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Who else up watching election results? As of the time of this writing Decision Desk has called all of:
The Virginia governor race in favor of Abigail Spanberger (D).
The Virginia lieutenant governor race in favor of Ghazala Hashmi (D and the first Muslim woman elected to statewide office).
The Virginia Attorney General race in favor of Jay Jones (D lmao).
The New Jersey governor race in favor of Mickie Sherrill (D).
The NYC mayoral race for Zohran Mamdani (D, projecting a majority of the vote too lmao).
Both statewide Georgia Public Service Commissioner races for the Democratic candidates.
Polls are still open in California so no word yet there on the redistricting ballot measure. In other Jay Jones news the house delegate who leaked his texts is on track to lose her re-election, as part of dems winning a trifecta in the Virginia government.
The county by county level results I've seen show pretty much all of the above running ahead of Harris and Spanberger even running ahead of Biden in 2020. Is this indicative of what we might see going forward? Dems had previously overperformed in special elections this year but this is the closest to a general until next years actual federal elections. If these trends hold up not a good sign for Republicans!
It seems like to me the Republicans pretty much threw in the towel for the VA governor with a nonserious candidate, and down the ballot suffered as well. Either way I do think Youngkin was expected to be a blip in the rapid slide of VA into the deep end. He was bouyed by some favorable short term issues but there was nothing that would stick past a news cycle.
In terms of using it as a bellweather, polymarket's numbers for 2028 are down for the democrats, so it seems that if anything the democrats very slightly underperformed compared to expectations. https://polymarket.com/event/which-party-wins-2028-us-presidential-election
Edit: actually 2026 numbers are down for republicans so it's bad news for them
Can you say more about why Earle-Sears was not a serious candidate? She was elected Lieutenant Governor in 2021.
Apart from what @hydroacetylene said, I'll try to give you a more complete answer. You have to go back to 2020 and the Virginia GOP's decision to have a convention instead of a primary. Virginia had been a Republican stronghold for years, but in little more than a decade had become reliably liberal. A lot of conservatives like to blame Federal employees in Northern Virginia for this shift, but that's a bit of a cop out; NoVa had been reliably Republican well into the 2000s, and the shift was occurring in other places, like suburban parts of Richmond and Hampton Roads. Biden won Virginia Beach in 2020, the first Democrat to do so since the days of the Solid South. This sudden shift left the state GOP scrambling and rudderless. While Republicans found ways to win in liberal strongholds like Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, Vermont, Rhode Island, and California, no Republican had won statewide office in Virginia in ten years. Rather than look to these other states as examples of how to win in hostile territory, the state GOP appealed to rural voters in the western part of the state more closely aligned with West Virginia and Kentucky than the Tidewater. But running up the score from a 60% win to a 75% win doesn't do much if the county has 5,000 voters, and it was clear to some in the party that this was a formula for continued irrelevance.
In February 2020, state delegate Amanda Chase announced that she would be seeking the gubernatorial nomination. Ms. Chase dubbed herself "Trump in Heels" and represented the far-right fringe of the party. She had been disciplined by the state GOP in the past and had taken every opportunity to publicize her maverick image. As 2020 wore on, and COVID restrictions came into place, she was representing her district from a plexiglass box she was forced to sit in due to her refusal to wear a mask during sessions. She had previously open carried in the state house. As 2020 drew to a close and Trump lost the election (and by double digits in Virginia), she became a vocal proponent of the MASSIVE FRAUD narrative, part of the fringe who genuinely thought there was a chance of Trump being sworn in for a second term in January. She was completely unelectable. She also had a decent shot at being the Republican nominee for governor.
The party establishment was alarmed, and devised a plan to prevent her nomination at all costs. Per state law, they had the privilege of holding a convention rather than a primary. In a primary, Chase could win the nomination with 30% of the votes, with three serious candidates and several minor ones splitting the remaining 70%. But in a convention, the nominee would need a majority, elected by screened delegates. the establishment's push for a convention led to all-out war within the party. MAGA hardliners had by this point made sizeable inroads into party leadership, and sought to thwart what they saw as a rigged nomination process. The convention went forward, but rules and logistical challenges turned it into a mess.
The idea was that delegates would be seated in an "unassembled convention" whereby they would submit ballots at 37 locations throughout the state. Ranked choice voting would be used, and delegate votes would be weighted based on Republican turnout in the previous election. Most importantly, since Virginia does not include party affiliation with voter registration, delegates would be screened by the local party before they would be seated, ostensibly to weed out Democrats, but realistically to ensure that only committed party men would go through the process. As the May convention approached, the party bragged that over 53,000 delegates had qualified, but only 30,000 showed up, a far cry from the over 300,000 who participated in the last primary. The byzantine process had critics describe the whole thing as a mess that only made the GOP look worse, but it achieved its objective: Chase finished third, and that November, Virginia elected its first Republican governor since 2009.
