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Russian (RU) Back in 2021, Republican Glenn Youngkin sailed to victory in the Virginia gubernatorial largely by playing into the fears of outraged conservative parents. He had leaned into the so-called “parental rights” movement, a backlash against everything right-wing parents had been denouncing since the pandemic shut down schools: transgender students playing sports, books about the LGBTQ+ community and diversity programs. And it worked — he won handily.
In the aftermath, the Republican Party took the strategy as gospel. Across the country, lawmakers and candidates have leaned hard into a full-fledged assault on culture war issues. This year’s statewide elections in Virginia are no exception, with candidates for governor and other offices banking on what seems a proven strategy.
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But four years later, that same playbook doesn’t appear to be swaying Virginia’s voters.
This year, Virginians largely see anti-trans rhetoric as plain old alarmist pearl-clutching from the GOP. They’re more worried about issues like affordability and jobs — ones that the Trump administration is making worse.
“A lot of the GOP campaigns are falling short because they’re focusing on fearmongering on trans students when the economy is absolutely top of mind for voters in this state,” Jatia Wrighten, a political science professor at Virginia Commonwealth University who studies voter turnout and local elections, told HuffPost.
“Republicans think this is going to carry them all the way,” Ben Tribbett, a Virginia-based Democratic strategist, told HuffPost. After all, President Donald Trump, who made culture war issues a pillar of his campaign, defeated Vice President Kamala Harris just last year. At the time, some critics blamed the loss on Harris’ supposed focus on “identity politics,” including support for trans people.
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“I think the post-2024 internal party blaming the election results on trans people was bullshit,” Tribbett disagreed. “Kamala just seemed more socially out of touch, it wasn’t trans issues that took her out.”
Now, the question of what candidates, and which issues, are out of touch with voters might be swinging from the opposite direction.
In some key races, Republicans have been trailing in the polls for months. A George Mason University poll taken just days before the election shows Democrat Abigail Spanberger up by 12 points over Republican Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears in the governor’s race.
Part of the problem may be that Earle-Sears is attempting to go full Trump. One of the only five main issues highlighted on her campaign page is devoted to opposing trans athletes. And Earle-Sears is running an anti-trans ad that is almost an exact replica of an ad the Trump campaign ran against Harris last year.
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“Our LGBTQ neighbors have the same legal rights as anyone else,” Spanberger says in the ad. The spot further criticizes Spanberger for supporting transgender rights, saying, “THAT’S INSANE.”
Then, it ends with “Spanberger is for they/them, not us,” the exact same phrase Trump used to pillory Harris.
The irony, though, is that Spanberger’s campaign hasn’t focused on the culture wars at all: Her campaign page’s section about protecting rights has one mention of the LGBTQ+ community. Instead, her main issues are making Virginia affordable and strengthening public schools.
“Every corner of Virginia, the story is the same,” Spanberger says in one of her ads. “The cost for families in housing, in health care, in energy … every day just gets a little harder. But I’ve rolled out plans and I’m ready to get to work to lower costs.”
Neither Spanberger’s nor Earle-Sears’ campaigns immediately responded to a request for comment.
Polling indicates that Virginia voters aren’t worried about trans athletes, but rather the state of the economy and threats to democracy. An October 2025 Emerson College poll found that when it came to their choice for governor, voters’ top issue was the economy, with 79% of respondents saying it was the most important issue. Education and health care were at 78% and 71% percent, respectively, followed by threats to democracy at 66%.
Only 27% of those surveyed said transgender issues were very important.
Back in 2024, Trump’s campaign paired his culture war issues with big picture promises on the economy — beyond pledges like stopping an immigration “invasion,” keeping “men” out of women’s sports, and prohibiting so-called critical race theory in K-12 schools; he also campaigned on economic issues like ending inflation and returning manufacturing jobs to the U.S. Even then, Trump didn’t win Virginia in 2024 — the state swung to Harris by five points.
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And a year later, the Trump administration’s policy moves aren’t exactly convincing Virginia voters that Republicans have their best interests at heart. Trump’s trade wars have actually caused the price of goods like coffee, toys and clothing to go up.
All of the anti-trans rhetoric can’t fill the gap. “[It] doesn’t answer real questions about their day-to-day lives. These social issues are just not that important to voters who can’t buy groceries and can’t find jobs,” Wrighten said.
