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For Republicans, the 2021 Virginia gubernatorial election is the stuff of campaign legend.
An outsider with little initial name recognition defeated a well-known and well-funded former governor and Clinton family associate, delivering the GOP its first statewide win in the commonwealth since 2009, doing so one year after former President Joe Biden held the state for Democrats by a 10-point margin.
The drastic swing put wind in the sails of a Virginia Republican Party that had floundered for years. Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R-VA) was immediately vaulted into the 2024 presidential discussion, and the gains the party made that year proved lasting. In 2024, President Donald Trump improved his performance in the commonwealth by 5 points, even as he still failed to push Virginia back into the Republican column.
The defining moment in that 2021 campaign came when the Democratic nominee, former Gov. Terry McAuliffe, said that he didn’t believe that “parents should be telling schools what they should teach” during a debate. The easy-made attack ad became Youngkin’s closing statement. He won by a slim but healthy 2-point margin, and his coattails brought with him a Republican lieutenant governor in Winsome Earle-Sears and a Republican attorney general in Jason Miyares.
That victory, and the issue that defined it, education, was seen at the time as a new opportunity for Republicans to encroach on an issue that historically Democrats had dominated. Education and its role in the culture war became the defining issue of the campaign, and without its emergence, Youngkin, who trailed most polls until the very end of the campaign, likely would have lost.
While most Republicans until that point had all but avoided the issue, Youngkin made it define his campaign. He vowed to root out racially divisive and sexual material in schools, restore meritocracy to education, and investigate Loudoun County Public Schools for covering up an incident of sexual assault where the male student perpetrator entered the girls’ bathroom while wearing a skirt.
But four years later, the movement that Youngkin led has largely dissipated from public view. A quirk of Virginia’s constitution is that the governor cannot run for reelection, so while the incumbent governor has enjoyed generally positive approval ratings throughout his entire term, he would never have the chance to have a direct referendum on his record with Virginia voters.
Since that 2021 sweep, Earle-Sears has been the heir apparent to the Youngkin regime. She launched her campaign a year ago, and, with Youngkin’s endorsement, secured the Republican nomination unopposed. In the meantime, Trump’s victory returned Republican control to the White House, and former Rep. Abigail Spanberger, who has a history of winning tough, close races, secured the Democratic nomination, likewise with no opposition.
But since each candidate launched their respective campaigns, neither has distinguished themselves on the campaign trail in any way. The effect is that the race, up until recently, has largely been defined by the baseline fundamentals of Virginia’s political landscape. It is a Democratic-leaning purple state that generally elects a governor from the opposite party as the president. Baseline advantage: Spanberger.
The polls have borne that out. A May Roanoke College poll gave Spanberger a 17-point lead, while a June VCU poll gave the Democratic candidate a 12-point lead. Up to this point, the picture looked bleak for Earle-Sears and the GOP. That was, until the calendar turned to August.
The most recent Roanoke College poll, taken in the middle of August, showed Spanberger’s lead had shrunk by a whopping 10 points in the span of three months. Likewise, another poll from co/efficient, a polling firm affiliated with Republicans, showed Spanberger with only a 5-point lead.
Now, the abrupt narrowing of the race is partly the result of Republicans “coming home” to their nominee. But it has also coincided with the beginning of the new school year and, with it, a host of new headlines that have reminded voters that the problems in the education system didn’t just go away when Youngkin was elected.
In a bid to recapture the magic of 2021, Earle-Sears and the rest of the Republican ticket, which includes Miyares running for reelection, have once again turned to the issue that animated the closing days of that campaign. And once again, liberal school officials in northern Virginia have been only too willing to provide the headlines to give the issue salience.
In Loudoun County, the place where the education issue first caught on in 2021, the school board has once again injected itself into the education culture wars by refusing to require students to use bathrooms that correspond to their biological sex, and thus defying an order from the Trump administration that threatened to pull federal funding from the district if they did not comply.
In neighboring Fairfax County, school officials at a high school secretly helped several female students get abortions without parental notice or consent, while the pro-Spanberger commonwealth’s attorney for the county, Steve Descano, has refused to prosecute numerous crimes, including a registered sex offender who exposed himself in the women’s locker room at several local schools and gyms.
With two months left to go until the general election, the revival of the 2021 education and culture wars playbook is, at the very least, showing that the parental rights movement that began that year is not dead, and the issues that animated Youngkin’s victory still hold salience four years later.
Youngkin and Trump placed themselves on the right side of issues that are supported by supermajorities of the electorate, while their Democratic opponents struggled to defend unpopular positions.
For much of the cycle, Earle-Sears has run what can only be described as a lackluster campaign. But the pivot to the politics of parental rights may be the catalyst for a strong finish. The lieutenant governor, who is black, got some wind in her sails when a Spanberger supporter showed up to a recent GOP rally with a sign reading, “Hey Winsome, if trans can’t share your bathroom, then blacks can’t share my water fountain.”
While the Democratic nominee condemned the racist signage, the incident energized the GOP in Virginia to close ranks around their nominee, while forcing Democrats to reckon with the reality that their base is all too comfortable with racism toward Republicans.
The reality is that even with her recent surge, Earle-Sears is the underdog in the race. Trump lost Virginia by 5 points last year and remains unpopular in the commonwealth, especially as he has gone to war with federal bureaucrats, many of whom live in Virginia and are among the most likely to turn out to vote. Compounding the problem for the incumbent lieutenant governor is Virginia’s unwillingness to elect a governor from the president’s party. Simply by virtue of being the Democratic nominee, Spanberger should win.
VIRGINIA RACES TIGHTEN, EARLE-SEARS CLOSES GAP TO 5 POINTS
But history is full of campaigns that were certain to win, only for voters to deliver a different result. McAuliffe learned that lesson the hard way in 2021. The education culture wars still matter four years later, and the reality is that allowing school districts to facilitate secret abortions and allow men in women’s locker rooms is still an unpopular position.
The realities of the political landscape may ultimately still send Spanberger to the governor’s mansion. But if a race that was supposed to be a walk to the finish line continues to grow more competitive, Democrats will only have themselves to blame. After all, no one forced them to adopt a view of culture and schools that was created by radical advocacy groups and is at odds with commonsense and the voters they need to win elections.
