The pro-business group Virginia FREE sent out a seemingly routine announcement earlier this week: Its board of directors had met with Abigail Spanberger, the Democratic candidate for governor, to discuss business-related issues.
What wasn’t said, and what made this announcement newsworthy: Virginia FREE has been trying for three months to secure a similar meeting with Winsome Earle-Sears, the Republican candidate for governor, and still doesn’t have a commitment, according to the group’s executive director, Chris Saxman.
“The Spanberger team was very responsive and easy to work with and was more than happy to meet with us and discuss issues important to us,” Saxman said.
The Earle-Sears campaign? Saxman doesn’t know if there will ever be a meeting.
Of the six statewide candidates — Democrats and Republicans for governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general — Earle-Sears is the only one who hasn’t committed to meet with Virginia FREE, which bills itself as “Virginia’s premier, non-partisan intersection of business and politics” and whose board of directors reads like a “who’s who” of the state’s business elite.
Keep in mind that two of those six candidates — Ghazala Hashmi and Jay Jones, the Democratic candidates for lieutenant governor and attorney general — didn’t win their nominations until about three weeks ago, but scheduling a meeting with Virginia FREE is already in the works. Earle-Sears has let three months go by without making a commitment.
I cannot stress enough how unusual this is. Every serious candidate for governor I’ve ever known has wanted to have good relations with the state’s business community, not simply because that’s a good source of campaign contributions but also because support from the business community is often necessary to carry out whatever a governor’s agenda might be.
For a Republican candidate for governor to not meet with Virginia FREE seems unfathomable to me. While the group is officially nonpartisan, a pro-business group is, by definition, likely to be a friendly audience for a Republican candidate. One of the issues the group is concerned about is maintaining Virginia’s so-called “right-to-work” law, which bans compulsory payment of union dues. That’s been a signature issue for Republicans for years and one that Earle-Sears has cited. Virginia FREE’s executive director, Saxman, is a former Republican legislator. The group’s board includes many people who are identifiably Republican and even served in Republican administrations. (It includes some Democrats, too.) What is Earle-Sears thinking in not accepting an invitation to meet with this group?
We don’t know because, ultimately, we don’t really know what Earle-Sears is thinking about much of anything. She rarely gives interviews outside the conservative news sphere where the questions are friendly ones; she certainly hasn’t engaged in a substantive policy interview with anyone. Her website is vague about her positions; she’s issued no detailed policy statements as is customary for candidates for governor.
What Virginia FREE said about its meeting with Spanberger
“We discussed a broad range of issues central to Virginia’s business community. Abigail Spanberger was highly engaged, asked excellent questions, and took seemingly copious notes. Board members were quite pleased with the hour long, productive meeting. Our goal was to develop a constructive dialogue for the future of the Commonwealth and we feel that goal was achieved.”
— Chris Saxman, executive director
So far, no debates have been announced, although not all that is on Earle-Sears. Neither she nor Spanberger agreed to take part in the traditional debate before the Virginia Bar Association’s summer meeting — I wrote about that in a previous column. For the past three gubernatorial cycles, there has been a debate in Southwest Virginia. This year three groups — the Appalachian School of Law (which sponsored the 2021 debate), PBS Appalachia and Cardinal News — joined together to sponsor a debate in Bristol. So far, neither campaign has responded to that offer, either.
I suspect that Spanberger is keen to play things safe. That’s a wise strategy for any candidate who, like her, has been ahead in the polls. Usually, it’s the underdog who is most interested in securing a debate, which makes Earle-Sears’ silence — on debates, or anything else — more curious. By contrast, the lightly funded Republican candidate for lieutenant governor, John Reid, has challenged his Democratic opponent to 10 debates.
There’s always some gamesmanship over which debates candidates will do. The cancellation of the Virginia Bar Association debate is unusual, but it’s too early to say that we won’t have any debates this year. However, what goes beyond being simply unusual and veers into the range of being unprecedented is Earle-Sears’ avoidance of any kind of serious discussion of what she might do as governor.
At one time, it was customary for gubernatorial candidates to try to outdo each other with more detailed plans about what they’d do in office, as if a few additional bullet points somehow made one candidate more qualified than the other. At one time, it was also customary for gubernatorial candidates to subject themselves to grueling examinations by newspaper editorial boards. (Of course, at one time there were newspaper editorial boards, but that’s a different matter.) Those times have faded away but Spanberger, at least, has honored the spirit of that. She’s held events to roll out her plans on drug prices, energy and housing and presumably has more to come. Earle-Sears has done none of that.
