he’d have had to run 38.2% ahead of Earle-Sears.
HD 64: Stacey Carroll (D) defeated Del. Paul Milde (R)
Carroll 19,163, Milde 16,933
Spanberger 19,745 Earle-Sears 16,473
Carroll ran 2.9% behind Spanberger while Milde ran 2.7% ahead of Earle-Sears.
For Milde to have won, he’d have had to run 16.3% ahead of Earle-Sears.
HD 66: Nicole Cole (D) has defeated Del. Bobby Orrock (R)
Cole 18,830, Orrock 17,248
Spanberger 15,943, Earle-Sears 14,402
This is the only district where the Democratic House candidate ran ahead of Spanberger. I don’t have a good explanation (or any explanation) for that, but it’s what the numbers show.
Cole ran 18.1% ahead of Spanberger while Orrock ran 19.7% ahead of Earle-Sears, better than any of the other Republican candidates here — and still lost.
For Orrock to have won, he’d have had to run 30.7% ahead of Earle-Sears.
Update: Tanner Bonovitch of the Sectorian Group and a consultant to the campaign of Del. David Owen, R-Goochland, in HD 57, contacted me this morning to offer this insight on whe numbers in HD 66 are so different. “Just finished reading your recent article, and like you, I couldn’t believe the numbers reported by VPAP on the Governor vs HD66 race,” he wrote. “A 5,700 vote difference between Governor and Delegate? No way. I did a bit of research and found that the reason we see this discrepancy is due to Spotsylvania having 2 split precincts within HD66. VPAP, for some reason, just skipped those precincts altogether in their ‘2025 Gubernatorial Results by District’ visual, and their current number is way off.”
Bonovitch did some math to account for that (which he included in an Excel sheet he shared): “It is likely that Del. Orrock will finish about ~1,000 votes better than Lt. Gov. Sears for a ~6% increase.” That means is client, Owen, had the best performance of any Republican candidate.
HD 69: Mark Downey (D) defeated Del. Chad Green (R)
Downey 19,262, Green 18,065
Spanberger 20,199, Earle-Sears 18,553
Downey ran 4.6% behind Spanberger while Green ran 2.6% behind Earle-Sears. This is the only district where the Republican House candidate ran behind Earle-Sears, but a third-party House candidate here might have skewed the vote some.
For Green to have won, he’d have had to run 3.8% ahead of Earle-Sears. That seems doable from afar. Of these 12 races we’re looking at, six had a Republican run that far ahead.
HD 71: Jessica Anderson (D) defeated Del. Amanda Batten (R)
Anderson 23,252, Batten 20,789
Spanberger 24,122, Earle-Sears 19,977
Anderson ran 3.6% behind Spanberger while Batten ran 4.0% ahead of Earle-Sears.
For Batten to have won, she’d have had to run 16.3% ahead of Earle-Sears.
HD 73: Leslie Mehta (D) defeated Del. Mark Earley Jr. (R)
Mehta 25,957, Earley 24,178
Spanberger 27,369, Earle-Sears 22,786
Mehta ran 5.1% behind Spanberger while Earley ran 6.1% ahead of Earle-Sears.
For Earley to have won, he’d have had to run 13.9% ahead of Earle-Sears.
HD 75: Lindsey Dougherty (D) defeated Del. Carrie Coyner (R)
Dougherty 15,129, Coyner 13,422
Spanberger 16,268, Earle-Sears 12,301
Dougherty ran 7.0% behind Spanberger while Coyner ran 9.1% ahead of Earle-Sears.
For Coyner to have won, she’d have needed to run 22.9% ahead of Earle-Sears.
HD 82: Kimberly Pope Adams (D) defeated Del. Kim Taylor (R)
Adams 18,421, Taylor 15,839
Spanberger 18,537, Earle-Sears 15,609
Adams ran just 0.6% behind Spanberger while Taylor ran 1.4% ahead of Earle-Sears. No other House race tracked so closely to the gubernatorial vote.
For Taylor to have won, she’d have had to run 18.0% ahead of Earle-Sears.
HD 86: Virgil Thornton (D) defeated Del. A.C. Cordoza
Thornton 16,884, Cordoza 14,475
VPAP says “incomplete data” on the governor’s race, so we’ll have to skip over this one.
HD 89: Karen Carnegie (D) defeated Mike Lamonea (R) for a Republican-held open seat
Carnegie 20,364, Lameona 16,942
Spanberger 20,835, Earle-Sears 16,600
Carnegie ran 2.2% behind Spanberger while Lameona ran 2.0% ahead of Earle-Sears.
For Lameona to have won, he’d have needed to run 22.6% ahead of Earle-Sears.
So what’s the bottom line?
Looking at these numbers, the only two House races where a better campaign for the Republican candidate might have yielded different results is in House District 69, where Green needed to run just 3.8% ahead of Earle-Sears to have won, and maybe House District 30, where Higgins needed to run 7.1% ahead. I say that looking only at the math. For all I know, Green and Higgins did everything humanly possible. The general order of things is the House candidates get fewer votes than the top of the ticket, so expecting them to exceed the tally their gubernatorial candidate received may be an unrealistic expectation. It might be better to say that if Earle-Sears had run a campaign just 3.8% better she’d have been able to save Green and 7.1% better she could have saved Higgins — but none of the other House candidates.
This is all guesswork, but these numbers lead me to conclude that Earle-Sears cost her party at least 10 House seats (maybe 11 or 12, depending on those HD 69 and HD 30 races and perhaps even all 13 once data is in for HD 86). There might always be unique local circumstances in these races that I’m not familiar with which could have influenced the margins but, numerically, the Earle-Sears campaign seems to have pulled them all down so far that the Republican House candidates in those districts couldn’t reasonably climb out of those holes. Could Earle-Sears have run a better campaign? Absolutely, but she didn’t, and she turned what might have been a modest Republican loss into a historic one.
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