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 Virginia 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 used to close their polling and fundraising gap before Nov. 4.
First came the federal government shutdown that began on 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 Sunday, 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 co-working-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’s 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.
