Rob PegoraroVirginia is not for Trump lovers
Smashing a 249-year-old glass ceiling was the least remarkable thing that Virginia voters did Tuesday. Once the Democratic and Republican parties had other candidates drop out and leave former congresswoman Abigail Spanberger and current lieutenant governor Winsome Earle-Sears as unchallenged candidates, it was assured that the Old Dominion would get its first female governor.
Which is still noteworthy, considering that the line of Virginia governors starts with Patrick Henry and then Thomas Jefferson, and yet also a tad regrettable considering that we took this long and that this happened 32 years after the commonwealth’s only other election with a woman running for governor.
But Spanberger didn’t just win but ran away with the election by more than 14 points, including support from a non-trivial fraction of 2024 Trump voters who found something to vote for her in her message of reducing the cost of living and standing up for the state against Trump’s chaos. Democratic candidates for lieutenant governor and attorney general Ghazala Hashmi and Jay Jones won by smaller margins that still outpaced many forecasts.
Yes, even AG nominee Jones, who had to grovel for forgiveness after the revelation of grotesque text messages from 2022 in which he imagined the execution of Todd Gilbert, then Republican majority leader of the House of Delegates, and the deaths by shooting of his kids.
(At least Jones apologized profusely, which is not something President Trump has ever done for any of his own deranged statements, much less the unforgiveable offense against democracy of trying to overturn the 2020 election.)
The ninth election that I’ve served as an Arlington County election officer, also the first I’d worked with the state’s top three offices on the ballot, saw equally sweeping victories for Virginia Dems in the House of Delegates.
With all 100 seats up for election, voters chose Democratic candidates in 13 previously Republican districts, turning a thin 51-seat majority into a 64-seat lock in the oldest continuous legislative assembly in the Americas–which has a great deal of unfinished business from previous sessions.
Being in the party of Trump, whose chaotic and cruel firings of government workers have left more of a dent in Virginia than in other states, seems to be political poison in far more of the commonwealth than many people expected. Especially if you try to pass off those layoffs as no big deal, as both Earle-Sears and current Republican governor Glenn Youngkin did.
These results–along with the Democratic demolition of Republican hopes in my birth state of New Jersey–should now have a lot of GOP officeholders elsewhere in the commonwealth and the country feeling nervous about their own job security. And that seems more than fair when so many voters already feel the same anxiety.
#2025Election #AbigailSpanberger #GlennYoungkin #HouseOfDelegates #OldDominion #Virginia #VirginiaGeneralAssembly #VirginiaGovernor #VirginiaPolitics #WinsomeEarleSears
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