A seemingly minor side-effect of this whole debacle was that Winsome Sears was nominated as Lieutenant Governor. Sears had served a single term as state delegate 20 years prior, but was otherwise a small business owner from Winchester and occasional minor candidate. How she won the nomination appears to be a mystery, since I can find nothing about how this happened. I suspect, though, that it's largely a combination of the unusual nature of the nominating process and sheer luck. I can't find much in the way of traditional campaigning, no one seems to have paid much attention to the LT side, she only got 32% of the vote on the first ballot (compared to 22% for second), and that just may have been the way the cookie crumbled. If anyone has any information that explains this, I'd love to hear it, but whatever happened, I think it's safe to say that she didn't win the nomination through running a traditional campaign.
So she essentially lucks into the LT role after Youngkin wins. And he's able to do so by shying away from MAGA rhetoric and focusing his campaign on a few key issues that were big at the time. In the process, he cements himself as one of the rising stars within the party and a possible presidential nominee. He maintains a decent approval rating in a state hostile to his party, even after
TrumpHarris carried it in 2024. He can't run for reelection, but it's clear to the party that the best way to stay in power is to extend his governorship the best way you can. And the obvious person to do that is the lieutenant governor. By this point the party is in agreement about the best path forward, so they have a primary, except there's only one name on the ballot.The upshot of all of this is that, in 2025, Sears found herself as the major party nominee for governor of a larger state, her only record of having won a competitive election on her own being state delegate race in 2002. She hadn't even run in a competitive race since 2004. She lucked into the LT nomination because of an unusual situation, got elected LT in the general by virtue of being ticketed with Youngkin, and won the nomination in 2025 without a primary opponent. The state party failed to realize that this was a recipe for disaster.
Several things ultimately did her in, and contributed to her image as an unserious candidate. The first was a series of glitches and booboos. The kind that a seasoned candidate wouldn't have made. The kind that a seasoned candidate may have made, but not so many. The kind that a seasoned candidate who made as many as she did could have recovered from by responding better. Things like putting watermarked stock photos on your campaign website, and likening DEI to slavery. I wouldn't say these alone sunk her campaign, but they didn't giver her an image as a good campaign manager running a well-oiled machine.
The second was that her inexperience was underscored by her inability to raise money. This is where I'd lay the most blame on the state party, because they should have considered this and had a plan to counter the problem. It was unrealistic to expect her to suddenly raise large sums of money when she hadn't had to before, and they needed to either get on the horn for her or teach her how to dial for dollars or whatever it took. It was clear this was going to be a problem the minute her candidacy was announced, and a party that cleared the path for her nomination should have been rolling in dough to give for the general. There is absolutely no excuse for this.
The biggest problem, though, was that she had very little in the way of policy, and what she did have was an object lesson in what not to do. The only two policy positions she seemed to care about were anti-abortion and anti-LGBT. She could mouth conservative buzzwords like school choice and what have you, but there was no real substance to her campaign. the Issues part of her website was buried at the bottom of the Meet Winsome section, and outlined five positions: lower taxes and government spending, be tough on crime (and illegals), school choice, right to work, no trans in sports. Nine total paragraphs. In 2017, the Republican nominee had pages and pages of policy positions down to minutia like how much money should be allocated to increase enrollment at the University of Virginia at Wise. Apart from the paucity of substance, these are not winning positions in this kind of race. Youngkin may have been elected, but it's still a blue state. Generic conservative talking points are not going to win the election, because the conservative isn't the default candidate. Youngkin understood this. She didn't, and the party didn't. The ultimate illustration of how inept she was at this came towards the end of the campaign, when she hammered the airwaves with commercials reminiscent of the "they/them" ads that critics found especially damaging to Harris. Apart from the blunder of fighting the last war, it wasn't even her last war. Trump was trying to win marginal votes in swing states; there was no expectation that those ads would get enough votes for an unexpected victory.
She completely misunderstood the election she was running in and either forgot or didn't realize that to win in Virginia, you have to attract the kind of voter who wouldn't normally be inclined to vote for you. And as these failures became evident, so did the final failure, the complete lack of a ground game. She didn't tour the state. She didn't respond to media requests. She didn't respond to voters. She disappeared the last month of the campaign. Whether it was from lack of money, lack of experience, or a sense that the enterprise was a lost cause, dropping off the face of the earth during crunch time isn't the mark of a serious candidate. At least take your best shot. You're a major party nominee for the governorship of an important state. When you launched your campaign, it looked winnable. Act like it still is, don't just throw in the towel. I don't think that this hurt her too much since she would have lost anyway, but it took the party from looking like geniuses who managed the improbable to inept jackasses who mishandled an important candidate in a winnable election. They moved heaven and earth to come back from the dead four years earlier, but, depending on how they handle things going forward, the view of Youngkin's win may go from a rejuvenation to a last gasp.
Harris carried Virginia in 2024
Spanberger ran as a moderate, just as Youngkin did.
Thanks, I don't know what I did there because if Trump had indeed won Virginia that sentence wouldn't have made sense. Corrected.
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