On the day in early April that both candidates were confirmed as their respective parties’ nominee, I contacted each campaign to request a policy interview with the candidate on energy and economic development. The Spanberger campaign called the next day and we began working out the scheduling for an interview. Since then I’ve been able to interview her twice — once on energy, once on economic development. More than a dozen inquiries to the Earle-Sears campaign have yet to net a single interview. We did have one scheduled in late May but 15 minutes before the scheduled time, her campaign called to say the candidate had “logistical issues” and would need to reschedule, possibly for the next day. Six weeks later, no other interview time has been offered.
Earle-Sears has done sporadic other interviews but almost all appear to be with conservative news sites such as Fox News, Newsmax and the Washington Examiner. Candidates are certainly free to talk, or not talk, with whom they want, but I’ve never seen a gubernatorial candidate who wasn’t eager to get in front of every news camera possible — or, in the lingo of the political world, to take advantage of “free media” or “earned media.”
Spanberger’s campaign has announced some campaign events. Her campaign schedule is not nearly as detailed as, say, as the daily schedule that Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s office releases — the governor’s public schedule is so granular that it lists when he’s meeting with which cabinet secretaries. Still, we do have some sense of what Spanberger is doing — on Wednesday, for instance, she took part in a roundtable with a local business group in Richmond. Earle-Sears isn’t doing anything like that. She’s certainly doing campaign events — on Wednesday she spoke to “local pastors and supporters” in Russell County, according to a social media post — but these aren’t announced to the general public. They also all appear to be before friendly audiences. On the same day that my interview with Earle-Sears was scratched, she was scheduled to do a rare media event, via Zoom, about public safety that was supposed to include the Republican sheriffs of Montgomery County and Roanoke County. That got canceled, too. Avoiding journalists who might ask probing questions isn’t unusual but, in not meeting with Virginia FREE, Earle-Sears seems to be avoiding probing questions from anyone. “It’s not just you,” Saxman said.
Earle-Sears isn’t just avoiding hard questions, she’s avoiding simple ones, too. Spanberger has responded to Cardinal’s Voter Guide questionnaire, which is designed to hit some basic highlights; Earle-Sears has not. When James Ryan quit the presidency of the University of Virginia under pressure from the Trump administration, Earle-Sears was the only statewide candidate who didn’t have anything to say. (Republican Attorney Jason Miyares declined to comment, citing his role as legal counsel to the university, which I consider a valid excuse.)
Again, this is not normal.
The reality is we don’t know nearly enough about what Spanberger would do as governor, but we know hardly anything about what Earle-Sears would do. We know she’s a conservative, and maybe that’s sufficient for some voters to make their electoral choice pro or con. However, saying someone is a conservative — or a liberal, for that matter — doesn’t really give any much clue as to how someone would deal with many of the issues that would face the next governor, lots of which defy ideological categorization.
We know that Earle-Sears favors keeping right-to-work, but that might involve nothing more than writing her name on a veto message if a Democratic General Assembly passed a repeal. Other issues involve actual details — details we don’t know. We know that Earle-Sears thinks the Clean Economy Act is flawed and we ought to have an “all-of-the-above” energy strategy that incorporates fossil fuels — a very standard Republican position. OK, tell us how that will work? Just about every energy project generates local opposition; should the state be able to override local zoning to mandate an energy project? Should we encourage or discourage more rooftop solar? Should tax breaks for data centers be extended beyond their current expiration date? What should be the state’s role in building a second inland port, that one in Southwest Virginia? Should the Virginia Department of Transportation’s Smart Scale scoring mechanism be the standard for judging road projects or should we take other factors into account? Those may not be the kind of bumper sticker slogans that fire up partisans on one side or another, but these are the kinds of details the next governor will have to deal with.
Saxman, who runs Virginia FREE, ticks off a list of issues his group is concerned with: energy, tax competitiveness with other states, artificial intelligence, housing. “More and more our state is becoming less Democrat versus Republican and more state versus local, and who’s going to make the decision.” On issues such as energy and housing, in particular, “we’ve got some really big decisions to make,” Saxman said, and the next governor needs to be engaged with all those.
Youngkin has sometimes described campaigns as a hiring process, and he’s not wrong. No potential employer would seriously consider a job candidate who declined to submit to a job interview or whose resume didn’t address key aspects of the job being sought. That’s essentially what Earle-Sears appears to be doing.
Saxman said his group would love to hear from her but some board members are already making commitments to Spanberger. As for Earle-Sears’ silence, he said, “it’s frustrating.”
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