Virginia residents are casting ballots in a handful of days for myriad closely watched races from the governor’s office to the House of Delegates, as Republicans and Democrats battle to tilt the balance of power in the state.
The GOP hopes to capitalize on a political trend toward red in the Old Dominion that they believe was sparked by a shift toward President Donald Trump in the 2024 election. Democrats are looking to stave off such inroads, eyeing possible flips that would save them their narrow majority in the General Assembly and oust Republicans from the governor’s mansion as voters head to the polls for the 2025 election on Nov. 4.
The gubernatorial race: Spanberger vs Earle-Sears
Virginia is one of just two states where voters will pick their governor this year, with the other being New Jersey.
Democrat Abigail Spanberger is looking to flip the governor’s seat blue as she challenges Republican candidate Virginia Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears in a race to succeed the term-limited Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R). The race has gained national attention, largely due to Earle-Sears’s criticism of Spanberger for declining to pull her endorsement of Democratic attorney general candidate Jay Jones after violent texts he sent in 2022 recently resurfaced.
While the controversy threatened her campaign, even prompting a last-minute intervention from former President Barack Obama, Spanberger has maintained a consistent though narrow lead of 5 to 9 percentage points throughout August, September, and October. That lead has significantly shrunk since May, when the Democratic candidate led Earle-Sears by 17%.
Spanberger, 46, has represented Virginia’s Seventh Congressional District from 2019 to 2025. The Democrat who positions herself as a moderate has also worked as an inspector with the U.S. Postal Service and as a case officer with the CIA. The former congresswoman has focused her campaign on lowering costs for voters amid worries that Trump’s steep government job cuts in Virginia are hurting workers.
“My time in the CIA taught me the importance of being decisive, understanding the nuances of global and domestic threats, and working collaboratively to solve problems,” she said. “These are lessons I’ll bring to the governor’s office.”
Earle-Sears, 61, is a Jamaican immigrant and Marine veteran known for her conservative views on social issues. She has backed policies that would prevent the first $20,000 of law enforcement officers’ salaries from being taxed and stressed her commitment to protecting Virginia’s right-to-work law.
The Republican candidate has gone back and forth on backing Trump and describing him as a liability to the party. Trump has declined to offer her an outright endorsement, although he said earlier this week, “She should win because the Democrat candidate is a disaster.”
The attorney general’s race: Miyares vs Jones
Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares, a Republican, is seeking reelection and facing a challenge from Jones.
Jones’s campaign has faced major challenges after he became mired in controversy due to a scandal over text messages he sent calling for then-Republican state House Speaker Todd Gilbert to receive “two bullets to the head.” Jones has since apologized for the messages, in which he also said Gilbert and his wife were “breeding little fascists” and appeared to suggest he hoped their children “would die.”
Miyares, a former real estate attorney and an assistant commonwealth’s attorney, led Republicans, including Trump, in calling on Jones to drop out following the revelations, launching a $1.5 million ad campaign capitalizing on the controversy. And the Republican candidate has sought to appeal to split-ticket voting by urging Democratic voters backing Spanberger up the ballot to support his campaign.
Support for Jones dropped after the messages resurfaced, with some polls now indicating Miyares holds a slim lead and 3.5 times more money in his coffers than his Democratic rival for the final push.
The latest polling shows Miyares tied with Jones to win the election. The Republican candidate edged out Jones on voter favorability by a margin of 8%, according to a Washington Post survey.
Miyares, the son of a Cuban refugee and the first Hispanic Virginian elected statewide, has expressed support for Trump’s moves to send military troops to U.S. cities to combat crime, setting himself apart from Democratic attorneys general who have criticized the effort as authoritarian.
Miyares vowed to continue statewide efforts to crack down on violent crime in comments to the Virginia Mercury as he touted a steep decline in murder rates he credited to his “Ceasefire Virginia” program.
“I have said before, I will not support a criminal first, victim last mindset. And I find it amazing that whenever we have these great discussions about criminal justice reform, the one word that you never hear is victims,” he said. “Denying the voice of victims is not something I’ll ever find acceptable.”
Jones is a former House of Delegates lawmaker and an assistant attorney general for the District of Columbia. The Democrat, who has also attracted scrutiny over a 2022 reckless driving conviction, has centered his campaign on presenting himself as the state’s obstacle to Trump’s agenda, even launching a six-figure statewide ad last week criticizing Miyares over his ties to the president.
