B (2:34)

Prop 50 is already the third most.

A (2:36)

Expensive ballot measure in state history with $215 million in spending as of the first week of October, the polling looks somewhat positive for Democrats hoping to gerrymander the state. But polling in such an irregular race can be tricky.

B (2:51)

Here with me to dive into all.

A (2:52)

Of this is deputy editor of Inside Elections, Jacob Rubashkin.

D (2:55)

Welcome to the podcast, Jacob.

C (2:57)

Thank you so much for having me, Galen. Always a pleasure.

A (2:59)

Always a pleasure. I should also mention that if you.

D (3:02)

Dear listener, are interested in the 2025 election and are in or around the.

A (3:07)

The New York City area, Nate Silver, Clair Malone and I have a live show at the Comedy cellar on Monday, November 3, which is the day before Election Day.

D (3:15)

It's sure to be rowdy and I will drop a link in the show notes.

A (3:19)

But Jacob, out of deference to your.

D (3:21)

Geographic location, let's start with the race that's in your backyard, Virginia.

A (3:27)

How's the governor's race shaping up there?

C (3:30)

First of all, as someone who grew up in Maryland, very different areas. We don't claim Virginia.

A (3:34)

But wait, but don't you live in D.C. now?

C (3:37)

I do live in D.C. and D.C. also claim Virginia.

D (3:40)

Whoa, Savage.

A (3:42)

Who claims Virginia?

C (3:44)

I mean, honestly, you know, because the rest of Virginia doesn't really claim Northern Virginia either. So politics are complicated down there as opposed to everywhere else, where it's very easy and straightforward and everyone gets along. Exactly. Look, I think the Virginia gubernatorial race is proceeding basically as we anticipated heading into this year. I mean, everyone who covers these races knows that there is a very robust historical trend in which the party that wins the presidential election in the even numbered year goes on to lose the Virginia gubernatorial race the following year. The only time that didn't happen was in 2012 and 2013. Obama won the election in 2012. Terry McAuliffe won a plurality victory in the Virginia gubernatorial race in 2013. But otherwise there's this robust historical trend that puts Republicans in this case, in a real bind. And you look at the way that the contest between former Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger and Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earl Sears has played out, and Spanberger seems like the pretty clear favorite heading into the last couple weeks of the election.

D (4:54)

I should say that according to Decision Desk HQ, polling average Abigail Spanberger, the Democrat, leads by 7 points, which is healthy, although not a runaway lead. But betting markets suggest there's a 90 plus percent chance that Democrats take control of the Virginia governor's man mansion.

A (5:13)

What's that, 10%?

D (5:15)

What's Republican sort of best case scenario right now?

C (5:19)

Well, I mean, setting aside kind of the whatever numbers the betting markets happen to spit out on any given day, I think if you're trying to make the best case scenario for Republicans. It looks something like Virginia moved a little bit to the right in the presidential election. We saw Democratic voters not turn out to the degree that some people were expecting. In Northern Virginia, and especially in the Hampton Roads area, where you've got larger black populations that showed more openness to voting for Trump, as did immigrant and other communities. In Northern Virginia, you have a candidate who would be a historic governor, Winsome Earl Sears at the top of the ticket, the first black woman to ever serve as a governor of a state, if she were to win this race, and you have a popular outgoing Republican governor in Glenn Youngkin, who has given Earl Sears the stamp of approval as his chosen successor. That's kind of the argument that you can make. Again, this is a lot of ifs. This is a lot of hypotheticals. It's not the scenario that I see playing out, but that is kind of, if you had to make a case for how she wins, it's that Virginia is still a purple state. And with enough kind of tweaks at the margins and a number of different categories and areas of the state, you can get to a very narrow win.

D (6:48)

Yeah, I want to note here that actually Harris won both Virginia and New Jersey by the same margin in 2024, which was six points. But those two states started from very different places.

A (7:04)

Biden won New Jersey in 2020 by.

D (7:08)

16 points, whereas he won Virginia in 2020 by 10 points.

A (7:13)

So that means that New Jersey, between.

D (7:15)

Those two elections in just a four year span, swung 10 points to the right, whereas Virginia swung four points to the right. So there's a bit more rightward momentum in New Jersey, which we'll get to in a minute, than there is in.

A (7:28)

Virginia, which is perhaps why the expectations.

D (7:32)

Might be flipped on their head that the expectation is that Democrats have a better foothold in Virginia right now than they do in New Jersey.

A (7:40)

I'm also curious if you can talk.

