Every four years, a familiar pattern plays out in Virginia, in which governors are limited to one term at a time and elections are held twelve months after the latest Presidential contest. A semi-substantive campaign breaks out, but the result is driven by the national mood; only once in the past half century has the President’s own party won the governor’s mansion in Richmond. Unlike in New Jersey—where Spanberger’s old congressional roommate, Mikie Sherrill, is running in the other gubernatorial race this fall—in Virginia, the out candidate invariably wins, and whatever that person does is held up as a national model for the Party. So it’s only natural for Spanberger to contend that her case for political moderation deserves a serious look, and perhaps for her to be a little tired of all the attention on Mamdani. As Election Day approaches, Spanberger, who is a warm but assiduous campaigner, is ahead in her race by a wider margin than any candidate in her state’s recent history. Republicans have tried dragging down Spanberger by amplifying the case of Jay Jones, the Democratic candidate for attorney general, who was found to have sent text messages three years ago fantasizing about killing the G.O.P. speaker of the state assembly. Spanberger condemned him but wouldn’t call on him to withdraw from the race. Still, Earle-Sears—a Jamaican immigrant and a social conservative who recently insisted, in a debate, that being against protections for people in same-sex marriages is “not discrimination”—has run a mostly puzzling and underfunded campaign. (Donald Trump only recently, tepidly, backed her.)
Spanberger’s lead has afforded her the chance to run a straightforward Democratic campaign focussed largely on the cost of living in her state. To optimists, that’s a through line connecting candidates as different as Spanberger and Mamdani. Tim Kaine, the Democratic senator from Virginia, pointed out that both are younger than their predecessors and that both stress the issue of affordability. But in the race’s final stretch Spanberger has seemed eager to emphasize what, in her telling, is the realism of her approach. “This is what I’m going to work to do, right? I’m not going to make promises that I can’t keep, but I will work tirelessly to deliver,” she said. “There’s no magic wand to lower housing costs, but it takes intentionality and a plan to work with the General Assembly to change some of our laws to increase housing supply, to have a governor’s office and an administration focussed on making a long-term plan to bring down costs, right? Health care’s the same—you can’t just wave a magic wand and fix the system.”
“If you just speak in bumper-sticker sayings or what fits on a rally sign, you’re actually underestimating voters, or you’re making a promise that you can’t complete,” she continued. “And I think that’s part of why, you know, over time, people’s faith in politics might get degraded.”
Don Beyer, a Democratic congressman from northern Virginia, said that his colleagues in the U.S. House have been watching Spanberger’s campaign as a glimmer of hope since the spring, as Trump’s steamrolling of the capital has intensified. “Everyone’s been pointing to it: ‘We know we can’t pass any legislation, we can only use the courts, we can’t impeach him. But Abigail can win!’ ” Beyer told me. He said he expected that, if she does, it will help Democrats recruit stronger candidates for tough midterm races next year. Kaine said his fellow-senators, too, are monitoring the contest closely. But, in Kaine’s account, they are more cautious: “They view the Virginia result as one that will either be a hope creator nationally, or the one that will pour some cold water on people who are already feeling a little bit down.”
Late last year, while Kaine was traversing the state to campaign for a third term in the U.S. Senate, he started to notice that something was missing from the messages he saw on his hotel TVs, in media markets that overlapped with West Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Kentucky. “Other Democrats were running ads about preserving democracy, or about choice. Important issues, but they weren’t running ads about the economy, where the Republicans were running ads about inflation,” he told me this fall. Kaine, who was elected Virginia’s governor in 2005, before becoming Barack Obama’s first Democratic National Committee chairman and then Hillary Clinton’s running mate in her bid for the Presidency, had done a straightforward spot about his record building roads, bridges, and ships, and supporting offshore wind power, and voters were responding positively. “It just made me mad, because I thought both Kamala Harris, but also other Democrats, had economic stuff they could have put front and center,” he said. Kaine won reëlection comfortably in an otherwise dark November for Democrats, and, soon after, he spoke with Spanberger about what he’d seen.
She didn’t need much convincing. She had already been on the trail for a year, using a version of the basic economics- and education-first pitch that had served her well in her three congressional races. (The 2020 round of redistricting shifted much of her purview to northern Virginia, meaning she’s already earned votes from a big band of the state.) Virginia’s current governor, the Republican Glenn Youngkin, won his race in 2021 in part by warning of the dangers of “critical race theory.” When Earle-Sears started trying to reignite a culture war against Spanberger, whom she has accused of being a secret hard-core lefty, the Democrat largely shrugged it off and pivoted back to her safe space: protecting paychecks, fighting the effects of tariffs, investing in rural hospitals. In the race’s only debate this fall, Spanberger mostly stared ahead as Earle-Sears sought repeatedly to get her to address the Jones scandal, sometimes pivoting from entirely unrelated topics—like a car tax—to try to force the issue. Spanberger skated past a series of moderator questions about trans rights by mostly demurring and offering that local jurisdictions should make tough calls about who can use what bathroom or play on what team.
