Employment and Health Care Take Center Stage in Virginia Governor’s Race

ARLINGTON, Va. — Sequoia Ross was stunned when she saw the price of groceries during a recent trip to the store. Items ought to be more affordable, said the single mother of four and eighth grade English teacher, who lives in Amelia County, located in Virginia’s Richmond metropolitan area.

“And I don’t mean through stipends or these little bursts of money,” Ross, 48, told Capital B, referring to the $200-$400 tax rebate checks that eligible Virginians received in October. “I can spend $200 in 15 minutes. That doesn’t last me. It feels like we’re getting breadcrumbs.”

Grocery prices, which have been rising as a result of President Donald Trump’s tariffs, are one of a number of issues that Virginians are thinking about as they prepare to elect a new governor on Nov. 4 to replace Glenn Youngkin, an ally of the president. Other issues on residents’ minds include K-12 education, employment, and health care.

Virginia’s off-year governor’s races are widely seen as a referendum on the party in power nationally. Nearly every year since 1977, Virginians have elected a governor from the party opposite of the one the president is from. This year’s race — between Democratic candidate Abigail Spanberger, 46, and her Republican rival Winsome Earle-Sears, 61, the state’s current lieutenant governor — will see a woman enter the state’s Executive Mansion for the first time in Virginia’s history.

Virginia’s search for a governor comes at a tumultuous time for the state. It’s been hit especially hard by the federal government shutdown and the slashing of federal jobs. Black Americans are about 26% of the federal workforce in Virginia, according to the Economic Policy Institute, and account for approximately 18% of the total state population, making Virginia one of the states with the highest Black populations.

Virginia is also at the center of the ongoing battle over preserving U.S. history. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced in August that a Confederate statue that had been removed from Arlington National Cemetery in 2023 would be returned, as the administration continues to whitewash Black history. Additionally, Virginia public schools have been targeted for federal cuts over their policies regarding race and gender identity.

“We need to focus on how we’re censoring history,” Ross said. “We need to have more people who understand that all history needs to be taught, especially in the U.S., because we’re a nation of diverse cultures.”

Spanberger and Earle-Sears have been able to find some common ground in their support for boosting funding for education. But the two candidates are miles apart when it comes to their views on issues such as health care, the size of the federal workforce, and LGBTQ rights; they tend to follow the rules and norms of their respective party.

Trump has articulated soft praise of Earle-Sears, but has seemed to stop short of offering a full-throated endorsement.

Observers see this year’s historic contest as an early signal of the competitiveness of the country’s two main political parties in the 2026 midterm elections, as Trump is confronted with low approval ratings and Americans struggle to make ends meet. Whoever wins will be responsible for delivering the stability that residents demand.

What residents are saying

With the federal government still closed, Katina Moss can’t stop thinking about the future of Medicaid — her source of health care.

Medicaid, a program that’s jointly funded by state and federal authorities to provide health insurance to low-income Americans, is at the center of the shutdown battle. Approximately 20% of Medicaid enrollees are Black, while Black Americans are 14% of the U.S. population.

Democrats want a funding measure that will extend expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies and reverse Republicans’ recent slashing of Medicaid, while Republicans want the government to reopen with a “clean bill” that wouldn’t change spending levels.

To Moss, 52, it’s nerve-racking that access to health care, to the various medical appointments she might need, is so politically vulnerable, and she wants her next governor to fight for this fundamental right.

“Everything, for me, is centered on our basic humanity,” Moss, an entrepreneur who was born and raised in Richmond, told Capital B, her 1-year-old grandson playing in the background. 

“I don’t see how there can be a cadre of people who continue to claim that this is the greatest nation in the world, yet they won’t use our vast resources to take care of people,” she said. “That perplexes me.”

Tavorise Marks — who lives in Chester, around 20 miles south of Richmond — also was thinking about access to key services as he drove to an appointment with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

Marks, 42, is a disabled U.S. Army veteran and small-business owner who has long been active in his community, including by serving as a member of the local NAACP. He worries about the impact that reducing the size of the federal government is having on people who rely on work done by federal employees.

“Last year, I could have scheduled an appointment with the VA and it would’ve happened in a few weeks, but this one I’m going to right now, I had to schedule it two months ago because of the limited personnel,” he told Capital B from his car. “The VA is being dramatically impacted [by the resignations and cuts]. VA claims aren’t getting processed as fast as they used to.”

Though Marks has historically voted Democratic, he isn’t scared to take the party to task. He filed a lawsuit against the party in 2022, when he was running in a special election for the state’s 4th Congressional District, over what he saw as an inadequate number of polling sites. He thinks that Earle-Sears would be more popular if she hadn’t attached herself to a MAGA agenda.

“There were a lot of Black voters who were upset about Terry McAuliffe running for a second chance at governorship over two qualified women, Jennifer McClellan and Jennifer Carroll Foy,” he said. “Either one of those women would have been not only the first female governor of Virginia but also the first Black female governor in the country.”

A Washington Post-Schar School poll shows that Spanberger, a former CIA officer who was in the U.S. House of Representatives for three terms, has a 12-point lead over Earle-Sears, a U.S. Marines veteran. A poll from the Wason Center at Christopher Newport University shows that Spanberger’s momentum is driven partly by Black voter support: 84% to 6%.

Sheba Williams, who lives in Richmond, echoed Ross, Moss, and Marks’ concerns, also highlighting her hope that the next governor grapples with criminal justice in Virginia.