D (7:41)

A little bit about who you mentioned, that Winsome Earl Sears would be a historic first black woman governor of a state.

A (7:48)

Can you tell me a little bit.

D (7:49)

About Abigail Spanberger, and perhaps in particular in the context of what's been happening in Northern Virginia during Trump 2.0.

C (7:58)

Spanberger is one of several Democrats who really burst on the national scene back in the first Trump midterm in the 2018 elections. You know, at that point she was a political unknown and she was running for a district, Virginia's seventh District, that sat in the Richmond suburbs against a pretty conservative Republican named Dave Bratt, who himself had won a shocking upset victory over then House Majority Leader Eric CANTOR Back in 2014 in the Republican primary, in a seat that, no, nobody considered competitive at that time. But you fast forward four years to 2018, and this seat was one of many in Virginia, certainly, but across the country that swung hard against Republicans. During the first Trump administration. Suburban voters, who for a long time had voted Republican but were highly educated and a little wealthier than the average American, began to abandon the Republican Party. And Spanberger was able to take advantage of those trends, but she did so by capitalizing on her own very compelling biography. So, most notably, she is a former CIA officer. She served overseas. She ran as one of several national security women who won big races in 2018 and continue to win big races for the following couple of years. And she was able to combine that profile as a CIA officer with her profile as a Girl Scout mom and a classic kind of suburban mother who was outraged over the actions that the Trump administration was taking on healthcare and other items in the 2018 elections. And that combination was enough to defeat Dave brat in that 2018 election. She faced another really competitive race in 2020 against state delegate Nick Freitas. That was a very expensive contest that saw Spanberger emerge as one of the Democratic Party's best fundraisers. She faced another hard challenge in a redrawn district in 2022 that includes a lot more of Northern Virginia, Prince William county, you know, areas further afield from her Richmond base. Initially, she faced off against Yesli Vega, who had her own kind of interesting law enforcement background in a closely watched race. And then she did not run for reelection in 2024, choosing instead to focus on her gubernatorial bed.

D (10:31)

You talked about how the lieutenant governor, winsome Earl Sears, might be able to capitalize on some of Trump's support. I think that's a big if. There's maybe a likelier chance that Abigail Spanberger is able to capitalize on Northern Virginia's aversion to Trump, in particular, in the context of the DOGE cuts and maybe a federal government shutdown. I mean, there are a few places in the country, maybe no places in the country, whose fate are more tied in with the federal governments than Northern Virginia's. Is there any sense that there is a backlash, a palpable backlash to DOGE cuts and the like?

C (11:10)

Yeah, I mean, the sense we get that there's a backlash is that Spanberger is leading from anywhere from, you know, six to 12 or more points in all of the polling that we have in this race. And I think it's pretty obvious that Sears is on the defensive when it comes to these issues. If you watch the interviews that she's given with local and national outlets, she does not have a good answer for reacting to those cuts. When she's talked about it in the context of her current job as Lieutenant governor, she said, you know, she was speaking to a crowd of supporters and she said, well, who here hasn't lost a job before? You know, I mean, she has.

B (11:50)

Fair.

C (11:51)

Well, fair, yes, but also perhaps not what you want to hear. If you have just lost your job and you've lost it because of a Republican president, you know, she has not had a good response. And she's been unwilling to certainly at all criticize or call out or even distance herself from the Trump administration's actions in that regard, because, again, she's trying to walk this tightrope of keeping the Trump base motivated. And this is a Trump base that is naturally going to be less motivated because it's an off year election because Trump is not on the ballot anymore. Um, so she's got a difficult tightrope to walk. And certainly I think it is, it is a real detriment that you've got the Doge cuts that hit Virginia so hard. But also, you know, it's not just Northern Virginia, the huge military presence in the Hampton Roads area, in Norfolk, in Virginia Beach. Those communities have been hit hard by the initial cuts, and they're getting hit hard by the government shutdown as well, which remains ongoing. There's a tremendous contractor community in Virginia. Right. It's not just federal employees. And the contractors are the ones who ultimately draw the shortest stick in these shutdowns. Because even as federal employees are legally required to get back pay, contractors do not have those same protections. So there is a real kind of economic sword of Damocles hanging over a big part of the Virginia economy right now. And voters blame Republicans for that. That is going to be a serious challenge for Sears and for the other Republicans running statewide in Virginia.

