NORFOLK, Va. — After Abigail Spanberger took the stage at a campaign event Sunday afternoon here, she delivered an impassioned speech casting next week’s gubernatorial election as a chance to reject President Donald Trump and the chaos she said his administration’s policies have sowed in Virginia’s economy.
It’s a message Spanberger, the Democratic nominee, has remained laser-focused on in the closing stretch of the campaign, even as a series of new outside developments and lines of attack threatened to upend the race against Republican Winsome Earle-Sears.
“We are so excited about what this election means,” Spanberger said at a restaurant in downtown Norfolk owned by NBA referee Tony Brothers, one stop on a bus tour across the state in the race’s closing days.
“And that’s not because we don’t see the hardships of this moment. It is because we see the hardships of this moment. It is because we know that across Virginia, we have hundreds of thousands of federal workers and government contractors and Virginians who are terribly impacted by a government shutdown,” Spanberger said. “It is because we have the threat of hundreds of thousands of Virginians losing their health care because of legislation passed in Washington that we are looking toward this election.”
Much of Spanberger’s gubernatorial campaign in the blue-leaning state has focused on affordability, public safety and abortion rights, along with attacks on Trump’s policies. But the former congresswoman has been forced to confront a trio of issues that emerged over the past month that Earle-Sears has tried to use to close their polling and fundraising gap before Nov. 4.
First came the federal government shutdown that began Oct. 1. Then, days later came the emergence of years-old violent text messages sent by Jay Jones, the Democratic attorney general nominee sharing the ballot with Spanberger. And last week, there was the last-minute redistricting effort by Virginia Democratic lawmakers.
But Spanberger has refused to let those issues knock her off course, keeping her campaign largely centered on economic issues as she tries to secure a victory in one of the biggest statewide elections to take place during Trump’s new term.
Spanberger has used the ongoing government shutdown to reinforce some of those broader themes of her campaign, arguing it’s another example of how Republican-controlled Washington has uniquely hurt Virginia, where many federal employees reside. She’s also tied it back to the Department of Government Efficiency’s efforts earlier this year to shrink the federal workforce.
“We need a governor who will stand up and make clear that attacks on our federal workers, attacks on government contractors, whether it’s from a DOGE effort to fire people or a government shutdown … that those are attacks on Virginia and attacks on our economy — and we need a governor who will stand up and make clear the impacts of all of those bad efforts,” Spanberger said at an earlier event Sunday, in Portsmouth, one of two that day where she was joined by Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro.
By contrast, she has almost entirely avoided the Jones scandal and a mid-decade redistricting push in recent days, despite a raft of Republican attacks.
While Spanberger condemned Jones’ texts, she has not called on him to drop out of the race and has repeatedly declined to say whether she would retract her endorsement of him.
As for redistricting, Spanberger said Monday that she wouldn’t oppose Democratic lawmakers’ attempts to redraw the state’s congressional maps to boost their party ahead of next year’s midterm elections, but has otherwise largely avoided the topic at campaign events.
“There have been some challenges, some of which I think were very unexpected, but I think she’s responded to them very well, and that makes me even feel better about voting for her, because as governor, she’s going to get thrown curveballs that she doesn’t expect, and how she responds to them, and the kind of leadership she demonstrates is going to make a big difference to me,” said Gene Granger, a 43-year-old coworking-space manager who described himself as an independent and attended the Portsmouth event.
Conversely, the shutdown, redistricting and Jones’ texts have been at the center of Earle-Sears’ events and ads.
At a Saturday night rally in nearby Chesapeake with other Virginia Republicans on the November ballot, Earle-Sears pointed to Spanberger’s refusal to answer questions during their lone debate in the campaign about whether Jones should end his campaign, leading the crowd at the event at a conference center in cheers of “Jay Jones must leave the race.”
“Instead of saying to him, ‘You must leave the race,’ let us say it for her,” Earle-Sears said.
In an interview with NBC News after the rally, Earle-Sears reiterated her message that Democrats in Washington — including Virginia’s two Democratic senators — were to blame for the shutdown and that redistricting was a political stunt launched by Democrats in Richmond designed to keep her off the campaign trail.
“They’re doing this redistricting … forcing me to come off the campaign trail and be in Richmond every single day of the week, while she can continue to run,” she said, referring to her responsibility as lieutenant governor to preside over the state Senate.
The latest major public polls show Spanberger maintaining a lead over Earle-Sears in the final days of the race. But voters’ views of who is to blame for the shutdown and how it is affecting the race are mixed.
For example, a recent Suffolk University poll of likely Virginia voters showed Spanberger leading Earle-Sears 52%-43%, inside its margin of error. The survey also found voters were split over who was responsible for the shutdown: 38% said congressional Democrats, 28% said congressional Republicans and 21% said Trump.
A Washington Post poll of likely voters released last week that showed Spanberger leading Earle-Sears 54% to 42% — outside the margin of error — also showed the issue that voters overwhelmingly cared most about in their choice for governor was “Economy/Cost of living/Jobs/Housing” at 19%. Just 1% of respondents said the issue they cared most about with their vote was the government shutdown, while another 1% cited Jones’ texts.
So far, however, it doesn’t appear that any of these last-minute developments have created the major hiccups for the Spanberger campaign that Republicans seemed to have hoped they would.
In interviews with about 20 voters across weekend campaign events held by both parties, all said they would not be splitting their ticket in the contests for governor and attorney general and blamed the opposing party for the shutdown and the redistricting fights.
Many also said they had taken advantage of early voting in the state, which began in September, before these new developments occurred.
Audrey Curtis, a 68-year-old small-business owner from Virginia Beach who said she will vote for Earle-Sears, blamed Democrats for the shutdown and called legislative Democrats’ redistricting efforts “a stunt to keep her off the trail.”
Bruce Johnson, a 73-year-old retired Navy officer and government contractor, said he was supporting Earle-Sears because she’d “continue” Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s economic policies. He also said that Democrats were to blame for the shutdown because “they want to put all these add-ons in the spending bill, which I think are a crock.”
When it came to Jones, Johnson said “it is an embarrassment that he hasn’t been disowned by Spanberger and by their party” and he called Democrats’ redistricting effort in Virginia “crap” that was intended to “pull Sears off the trail and pull incumbents in the House of Delegates off the trail.”
Meanwhile, Michelle Smith, a 58-year-old retired Army veteran from Portsmouth who voted early for the entire Democratic ticket, said following a Spanberger campaign event that she blamed Trump for the shutdown.
“He’s playing the game, and he’s playing it very well. He is using this opportunity from the government being closed to lay off people, which is what he wanted to do in the first place,” she said.
Smith said it was “a shame” that both Republicans and Democrats were advancing mid-decade redistricting in so many states, but that “we’re basically in a Civil War with that — we do not have time to play nice. We’ve got to fight.”
When it came to Jones, Smith said his texts were “awful” and that “everybody screws something up.”
Asked if she voted early for him, she said “of course.”
Granger, for his part, said he’d be voting for Spanberger to send a message to Trump.
“I am really tired and fed up with the politics that we are seeing coming out of the Republican Party, especially the Trump administration, in terms of divisiveness and the ‘us against them’ attitude,” he said. “That’s not what we should be about.”