Racial disparities in the criminal legal system afflict the state. Those convicted of felonies — who are disproportionately Black — are permanently stripped of their right to vote unless they receive a pardon from the governor. Additionally, Black youth are more than 8 times as likely as their white peers to be detained at juvenile facilities, and police officers stop Black drivers at higher rates than white drivers.

“I don’t see how there can be a cadre of people who continue to claim that this is the greatest nation in the world, yet they won’t use our vast resources to take care of people.”

Katina Moss, a Virginia resident

These racial realities have a major impact on Black residents’ lives, said Williams, 45, who founded Nolef Turns, a criminal justice-focused nonprofit organization, because of the many friends and family members she has who have been affected by the system.

“Our mission initially was to help people get jobs, not even careers, just jobs, but then we realized that there are like 46,000 collateral consequences [of being incarcerated],” she told Capital B. “You can’t just help people with jobs. You got to help people with health care and behavioral health and food and clothes and interview skills and housing and expungement.”

Williams was dismayed that criminal justice didn’t receive more attention at the one and only governor’s debate. The matchup, which took place at Norfolk State University this month, was marked by interruptions from Earle-Sears. She frequently asked her opponent about violent 2022 text messages from Jay Jones, the Democratic nominee for attorney general of Virginia.

Spanberger condemned the texts as “abhorrent.” While the controversy has been a centerpiece of Republican campaign ads, it hasn’t appeared to erode the Democrat’s support among voters. 

“To be clear, I don’t agree with what he said. It’s no different from what we hear, day to day, from the top [of the Trump administration],” Williams said. “But it’s frustrating that that is the focal point when we’re talking about people’s real lives. … [Text messages] shouldn’t be the focus. We’re in survival mode right now.”

What the candidates are saying

Spanberger has filled the airwaves and mailboxes with ads that tie Earle-Sears, the first Black woman to hold a statewide office in Virginia, to Trump’s actions in an array of areas, including education policy, which has long occupied a central position in the state’s politics. Virginia is the home of Massive Resistance, a set of anti-integration laws that the state adopted in response to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision.

“Republican Winsome Earle-Sears does what’s best for Donald Trump,” reads one mailer. It goes on to say that Earle-Sears “agrees with Trump on defunding our public schools,” “shutting down the Department of Education,” and “attacking diversity programs, public universities, and HBCUs.”

Spanberger, the mother of three daughters who attend public schools, told Capital B that, as governor, she would strive for inclusive leadership at a moment when the current administration appears to be targeting vulnerable communities, including by withholding resources from schools that embrace diversity.

“Strengthening our public schools, in some communities that’s actually making sure that there aren’t bricks crumbling down from the walls,” she said. “And in some communities, that means making sure that there’s enough support staff to contend with the special needs of a community, — whether it’s a high number of English language learners or a large community of students who need IEPs [Individualized Education Programs] or 504 plans.”

In addition to education, Spanberger has underscored her stances on health care — including access to reproductive care — and LGBTQ rights. At the governor’s debate, she said that she supports a state constitutional amendment that would enshrine abortion rights because “in states where they further restricted abortion access, women have died.” She backs a proposed state constitutional amendment that would enshrine same-sex marriage protections.

Spanberger also has emphasized the importance of lowering the cost of living and pushing back against the administration’s effort to overhaul the federal workforce, a move that has had an outsized impact on Virginia.

“All eyes are on Virginia, because we’re possibly flipping a governor’s seat,” she told Capital B. “I’m doing everything possible to get out every voter, to make every person across the state who feels the heaviness of this moment — whether that’s the pain of the government shutdown or the pain of DOGE [Department of Government Efficiency] efforts — know that a part of rejecting this assault on Virginia could come down to how we vote in November, and we can set an example for the rest of the country.”

Earle-Sears is leaning into some of these issues, too, but she’s doing so by taking a page from her party’s recent playbook.

“Spanberger is for they/them, not for us,” goes an Earle-Sears ad that portrays her rival’s support for LGBTQ rights as a threat to straight people. It’s the same messaging that Earle-Sears’ party used in the 2024 presidential election against former Vice President Kamala Harris.

This year, Earle-Sears attached a handwritten note to a bill barring officials from engaging in discrimination against same-sex couples. “I remain morally opposed to the content” of this bill “passed by the General Assembly,” she wrote. She struck a similar tone during the debate, saying that opposing same-sex marriage and firing someone because of their sexual identity isn’t discriminatory.

Earle-Sears’ position on education has some overlap with Spanberger’s. The lieutenant governor, like her opponent, has said that she wants to increase funding for teachers and education broadly. But a critical difference between the two candidates is that Earle-Sears favors Trump’s efforts to eliminate diversity initiatives in higher education — just as she supports scaling back the U.S. Department of Education and other federal agencies — while Spanberger doesn’t.

The lieutenant governor’s campaign team has not responded to multiple interview requests from Capital B.

While polling shows that Earle-Sears trails Spanberger, there’s much greater uncertainty in the attorney general’s race between Jones and his Republican opponent, incumbent state Attorney General Jason Miyares. The last time that Virginia had a governor and attorney general from different parties was when Tim Kaine was in office from 2006 to 2010.

Ross, the teacher, said that Virginians are desperate for someone who will use their voice for those who don’t have one or who might be too afraid to speak out because of the political climate.

“We need someone who can get some things passed, who has made the right connections with the right people,” she said. “We need someone to be the face of all Virginians — especially those who are really feeling the pinch.”

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