D (13:26)

You mentioned the other Republicans running statewide in Virginia. Which brings us to some of those down ballot races where there have been scandals, first surrounding the Republican Lieutenant Governor, candidate, John Reid, and now surrounding the Democratic Attorney General, candidate, J. Jones. Honestly, it wouldn't be a Virginia election if there wasn't some sort of like Russian nesting doll of scandals facing the people involved. I'm of course hearkening back to an accusation of blackface followed by an accusation of sexual misconduct, then another accusation of blackface that were facing Ralph Northam and company several years back during Trump 1.0, I think it was. But, you know, these are some touchy. Some touchy scandals.

A (14:11)

But to the extent that we can.

D (14:12)

Get into the details here surrounding John Reid and Jay Jones, the Reid News.

C (14:17)

Obviously has been around for a little longer. Right off the bat, there was a segment of the Virginia Republican Party that was very uncomfortable with having an openly gay man as one of their three statewide nominees. I would think that you could probably count Winsomerle Sears as one of those people. She is quite famously and for a very long time has been very opposed to gay marriage. And, you know, she. It took her a very long time to warm up to Reid as her running mate. Essentially in this race, of course, the two are elected not on a ticket, they're elected in separate primaries, they're elected in separate general elections. But that certainly was an impediment, I think, from the beginning to their relationship. And then you layer on these successive stories about some of the accounts that John Reid has followed on Tumblr, which is this is such like a 2010s era scandal, you know, a candidate's Tumblr page causing them all sorts of problems. But, you know, this is porn.

D (15:18)

He was following porn. And also there were nude pictures of him online.

C (15:21)

So he claims that none of this is true. Right. And it's not obvious who the pictures are of. And as somebody who never was on Tumblr, I don't really know the distinction between things that you're posting, things that you're reposting, reblogging, things that you like, things that show up on your page.

D (15:41)

It's okay, Jacob, no one was accusing you of having a Tumblr account.

C (15:46)

Well, look, the point is just like this is not necessarily like a clean cut somebody found like his OnlyFans page. The causation here is a little bit more jumbled. More recently, there was another story about like, some of the specific stuff that he was liking that was, you know, racist content and pretty kind of ugly, ugly stuff out there. But, you know, there's kind of been a specter that has followed him around for the last couple of months that really complicated the ability of the Republican ticket, Earl Sears, Reid and Attorney General Jason Miaris to come together and campaign altogether. And, you know, that's been a real.

D (16:28)

Challenge because Reid also accused the rest of the Republican establishment in the state of being homophobic, essentially, and how they were calling for him to drop out of the race over these likes or posts or whatever it was.

C (16:42)

Yes, yes, no, that's absolutely right. Reid kind of went at it with Governor Youngkin, who, you know, Governor Youngkin's operation tried to ease Reid out of the race ahead of the primary. He was the only candidate who was even running for Lieutenant governor. And there was concern even back then before any of these stories broke about his candidacy. So it certainly made things more difficult for an already challenged Republican Party in this election.

D (17:13)

Now we have a story about Democratic Attorney General candidate Jay Jones, which involves political violence. Actually, what are the specifics of what he said?

C (17:22)

The story is that several years ago, Jay Jones texted a Republican colleague of his potentially accidentally saying that if he had a loaded gun with two bullets and in front of him stood Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot, and Todd Gilbert, who was the state House speaker at the time, he would shoot Todd Gilbert twice. And he also apparently wished violence on Gilbert's children, saying that he hoped that one day they had to watch their kids die because then they would understand how gun violence affects the parents of children whose lives are lost. And, yeah, it was a lot of really bad stuff. It came just a couple days after another story about how he was ticketed for reckless driving, for driving like 115 or 120 in like a 60 mile an hour zone, had to do 1000 hours of community service, half of which he counted as time working for his own political action committee. Wow.

D (18:34)

Virginia really knows how to do it. Actually, are we talking about Virginia or are we talking about New Jersey right now?

C (18:39)

Okay, sorry, Jersey. New Jersey gets off easy on this one. But, you know, and then the delegate that he sent these texts to has also since said that Jones also said to her that he wished that some police officers would die so that police officers would stop harming people as much as he said that they were currently doing. So a number of different stories kind of in quick succession that reflect very poorly on him, especially as he's trying to be the state's top law enforcement officer in a manner of weeks.

D (19:15)

Obviously, they're not all running on the same ticket. So Virginians could elect, for example, Abigail Spanberger and Jason Melaris as the Republican as Attorney general. Is there any sense that that will happen or any sense that J. Jones will get out of the race at this very late moment?

