Look to this key governor's race to see if voters blame GOP for the shutdown

There’s no shortage of uphill climbs for the Republican ticket in Virginia’s statewide elections this year. The federal government shutdown is just the latest.

There’s still almost a month before voting concludes in Virginia’s gubernatorial election. That’s a lot of time in the fast-moving business of politics, and things often take unexpected turns.

Maybe Democrats and Republicans will have a divine pre-election breakthrough and resolve the seething dispute behind the government closure that feels more personal than political.

It’s not impossible, but I’m more likely to win the Nobel Prize, a best actor Oscar and Dancing With the Stars before you see that.

Republican gubernatorial nominee Winsome Earle-Sears had two strikes against her before she ever stepped into the batter’s box this year, and neither was of her making.

One is the fact that the party in charge of the White House has won the governorship of Virginia just once in the past 52 years (that happened in 2013, when Democrat Terry McAuliffe was elected governor into President Barack Obama’s second term).

Another is the abysmal record Republicans have in Virginia statewide races when Trump is either president or on the ballot. He is winless in three races in the commonwealth, and the same is true for Republicans seeking statewide office during that time.

Coincidence? Hardly.

Consider how fast attitudes changed four years ago with Trump defeated and exiled to Mar-a-Lago — seemingly for good, many thought at the time. A year after Democrat Joe Biden beat Trump by 10 percentage points in Virginia, Republican gubernatorial candidate and political neophyte Glenn Youngkin upset McAuliffe, who wanted his old job back. In 2021, the GOP won all three statewide offices plus the House of Delegates.

In Trump’s second term, he has already left a redder welt on Virginia’s backside. About 300,000 Virginians owe their livelihoods to the U.S. government, so the state suffers more than most from cuts to federal employment, programs, projects and contracts by Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency. The Weldon Cooper Center at the University of Virginia projects that Virginia will lose 32,000 jobs under those cuts alone.

Now comes the shutdown and warnings from the Trump administration that it will go beyond the employee furloughs customary in shutdowns and make permanent “reductions in force” — bureaucratic jargon for firings. That was clear in an Office of Management and Budget memo a week ago (first reported by Politico) and from Trump’s own threats hours before the shutdown began at midnight Oct. 1.

“We can do things during the shutdown that are irreversible and bad for them, like cutting vast numbers of people out,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Tuesday. “Cutting things they like, cutting programs they like.”

With the government shuttered and unable to pay bills for a protracted period, the administration can launch a firing spree resembling DOGE on meth and steroids. Two weeks into early voting in Virginia, that’s the last thing Republican candidates want voters to see.

“I see this as blame going right to the top, as it usually does,” said Mark Rozell, a political scientist and dean of the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University.

“Leaving the merits aside of who’s at fault here, the plain fact is various (Trump) administration actions toward the federal government have set the framework for how Virginians think about the impact of Republican policies in the state,” he said.

The shutdown became inevitable after Democrats in the closely divided Senate on Tuesday evening denied the GOP majority the 60 votes needed to extend federal funding into November. They demanded Republicans drop provisions in Trump’s recently passed budget — the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” — that the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates will strip 16 million Americans of health insurance coverage by 2034. Neither side is budging.

The GOP, however, has to make a more nuanced argument that’s difficult in the heat of a political campaign, Rozell said. Or, to borrow a shopworn bromide from longtime campaign pros, “If you’re explaining, you’re losing.”

And this explanation withers further because it involves depriving affordable medical coverage for the self-employed and others who lack employer-provided health insurance. Imagine peddling that position north of the Rappahannock — home to Virginia’s richest trove of moderate suburban voters, many of them federal workers facing job losses and unaffordable health coverage because of GOP-ordered layoffs and tax policy changes.

The timing of this crisis adds more difficulty for Earle-Sears and her ticketmates by forcing the GOP to do damage control on the fly while the shutdown worsens economic chaos through weeks of early voting.

Federal shutdowns are not new to Trump. He presided over American history’s longest — 35 days from December 2018 into January 2019, resulting in 320,000 furloughs as 420,000 “essential workers” labored unpaid for weeks, right through the holidays — after congressional Democrats denied him $5.7 billion for a border wall.

Ten months afterward, in General Assembly midterm elections, Virginians awarded both legislative chambers to the Democrats. It was the first time since 1968 that the party held unchallenged control of every statewide elective office or institution of government in Virginia, including both U.S. Senate seats and seven of its 11 U.S. House seats.

For some voters, especially in conservative-voting rural areas, this shutdown may be little more than an afterthought. That tracks with a fresh New York Times/Siena College poll of 1,313 registered voters nationwide in which 19 percent blamed Democrats, 26 percent faulted the GOP, but 33 percent held both parties equally liable.

Voters in Northern Virginia, however, recall the previous shutdown and this one, which is more acrimonious, likely to last longer and be more ruinous.

That won’t help Republicans shrug off culpability in Virginia, Rozell said.

“The existing framework in which most Virginians are blaming the Trump administration’s actions makes it really difficult to make the case that this shutdown is on the Democrats,” he said. “If it looks like Republicans can’t govern at the top, why are voters going to trust them in state or local elections?”

Neither Earle-Sears nor her ticketmates caused this shutdown. She has, however, dutifully genuflected to Trump policies throughout her campaign. She aligns herself with his One Big Beautiful Bill with its Medicaid restrictions and sharply higher costs for health insurance purchased through the Affordable Care Act marketplaces — the reason Senate Democrats blocked the short-term spending bill.

Abigail Spanberger’s Democratic campaign, predictably, is exploiting that, tying it to Virginians’ rising costs and mounting economic pain — this election’s bedrock issue.

But was slighting the famously vindictive Trump ever an option for Earle-Sears?

In a once-grand old party that has become another Trump property, no Republican wants to be the next Bob Good.

• Bob Lewis covered Virginia government and politics for 20 years for the Associated Press. Now retired from a public relations career at McGuireWoods, he is a columnist for the Virginia Mercury. He can be reached at blewis@virginiamercury.com.