Virginians are in an increasingly sour mood as the year comes to an end, with their disapproval of President Donald Trump deepening.
However, Virginians continue to like the state’s Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin, and like their incoming governor, Democrat Abigail Spanberger, even more.
Those are some of the key findings of the latest Roanoke College poll, which was released Thursday.
Taken together, they help to further explain the big Democratic victories in November’s election but also carry some warning signs for Republicans in next year’s congressional midterms. Here’s a summary:
74% think the nation is on the wrong track
We’re a perpetually unhappy people. In more than a decade of polling, Roanoke College has never found a majority who think we’re on the right track — doesn’t matter which party is in charge. It’s also sometimes hard to find out why people think we’re on the wrong track. It’s easy to assume that Democrats think we’re on the wrong track because Republicans control Washington, but if 74% think we’re on the wrong track, that has to include some Republicans, too. Why do they think we’re on the wrong track? The poll can’t answer that.
The key thing is that this number has shot up since Roanoke College asked it in August. Then, 60% thought the nation was on the wrong track; now it’s jumped up to 74%. That’s the biggest swing in more than a decade of poll results. This poll was taken Nov. 9-14, just after the election, but it seems logical to assume that voters’ moods didn’t change so much in just a day or two. Whatever worsened people’s moods from August to November surely played a role in the big Democratic wins in Virginia. History shows voters may never be happy, but Republicans need to find a way to make them feel less happy if they want to avoid similar bad results in next year’s elections.
The only consolation for Republicans is that 74% isn’t an unprecedentedly high number. Roanoke College found 74% thought we were on the wrong track in November 2023, when Joe Biden was president, and the number was higher still at 77% under Biden in May 2022. The lowest “wrong” track figures in the past decade came in January 2017, the month Trump took office, when it was 52%, and before that in January 2015 under Barack Obama.
Trump is far more unpopular than he was during his first term
Virginia voted against Trump all three times he’s run, so we shouldn’t be surprised to see that most of those surveyed disapprove. What’s notable is how many disapprove: 63%. That’s the second-highest disapproval for Trump that the Roanoke College poll has ever found. In May, the figure was 65%.
For comparison purposes, 53.95% of Virginians voted for a candidate other than Trump in last year’s presidential election (virtually all of those for Kamala Harris), so if Trump’s disapproval rate is now 63% that suggests some former Trump voters are now disapproving of what he’s done.
Trump began his second term with a disapproval rate of 52% in Virginia, and it’s risen in almost every Roanoke College poll since then.
More comparison: Trump was never this unpopular in Virginia during his first term. Twice then his disapproval rate hit 58%, but once it was as low as 48%. Generally, his disapproval rating in Virginia was in the low 50s. This year it’s generally been in the high 50s or sometimes in the 60s.
Trump’s growing unpopularity seems a red flag for Republicans going into the midterms — Trump 2.0 is not Trump 1.0. One caution for Democrats: These are statewide numbers, so the figures in strongly Republican parts of the state, such as Southwest and Southside, might be quite different.
Nearly half of Virginians see Trump as a criminal or a fascist
We don’t need a poll to tell us that Trump provokes strong feelings, but this poll does show the depth of those feelings: 30% of those responding consider him a criminal. That was the most popular of five possible answers:
Criminal: 30%
Leader: 23%
Disruptor: 18%
Fascist: 16%
Visionary: 11%
Don’t know/refused: 3%
I’ll consider “leader” and “visionary” to be positive descriptions, so that’s 34% positive.
“Disruptor” could go either way — positive, negative or just a neutral factual description, depending on how you feel about those disruptions.
And then we have 46% who see Trump as either a criminal or a fascist.
Of note: Most of these numbers are little changed from when the Roanoke College poll asked them a year ago. One category has, though. Those responding “leader” have slipped from 29% to 23%.
Both Biden and Trump have made us pessimistic about the future
The Roanoke College poll has often asked whether Virginians think the country’s best years are ahead of us or behind us.
During Trump’s first term, Virginians were consistently optimistic — whether because of Trump or in spite of Trump is harder to say, but seeing as how Virginians then disapproved of Trump, it likely was the latter.
Most of the time, 55% to 57% of those responding said our best days were ahead of us. By 2020, that figure had moved into the 60% range, hitting 62% in November 2020 when Trump was being voted out of office.
The good feelings continued in the early months of the Biden administration, although they trended down slightly. Then something happened. In November 2021, the “ahead” share fell to 49%, although still higher than the “behind” at 45%. This followed the chaotic American withdrawal from Afghanistan, which now stands out in polling as an inflection point on the Biden administration. It also coincided with rising inflation, which certainly undermined Biden.
Virginians’ mood rebounded slightly by November 2022, when 50% said our best days were ahead of us.
The question was asked again in May 2023, and then a majority said our best days were behind us — 41% ahead, 55% behind. We saw another slight rebound to the positive side in November 2024, around the time of the presidential election, but this poll again finds us pessimistic: 44% ahead, 53% behind.
Whatever happened to tank our optimism, neither Biden nor Trump has been able to change it. That was likely a problem for Democrats in last year’s election and will likely be a problem for Republicans in next year’s election. My sense is that whichever party, and whichever candidate, can change this mood will be well-positioned for 2028. The time seems ripe for a modern version of Ronald Reagan’s “morning in America” campaign of 1984. The challenge is that Reagan was then running for reelection. Assuming Trump doesn’t challenge the constitutional prohibition of a third term, the 2028 presidential election will feature two new candidates. Still, my point is that the time may be ripe for a candidate who can convincingly sell optimism to a pessimistic people. (The keyword there may be “convincingly.”)
Virginians feel pretty good about things at home
Virginians’ bad moods are mostly directed at national politics. By a slight margin, they feel Virginia is on the right track: 50% right track to 46% wrong track.
Virginians are historically more optimistic about the state than the nation. Although they’ve always said the nation is on the wrong track, they’ve almost always said Virginia is on the right track, with only intermittent exceptions over the years, the last time coming in November 2022.
Virginians like Youngkin
In 17 Roanoke College polls since Youngkin took office in January 2022, his approval rating has outranked his disapproval rating in all but one, in May this year. This poll found 54% approve of his handling of the governorship, 38% disapprove. Youngkin, I should point out, seems naturally optimistic, and I suspect Virginians like that about him. Whether he can transfer that to the national scene, should his future lead him through Iowa and New Hampshire, we’ll see.
Spanberger enters office with Virginians feeling good about her
The poll finds Spanberger notching her highest favorable rating to date: 56%. That’s up from 47% in October, before the election. Of note: That 56% figure nearly matches the 57.58% she won in the election, so she’ll enter office in January on a high note. The challenge for her will be to keep it there, but that 56% figure does give her some political capital to spend on difficult decisions, if she so chooses.
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