John Reid, the Republican candidate for lieutenant governor, last week released his plan for lowering the cost of child care and making it more available.
The most significant thing about his six-point plan (or 12 points, if you count the subsections) was not that he favors tax credits for families or tax incentives for employers who offer child care.
It’s that he had a plan, which voters are now able to read and evaluate.
You can make the case that this doesn’t really matter because the duties of the lieutenant governor are basically limited to banging a gavel while presiding over the state Senate. Nonetheless, even a lieutenant governor has a bully pulpit from which to promote policy options, and this is Reid’s preferred policy for an issue that many voters say concerns them.
The real significance is that Reid’s specificity stands in direct contrast to that of his own party’s candidate for governor, who has been almost completely silent on, well, almost everything. Reid is releasing policy proposals; Winsome Earle-Sears is not. Reid is challenging his Democratic opponent, Ghazala Hashmi, to debates. Earle-Sears didn’t agree to the traditional summer debate before the Virginia Bar Association (neither did Democrat Abigail Spanberger, but we’ll get to her) and hasn’t agreed to a joint proposal from the Appalachian School of Law, Cardinal News and PBS Appalachia to a fall debate in Bristol. In fact, no debates anywhere have been announced.
I wrote a few weeks ago that Earle-Sears was running a campaign in which she wasn’t making herself available for serious questioning, not just from pesky journalists but from groups that a normal candidate — particularly a Republican — would be rushing to meet with. The pro-business group Virginia FREE — run not just by a former Republican, but one who served on her transition team — tried for three months to get a meeting. Not until my column was published did her campaign agree to meet with the group, although no meeting has happened yet. I made more than a dozen requests for an interview on energy and economic development policy and have yet to get a meeting, although the Earle-Sears campaign has promised a 15-minute interview on Wednesday (Spanberger agreed right away and I’ve had close to an hour total). Last week, conservative radio talk show host John Fredericks said that he’d made more than 20 requests for Earle-Sears to come onto his show and she’d never agreed.
This boggles the mind. Fredericks is a major figure in conservative circles. Any Republican ought to be asking him for a time slot to help reach their base. That prompted Fredericks to tell the Republican party state chairman, “Your gubernatorial campaign is a clown car.”
“It’s not a clown car and I think we are fixing it as we speak,” replied state Sen. Mark Peake, R-Lynchburg. Indeed, Earle-Sears late last week replaced her campaign manager. This move coincided with the release of campaign finance reports that show Spanberger with three times as much campaign cash as Earle-Sears and a Virginia Commonwealth University poll that gave Spanberger a lead of 12 percentage points.
These are all juicy details for those who follow politics as if it were a sports event — the horse race — but here’s a larger, more serious point for voters more concerned about policy: We really don’t know much about either of these candidates. In fact, I’d make the case that, collectively, we know less about this year’s gubernatorial candidates than we have at any time since 1969.
Here’s how I figure that. Under the principle that a tiger doesn’t change its stripes, the best way to judge what a candidate might do in office is to see how they’ve performed in previous offices. Both Earle-Sears and Spanberger have served in office, but none of that experience gives us much insight into what type of governor either would be.
I want to be careful here: I’m not saying either candidate is unqualified. In modern times (which I date from 1969, our first election after the Voting Rights Act and the first in which a Republican won), we’ve elected four governors who had never served in elective office: Linwood Holton, Mark Warner, Terry McAuliffe and now Glenn Youngkin. Either of the candidates this year has more experience in office than those four combined. I am, though, saying we just don’t have much in either candidate’s background to predict what their administrations might look like — especially Earle-Sears.
The two best ways to predict those things are to look at their records in previous offices and at their policy statements about what they intend to do. By those measures, Donald Trump in 2024 was absolutely predictable: We knew what his first term was like, and he was very clear about certain policies, such as immigration and tariffs. Whatever you think of Trump, voters knew exactly what to expect from a second Trump term — and that’s what they’re getting.
By contrast, Earle-Sears and Spanberger are something of a mystery — Earle-Sears has only a slight record in state government, and Spanberger has none.
Earle-Sears is the current lieutenant governor, which sounds important, but the duties of that office are pretty much limited to being a presiding officer. The most controversial tie vote that Earle-Sears broke was one that Democrats engineered to put her in the position of casting what they thought would be a politically inconvenient vote — she voted against a right to contraception. While Earle-Sears has presided over votes on thousands of bills, we don’t really know how she stands on them, or what her more detailed policy views might be. We can assume they’re conservative, but that doesn’t really tell us much. Before that, her only service was a single term in the House of Delegates in 2002 and 2003 — more than two decades ago, when many of the questions facing the state didn’t exist. This was long before the rise of solar energy and data centers, for instance. In the absence of substantive interviews or detailed policy statements, Earle-Sears is something of a cipher.
Spanberger served three terms in the U.S. House of Representatives, which means she has a voting record there, but federal issues are often quite different from state ones. We do know that the Bipartisan Index compiled by the Lugar Center and Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy ranked her as the most bipartisan member of the Virginia delegation and one of the most bipartisan in Washington. “Rep. Abigail Spanberger is an annual fixture in the top ranks of the Bipartisan Index,” said Dan Diller, policy director for the Lugar Center. “Her cumulative scores since she entered the House in 2019 rank second among all House Democrats during that period, making her one of the most reliable bipartisan voices in the entire Congress.” That still doesn’t tell us, though, how she’d stand on, say, how much we should prioritize community college funding vis-a-vis funding for four-year schools and other budgetary matters that a governor will have to decide. Virginia has elected other former members of Congress as governor before, most recently George Allen in 1993, but we have to go back to Claude Swanson in 1905 to find one of those congressional members who didn’t have previous experience in state government.
In contrast to Earle-Sears, Spanberger is rolling out the traditional policy plans that sketch out what she’d do in office. Tuesday in Suffolk, she’ll talk about economic development. She’s given interviews to Cardinal on energy and economic development, which address some questions (although I still have many others). She’s answered Cardinal’s questionnaire on 11 different policy points. Earle-Sears has done none of those things. You can, at least, read those and get some sense of what Spanberger might do in office and then agree or disagree accordingly. With Earle-Sears, you can’t.
Over the past 13 gubernatorial elections, we’ve occasionally had candidates who didn’t have much of a record on which we could judge what kind of governors they’d make, but even when we had those candidates, there was always another candidate with an extensive record.
Four years ago, Youngkin had no record, but McAuliffe was a former governor, so voters knew exactly what to expect from him — and voters decided they’d take the unknown over the known.
In 2017, Republican Ed Gillespie had no record in state government, but Democrat Ralph Northam had a General Assembly record (I tend to discount the lieutenant governorship because the job entails so little).
In 2013, McAuliffe was the one with no record, but Republican Ken Cuccinelli had been attorney general and before that a legislator.
In 2009, both candidates — Republican Bob McDonnell and Democrat Creigh Deeds — had legislative records, plus McDonnell was attorney general.
We have to go back to 1969 to find a situation comparable to this one. That year, neither major party candidate had served in elected office: Republican Linwood Holton was a lawyer in Roanoke, Democrat Bill Battle was the former ambassador to Australia.
Whichever way Virginia decides this year, we will make history. What happens after that may be a surprise.
Want to see where the statewide candidates stand? We’ve sent questionnaires to all of them and posted the responses from the ones who have replied in our Voter Guide. We’ve also sent questionnaires to all the House of Delegates candidates across the state, as well as to local candidates in Southwest and Southside. We’ll be posting those responses in August after we build out more parts of the Voter Guide.
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