“Jason is going to make this race about my mistakes, but this race has always been about more,” Jones said during a recent debate with Miyares in which he referred to his rival as “a willing cheerleader” for Trump.
“The stakes of this race are too high for it to be about anything else, because when Donald Trump fires workers, defunds our schools, levies tariffs that destroy our regional economies, sends armed troops into cities, and defunds law enforcement, he has a willing cheerleader here in Jason Miyares who will not step up to sue,” Jones said.
The lieutenant governor’s race: Reid vs Hashmi
Republican candidate John Reid is running against Ghazala Hashmi, a Democratic state senator currently representing Virginia’s 15th Senate district.
Polls indicate the race to claim the seat currently represented by Earle-Sears is tight. A poll released Monday by the Wason Center found Hashmi leads Reid by just 2 points among voters, and 7% say they are undecided.
Reid is the first openly gay candidate for statewide office in Virginia. He was unopposed in the GOP primary after becoming the party’s de facto nominee when Fairfax County Supervisor Pat Herrity announced he was withdrawing from the race for health reasons. Praised for his open approach to the press and voters, Reid is known as the host of the conservative WRVA Morning Show in Richmond. He started his political career decades ago as President Ronald Reagan’s intern.
The Republican has framed himself as a business-friendly candidate with traditionally conservative views on social issues and a focus on economic growth. He has taken a bipartisan approach to campaigning, launching Democrats for John Reid, a coalition of Virginia Democrats publicly lining up behind his candidacy that includes former state Sen. Joe Morrissey.
“Preserving Virginia’s business climate that has been so successful for so many years with Republicans and Democrats, that’s really important for all of us going forward,” he told Virginia broadcaster VPM in September. “I’m a Republican. If you want to get in a fight, I can get in a fight, but I’d prefer that we find a way to work things out, and I hope that that will be a refreshing mindset and attitude at the Capitol.”
Morrissey expressed hope that Reid is “more open to all sides,” in contrast to Hashmi, whom he painted as “strictly partisan” and aligned with the “far left crowd in Virginia,” during an interview with the Virginia Mercury.
Hashmi, who defeated five other candidates in the Democratic primary in June, would be Virginia’s first Asian-American and Muslim statewide officeholder if elected. She has largely centered her campaign around education and healthcare, highlighting her role as chairwoman of the state’s education and health committees and background as an academic administrator before being elected in 2019 to represent the Chesterfield County area.
The Democratic candidate has also made concerns about the Trump administration a defining piece of her message to voters.
“We’ve seen the Trump administration dismantle the U.S. Department of Education and dismantle our research and public health institutions. We have the potential for a serious crisis. When I hear our medical professionals and our Centers for Disease Control and Prevention experts say what a grave crisis point we’re at — calling for the resignation of the Secretary of Health and Human Services [Robert F. Kennedy Jr.] — that’s a signal that this current administration, under Donald Trump, is destroying the very fabric that keeps the public safe and that ensures that we continue as a prosperous and thriving country,” Hashmi said during an interview with VPM.
“When we don’t have those federal measures in the ways that we’ve had them in previous generations, it’s going to be incumbent on state leadership to pick up that mantle and ensure that we can keep moving forward in the face of this historic crisis,” she added.
Reid has sought to gain momentum by criticizing Hashmi’s refusal to hold a debate before the election, but took some flak for recently holding a mock 40-minute forum with an artificially generated copy of his Democratic rival.
Top state legislature races
All 100 House of Delegates seats are on the ballot this year. Over a dozen of the races are viewed as highly competitive, as Democrats fight to hold on to their razor-thin 51-49 majority, and the GOP seeks to avoid a repeat of 2017, when the opposition party flipped 15 Republican-held House seats the year after Trump’s first presidential victory.
In Democrats’ sweeping bid to sustain their narrow majority, the party is running candidates in all 100 districts for the first time in recent history, with an emphasis on flipping Republican-held seats, particularly in districts former Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris won last year.
In July, Virginia House Democrats’ campaign arm announced a $9 million TV ad reservation ahead of the election, with more than $8.5 million slated for the final three weeks of the campaign.
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Many of the races center on rising energy costs and affordability concerns associated with burgeoning data centers, which have become a leading issue in Virginia due to their increasingly prominent role in the state.
The tightest House contests are Districts 57, 75, and 82, according to the Virginia Public Access Project’s “VPAP Index,” which classifies districts based on how much they favor one party over another.
