This is primary season and candidates have to double down on what the truest of your party’s true believers truly believe.
The common logic is that you steer as far as you can to the right (for Republicans) or left (among Democrats) to rouse their base voters until they’re ready to chew barbed wire and spit out roofing nails.
Then, after the preseason scrimmage is over, it’s time to tack back toward the center — where the dispositive mass of Virginia’s electorate has repeatedly proved it resides — and, if you still can, appear less the wild-eyed zealot and more the measured, moderate and sane candidate of November.
But something weird is happening this year: folks with no primary opponent seem locked in primary mode, especially within the GOP, where the statewide nominations are already settled.
On the Democratic side, the only statewide candidate without a primary fight is former U.S. Rep. Abigail Spanberger, who has a bye into the November governor’s election. She and Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, who is unopposed for the Republican nomination, will contend for history’s distinction as the first woman governor in Virginia’s more than 400 years.
There are a half-dozen Democrats — state Sens. Aaron Rouse of Virginia Beach and Ghazala Hashmi of Chesterfield County, former Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney, Prince William County School Board member Babur Lateef, lawyer and labor leader Alex Bastani and career federal prosecutor Victor Salgado — vying for lieutenant governor. None are known statewide and it’s anyone’s guess where that roulette ball lands. The victor will take on Republican John Reid, Virginia’s first openly gay statewide nominee who survived a homophobic attempt to blackmail him off the ticket that backfired spectacularly on the top echelon of Virginia’s GOP.
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In the Democrats’ attorney general sweepstakes, Jay Jones, a former assistant attorney general in the District of Columbia and former House of Delegates member from Norfolk, is battling Henrico County Commonwealth’s Attorney Shannon Taylor. The winner will oppose Republican Jason Miyares, who is running for reelection.
The GOP nominees have the luxury of sniping at these down-ticket Democrats as they go after one another hammer and tongs until the June 17 primary. But the Democrats share a unifying theme. Each promises to shield Virginia from the varied predations of the Trump White House, whether it be reproductive or LGBTQ rights, mass layoffs of Virginia’s large federal workforce or protecting Medicaid, the federal-state program that provides health care for the poor.
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That messaging is unlikely to change much after the primary, with good reason: Trump is historically toxic in Virginia. Every time he has either been in office or on the ballot, Republicans have paid the price in Virginia elections.
Trump himself is 0-3 in the commonwealth, losing to Hillary Clinton by 5 percentage points in 2016, Joe Biden by 10 in 2020, and Kamala Harris last November by 6.
Beginning in 2015 — when he descended the golden escalator into the lobby of his eponymous Manhattan skyscraper to announce his first presidential bid — and for the next five years, Virginia Republicans lost. They lost majorities in the state’s U.S. House delegation. They lost every election for statewide office. They lost control of the House of Delegates and the Virginia Senate.
By 2020, Democrats owned every statewide lever of elective political power in Virginia for the first time since 1968.
As soon as Trump was gone, GOP fortunes improved. In 2021, Republicans swept all three statewide executive offices and retook the House of Delegates majority. The ticket was led by Glenn Youngkin, a wealthy former hedge fund executive running for governor in the first election of his life as a fresh-faced, kinder, gentler Republican who judiciously distanced himself from Trump but is now a reliable Trump lieutenant.
Now, Trump is back, and if you thought the first term gave Virginia Democrats plenty to chew on, version 2.0 — supercharged by modern-day Croesus and chainsaw-wielding grim reaper of livelihoods Elon Musk — serves up a banquet.
And that puts this year’s GOP slate in a pickle.
Sure, they’re free to make Democrats account for years of out-of-control federal spending, and a border and immigration policy that the party couldn’t or wouldn’t address when it had the chance. Yes, the GOP is advancing the attack — as it has done for years, and with considerable success last year — that violent crime is on the rise ( it’s not) and that “illegals” are driving it (they’re certainly not).
But what they’ve been unwilling to do so far, even though there are no nomination battles to wage, is put distance between themselves and Trump.
Republican candidates who were once stalwart globalist free-traders now sit either in meek acquiescence or voice throaty support for daunting tariffs the president has imposed unilaterally without the concurrence of Congress.
Not one has registered a notable protest over Trump unleashing Musk to eviscerate the federal workforce and curb federal government contracts, even though Northern Virginia has the richest concentration of them in the world with the possible exception of its nextdoor neighbor, the District of Columbia.
These candidates sit mute as the president openly defies the 14th Amendment to the Constitution which guarantees citizenship to all persons born on U.S. soil. They turn blind eyes when masked, unbadged federal agents, without warrants, arrest foreigners — both those here legally and illegally — and try to hustle them outside our borders, often without the due process of law.
Those aren’t conservative vs. liberal issues. Those have been foundational principles of our republic for nearly 250 years! They’re as elemental as our right to face our accusers in court, the right to be free from unwarranted government intrusion into our homes, the right to free speech and religion and the right to keep and bear arms.
But they dare not dispute their president who holds a death grip on what was once the Republican Party and now presumes a measure of almost imperial authority, unbounded by the courts, the Constitution, Congress — and certainly not centuries-old norms of decency and civility. They need look no farther into history than former Rep. Bob Good, R-Va., for a sobering lesson on the consequences of displeasing Trump.
Good, however, was felled in last year’s 5th Congressional District primary by Trump acolyte John McGuire. As Reid convincingly proved, the 2025 GOP statewide ticket is locked in, there are no primaries, and it’s time to move on.
Knowing that, let’s see if Republicans Earle-Sears, Reid and Miyares can reconnect with their party’s longtime creed and muster the character it takes to speak frankly about what Virginia voters — including persuadable moderates and more than a few Republicans — already recognize as the Trump administration’s gross abuses.
That would be so refreshing. It’s also the only hope the GOP has for avoiding a Virginia wipeout this November.