C (19:33)

So here's the thing we don't know, right, Is the answer, because we haven't had, I believe, any polling since these J. Jones stories broke. What we do know is that before the stories broke, he was polling decently ahead of Miaris, again, kind of in the single, mid. Single digit Mark. And there was an expectation even before all this happened that, you know, of course, both of these races, the LG race and the AG race, would be more competitive than the gubernatorial race. But the short answer is we don't have any data from after these scandals broke. And typically these things take a couple of days at the very least to seep into the consciousness. Miaris, I believe today, is launching a seven figure ad campaign highlighting Jones's comments on TV across the state. So we'll need to give that a couple of days to sink in as well. But we don't know is the short answer what the penalty will be electorally for Jay Jones or the rest of the Democratic ticket. What we do know is that it is very uncommon for these races to go in different directions. You have to go back to 2005, so 20 years ago to find an election when the three races did not go all in the same direction. Right. So in 2005, Tim Kaine wins his term as governor of Virginia. Again, you know, a Democrat winning the year after. The Republican wins the White House. But Bill Bolling wins a very, very narrow election for Lieutenant Governor. And that's the last time that these races have split. We've seen gaps due to scandal in kind of the same direction. So for instance, in 2013, we saw Terry McAuliffe win a very narrow gubernatorial victory over Ken Cuccinelli, while his lieutenant governor nominee, Ralph Northam, won a 10 point win over controversial Republican nominee E.W. jackson. So we saw about an eight point delta there. So if that's kind of the high watermark for difference in the modern era, if Spanberger is winning at the top of the ticket by less than eight points, perhaps that could put Jones in some real danger zone if she's winning by double digits. It's just difficult to see how even with these scandals, enough voters are going to split their tickets to get Miaris over the finish line even, even if the rest of his party is doing poorly.

D (22:05)

I want to move on to New Jersey, but of course, the Virginia House of Delegates is also up for election this fall. The Senate is not. That won't be up until 2027. Democrats are defending their narrow majority in the Virginia House of Delegates. Is there any sense that that could flip towards Republicans? I have to imagine not, given everything we've said. But I want to be comprehensive here before we get to Jersey.

C (22:31)

I think it's pretty clear the Democrats are in the driver's seat in the House of Delegates election in Virginia. You know, they already hold the majority. It's a narrow majority. I believe it's just a three seat majority that they have. But Republicans are very much on defense. There are a number of seats that, you know, Republicans have held in Virginia even as Democrats at the top of the ticket in national races have continued to improve in some of those suburban areas that we've talked about before. And those Republicans are in the fight for their lives. I would anticipate we see a Democratic net gain in the state House, certainly more likely that we see Democrats pick up ground than Republicans regain control.

D (23:09)

Okay, let's move on to my backyard, the Garden State, the jurors where the governor's race is a little more spicy. So according to the Decision Desk HQ polling average right now, Mikey Sherrill, the Democratic candidate, leads Jack Ciatarelli, the Republican candidate by five points. Just to say it, the betting markets have this race at about a 75 to 80% chance of being a Democratic win. And also, as I mentioned, this is a state that has shifted more decisively to the right in the Trump era, although it remains in the demic and remained in the Democratic column in 2024.

A (23:48)

Okay, so let's talk about who Mikey.

D (23:50)

Sherrill and Jack Cittare, because in some.

A (23:52)

Ways, both of those characters play into.

D (23:54)

The stereotypes a little bit of their parties in this moment.

C (23:59)

I don't know what you mean by that, Galen. Jack Cittarelli plays into the stereotypes of New Jersey for any moment. First and foremost, fair.

D (24:08)

Fair.

C (24:10)

No, that's not being fair to Jack Cittarelli, though he does kind of predate the current Republican iteration in New Jersey, which I think is an important part of what's going on here. Look, I think that.

B (24:23)

All right, that's the end of today's preview. Head over to GDPolitics.com for a last chance to get 20% off an annual subscription. That'll give you access to today's full episode and a second weekly pod into the future. On today's podcast, we dig into that New Jersey race as well as the redistricting ballot measure in California and the.

D (24:42)

New York City mayoral race.

B (24:44)

We're also at a moment when we're going to be ramping up coverage ahead.

A (24:47)

Of the 2025 elections.

B (24:49)

And then midterm coverage really begins in earnest. So take this opportunity to become a paid subscriber to GD Politics for just five bucks a month. Head to GDPolitics.com right now to do it. That's GDPolitics.com See you there.