It’s early on a Thursday evening and Winsome Earle-Sears, Virginia’s Republican candidate for governor, is in a familiar place. She’s standing outside of a school board meeting to call attention to policies related to where transgender students can use their elected bathroom and play school sports.
“Let’s have girls have their private spaces and boys have their private spaces,” she said to applause. “It has worked for how many millennia and certainly it can work now.”
Earle-Sears has blanketed the airwaves with ads that characterize Abigail Spanberger, the Democratic nominee, as “being for they/them,” replicating the messaging used against former Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election. She is airing the ads during college and pro football games just as President Donald Trump’s campaign did last year.
On Friday, she will address an event hosted by the conservative group Moms for Liberty, an organization that says it works to defend parental rights at all levels of government.
Polls in Virginia and elsewhere suggest the top issue on voters’ minds this fall is affordability. But Earle-Sears has made trans policies a centerpiece of her messaging ahead of the November election, hammering her Democratic counterpart for not answering whether she agrees that trans youth should be able to use any bathroom in a school building or play on a sports team that corresponds with their gender identity.
Just in September, the Earle-Sears campaign spent over $2 million on ads focused on transgender policy, more than it spent on any other topic, including spots referring to “woke Abigail Spanberger.”
“She has to do something to differentiate herself and stand out in a very disaggregated media landscape and make up for the enthusiasm gap the Republicans have in Virginia,” said Chris Saxman, a Republican strategist who served as Earle-Sears’ transition director after she was elected lieutenant governor and is now president of the business newsletter Virginia FREE.
Democratic strategist Rodell Mollineau says focusing on transgender rights could work in some places but not in Virginia.
“The Earle-Sears campaign is counting on transgender rights splitting independent and center-right voters in the same way it was problematic for Vice President Harris,” Mollineau said. “The difference is it’s no longer 2024, Spanberger has done a great job of defining herself as a middle-of-the-road Democrat, and Earle-Sears is carrying the mantle for Trump in a state that hasn’t embraced MAGA.”
A poll of likely Virginia voters in September found they were most concerned about inflation and cost of living, followed by threats to democracy. According to the poll, conducted by Christopher Newport University, Democrats listed threats to democracy as by far their biggest concern while Republicans were split between cost-of-living concerns, immigration and crime.
National polling, meanwhile, also suggests that debates over transgender policies rank lower among some voters’ priorities. A nationwide CNN poll of adults released this month found that 33% said transgender policies were “extremely” or “very important,” ranking last among the issues surveyed, while 43% said it was “not too” or “not at all important,” the highest percentage of any issue that was asked about.
From Jennifer Agiesta, CNN’s director of polling and election analytics:
CNN identified five different types of political independents, and those who are less closely connected to either major party tilt toward feeling that society has gone too far in accepting different cultures, gender identities, sexual orientations and other different backgrounds. Among the Disappointed Middle, a group that’s more politically engaged but deeply negative toward both parties, 41% say society has gone too far vs. 24% who say not far enough. For the Upbeat Outsiders, a less politically active group of independents who are more positive toward the parties, it’s a tighter split, 38% too far vs. 35% not far enough.
When asked by CNN at her earlier news conference if she was emphasizing policies related to transgender children at the expense of talking about the economy, Earle-Sears defended her focus.
“Look at all of these people here. They are supporting women’s rights,” she said.
Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares, a Republican who is running for reelection, also defended focusing on the issue despite voters’ stated desire to talk about affordability. “This has been a huge issue in Virginia,” Miyares told CNN in an interview. “It’s absolutely something I hear about on the campaign trail, from voters and students and people that come up and talk to me and people that stop me.”
Spanberger, the former three-term Democratic congresswoman, told WSET that she would “support a bill that would put clear provisions in place that provide a lot of local ability for input, based on the age of children, based on the type of sport, based on competitiveness.”
“Ultimately, Abigail believes that these are decisions that must be made between parents, schools, and local communities — not politicians, and she believes that we need to get politics out of our public schools,” said a spokesperson for the campaign.
A host of downballot Virginia Republicans are mirroring Earle-Sears’ messaging topics as are GOP candidates running in Georgia, South Carolina and Tennessee. And outgoing Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin this week announced that he has issued a state directive meant to “secure the health, safety, privacy, dignity and respect for all Virginians in sex-separated spaces.”
Trans people who oppose the Republican focus say they feel forgotten.
“It feels as though I’ve kind of been boiled down into a talking point. My life is part of just this strategy to make people angry and afraid and scared and prey on the population of trans kids in this country, which is inherently very vulnerable,” said Reed Williams, the 23-year-old digital director at Equality Virginia who transitioned at 12 while enrolled in the state’s public schools.
A decade ago, she says, her transition was supported by her family and school community. She worries that youth now won’t have access to the same level of support.
“I just wish that people could have a little more empathy,” Williams said.
Earle-Sears, though, is counting on conservative parents in Democratic strongholds like Fairfax County, echoing Youngkin’s successful emphasis on parental rights in schools four years ago.
A mother who declined to be named out of fear of exposing her family says she didn’t find out her child was transitioning until she went to access academic records and was shocked to see a different name.
“I did the best that I could at the time and I think the school did the best as well, but I think they should have told me,” she told CNN, adding that she voted early for Earle-Sears but does not broadcast her politics publicly.
Mark Harris, a political consultant to Earle-Sears, said the campaign thinks this is an issue that can help them with independents, moderate Democrats, Asian and Black Americans.
“From the campaign perspective, it’s a great issue to draw clear contrast between us and Spanberger and her being beholden to this very out-of-touch group of people that are driving the Democratic agenda,” Harris said in an interview with CNN.
Those supporting Democrats this fall reject that argument and say Earle-Sears and others aren’t speaking to the real concerns of most voters.
“They’re focused on things that don’t matter and they’re ignoring the millions of Americans whose health care is at risk,” said Laura Packard, a small business owner and cancer survivor who showed up to protest an Earle-Sears event.
Virginia State Sen. Danica Roem, the first openly transgender person to be elected and serve in both chambers of a state legislature in the nation’s history, says the overemphasis on trans issues indicates Earle-Sears is running a losing campaign.
“I’ve seen this happen. I have seen this playbook. It is not going to work,” said Roem, who suggested that top of mind for many Virginians is the uncertainty coming from the federal government in a state that is home to more than 300,000 federal workers.
Roem represents a state Senate district centered on Manassas, outside of Washington, DC, and has routinely been reelected after first flipping a state legislative district from red to blue in 2017.
“They attacked me over sports. They’ve attacked me over bathrooms. They’ve attacked me over health care. They’ve attacked me over forced outing, you name it. And I won,” she said.