“They hate your guts. They despise everything you stand for, and we’re running out of time to stop them,” a somber-looking Virginia Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears says in a recent campaign ad. “This election, don’t let radicals decide what kind of man gets to undress next to your daughter at school.”
Earle-Sears, a Republican, poured millions of dollars into this ominous advertising blitz attacking her Democratic opponent for governor, Abigail Spanberger, as a radical on transgender issues. She blanketed the airwaves with warnings to Virginians that mimicked Donald Trump’s successful campaign against Kamala Harris last year (“Kamala is for they/them, Trump is for you”).
But as Tuesday’s election approaches, the line of attack does not appear to be working as well for Earle-Sears as it did for Trump, according to data, raising questions about how potent the issue will be in the future for a party facing voter anger over high prices. Spanberger is leading Earle-Sears in recent polls.
“They realize it’s hard to beat a moderate Democrat in Virginia in this environment so they have to convince voters that she’s a radical,” said Alex Conant, a Republican strategist, of the Earle-Sears campaign. “That’s hard to do with someone who is a fairly known commodity and is spending a ton of money on her own talking about her moderate record.”
Republicans and many Democrats see the treatment of transgender children as a politically powerful issue because polls consistently show most Americans do not believe transgender girls should be allowed to play in girls’ sports. In a Gallup poll from May, 69 percent of Americans said transgender people should be allowed to play only on sports teams that match their sex assigned at birth. Transgender attack ads also tell voters that Democrats are consumed with cultural issues instead of the economy. That’s an image Democrats are determined to reject as they gear up for the 2026 midterms.
“They’ve really gotten effective at scouring any kind of public records of our candidates and looking for places where the candidate is on film taking a position on transgender issues and then they take that out of context and use that,” said Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster. “That’s a pretty effective attack if not responded to.”
Trans-related attacks are not as potent in this race, however, said Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic strategist. In 2024, many voters were angry at Democrats, who were in power nationally, over rising costs. Painting them as overly focused on transgender issues instead of the economy effectively stoked that anger. But this year, Virginians are blaming Republicans — who control the White House, Congress and the Virginia governor’s mansion — for cost-of-living issues.
“They’re falling into the fundamental mistake of trying to refight the last war and not realizing that the battlefield has changed,” Ferguson said. “They can no longer attack Democrats as focused on other issues and pretend that they are so focused on cost of living when most people feel betrayed on cost of living.”
At the end of September, Earle-Sears was spending about $2 million per week on the ads. Overall, she and outside GOP groups spent $9,269,297 on the ads in this race — more than a third of the $25.8 million her campaign and outside groups have plowed into the race overall. Democrats and liberal groups have spent $49.4 million in advertising in the race over the past year, according to data from AdImpact.
Polling indicates that anger over school policies for transgender students is unlikely to be enough to carry statewide candidates to victory this year. Only 3 percent of voters named those policies as a top issue in their choice for governor, according to an October Washington Post-Schar School poll of Virginia voters. That’s down from 4 percent in September, and after millions of dollars were spent in ads. That same poll showed Spanberger with a 12-point lead over Earle-Sears.
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