In some instances, parents have simply wisened up. “A lot of voters are sick of hearing about it,” Rasha Saad, one of the founders of Loudoun4All, a Loudoun County-based organization that advocates for equal public schools, told HuffPost. “They’re just like, ‘What you’re saying is happening is not happening.’”
Consider the attorney general race, where incumbent Republican Jason Miyares, after trailing for months, is now leading the race against former state lawmaker Jay Jones, who has been mired in scandal.
Miyares has claimed that focusing on transgender kids is what the voters want.
“This has been a huge issue in Virginia,” he told CNN earlier this month. “It’s absolutely something I hear about on the campaign trail, from voters and students and people that come up and talk to me and people that stop me.”
Earlier this year, after a transgender student was accused of filming in the boys locker room at a Loudoun County high school, Miyares targeted the school district, alleging, without any evidence, that the cisgender students were punished for saying they felt “uncomfortable” with a trans classmate sharing the locker room. Because everybody involved is a minor, the school district didn’t release details into the disciplinary actions it took but denied that anyone was punished for their viewpoints.
Miyares then opened an investigation into the school system, an echo of the Trump administration’s investigations into schools with transgender student athletes for alleged violations of federal civil rights law.
The Miyares campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
And imitating Trump may just be political poison in a state that has been hit hard by his administration.
First, the cuts to the federal workforce administered by DOGE earlier this year were a harsh blow to Virginia, which has 140,000 civil servants. Then, there’s the fact that Trump has been at war with colleges and universities, and the state has several prestigious institutions now forced to deal with funding cuts. This not only can have an impact on jobs, it also affects the flow of students who may change their minds about attending a Virginia school.
Trump’s approval rating in Virginia sits at 40%.
“I’m seeing voters who were apathetic last year, but are coming out this year because we need our state protections in place,” Saad said about voters who sat out the 2024 election. “We need our state protections in place, we need to codify abortion rights and voting rights so the federal government can’t screw around.”
Virginia’s Republicans don’t appear to be distancing themselves from the increasingly unpopular Trump policies. The Youngkin administration, which includes both Earle-Sears and Miyares, shrugged off the concerns about federal cuts several months ago, when they were first happening under DOGE.
“The waste, fraud and abuse is stunning and shocking, and everybody sees it,” Youngkin said about DOGE cuts in February. “There are inefficiencies in the federal government, and the Trump administration is doing exactly what they said they were going to do and promised Americans they would do.”
And now the government shutdown, which voters are blaming Republicans and Trump for, is causing even further pain for Virginia’s federal workforce. Early data shows that approximately 900 of those workers have filed unemployment claims as the shutdown drags on.
Even an October surprise in the form of a text message scandal has only helped Republicans to an extent.
Earlier this month, the National Review reported on violent text messages Jones had sent shortly after leaving the Virginia House of Delegates in 2022. In the messages, he fantasized about having the option to kill Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot, or the state’s Republican Speaker of the House Todd Gilbert — and choosing Gilbert. The scandal gave Miyares’ campaign a new edge, as Jones’ support dropped. However, many voters did not swing their support to Miyares, leaving the two candidates essentially tied.
Democrats like Spanberger were quick to condemn the violent rhetoric, and Jones himself apologized for the messages — but Republicans, including Miyares, were calling for him to step aside.
Some liberals immediately called out the hypocrisy. “There’s no way [Republicans] can take the moral high ground when they have Donald Trump sitting in the Oval Office,” Lamont Bagby, the chairman of the Democratic Party of Virginia, told The Washington Post.
“I think we are in an era where a lot of people feel that the Republican rhetoric has been similar,” Tribbett said. “Democrats don’t want to eat their own when Republicans have the same type of behavior.”
Trump has a long history of violent rhetoric, often referring to his political opponents as scum and demanding retribution against those who criticize him. The White House has used its official social media accounts to promote violent imagery and has shrugged off violence against Democrats and immigrants.
Virginia, with its off-year election, is often seen as a bellwether. And if the state’s GOP suffers defeat, it could spell big trouble for the Trump administration and Republicans’ chances in the midterm elections.
“[Spanberger] is going to win in a landslide,” Tribbett said. “I think a lot of people are going to be looking at Virginia as a referendum on the administration.”
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