Joe Thomas is The Daily Signal’s Virginia correspondent. He is a 37-year broadcasting veteran with 17 years covering Virginia from the marches to the memorials and everything in between.
How close is the race for Virginia’s next governor? We could cite polls (Democrat Abigail Spanberger leads by more than five points in the two that were released in the past week) or go over campaign contributions (Spanberger raised $12.6 million in September while Republican Winsome Earle-Sears raised $9.1 million), but it doesn’t appear that those statistics are telling the whole story.
For the first time since 2021, President Barack Obama will be coming to campaign in Virginia. The Nov. 1 event in Hampton Roads is his first visit to that region since 2012 during his own reelection campaign. As poker players refer to it, that’s the “tell.”
Despite Republican gains in Northern Virginia counties like Loudoun and Fairfax in 2021, it was the Republican ticket’s strength in the Hampton Roads region that pushed the ticket to victory in 2021. The three Republican statewide candidates all lived in the area, and then-lieutenant governor candidate Earle-Sears and then-attorney general candidate Jason Miyares both represented districts there in the House of Delegates.
On Sunday, President Donald Trump was asked why he had not endorsed Earle-Sears this year, to which he responded, “I think the Republican candidate is very good, and she should win because the Democratic candidate is a disaster.”
In the ads Obama recently recorded for Spanberger, he said, “Virginia’s elections are some of the most important in the country this year.” Why would he say that? For a couple of reasons.
The first is money. The direst issue to the Democratic Party—and more importantly, to those that give Democrats money, like climate venture capitalist Tom Steyer and the specter-like George Soros—would be the end of the Virginia Clean Economy Act.
The Democratic Party leadership is already facing several Democrat legislators admitting that they are open to rewriting the act. It’s also facing voters railing against the dire rhetoric of Dominion Energy telling them that rate hikes and brownouts are coming while saying that it has to build the inefficient renewable energy production facilities because of the law.
The stakes in this race are the billions of dollars in government subsidies that support these programs, according to data from the Conveners Network, an organization that helps companies find subsidies for renewable energy. If another Republican governor is elected who has a Republican House of Delegates ready to cut that money flow, you can imagine the urgency of wanting to stop that.
The second reason is normalization. Faster than you can say “Overton window,” a new GOP majority in the House of Delegates in 2026 could stop a proposed Virginia constitutional amendment that would permit abortion up until the moment of birth.