Could Virginia see one party sweep all three state offices this November?
Virginia's primary is happening on Tuesday. The same party has won the general election for governor, lieutenant governor, and attorney general in four straight elections. It could happen again.
Virginia is known for many things. It has the catchiest state tourist slogan, the most anti-tyrannical flag/seal, the most presidents born within its borders, and is, by really any measure, the best state.1 But the Old Dominion is also known for a curious political reality: It’s the only state that does not permit an elected governor to seek immediate reelection after a single four-year term.
Because Virginia elects a new governor every four years, politicians in both parties can always count on an opportunity to seek the highest office in the state. This results in a consistent quadrennial churn, whereby the sitting lieutenant governor and attorney general — the state’s two other elected statewide posts — immediately become the most likely contenders to seek the governorship the next time around. When one or both of those officeholders seek the governorship, that opens up opportunities to seek the two lower offices, which can attract many contenders hoping to eventually rise to the governorship.
The next step in this electoral cycle happens tomorrow, when Virginia holds its primary election. Unlike New Jersey last week, Virginia’s 2025 gubernatorial race lacks any primary competition: Republican Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears and former Rep. Abigail Spanberger, the Democrats’ standard-bearer, are both unopposed. Similarly, Republicans have already settled on their nominees for lieutenant governor and attorney general. Conservative radio host John Reid is unopposed in the GOP race to succeed Sears-Earles in the number two slot, while Attorney General Jason Miyares opted to seek reelection rather than take on Earle-Sears for the party’s gubernatorial nod (unlike the governor, neither Virginia’s lieutenant governor nor attorney general have term limits).2
Democrats, then, have the only statewide primaries on Tuesday (both parties have primaries for some seats in the House of Delegates). The party’s six-way contest for lieutenant governor looks difficult to handicap, while the race for attorney general features a head-to-head tilt.
The Democrats’ lieutenant governor primary has four leading contenders. Former Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney, a protégé of former Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe, leads the field in fundraising, according to data from the invaluable Virginia Public Access Project. Stoney originally sought the top job, but dropped down to the lieutenant governor race after struggling to compete with Spanberger. Meanwhile, state Sens. Ghazala Hashmi and Aaron Rouse are not far behind Stoney in fundraising. All three of these contenders have a large number of endorsements from various current and former state Democratic officials. For her part, Hashmi might benefit from being the lone woman candidate running in a primary that will almost certainly have more women voters than men because of the makeup of the Democratic Party. However, Prince William County School Board Chair Babur Lateef could attract votes as the only notable contender from Northern Virginia, the most vote-rich part of the state.
In the attorney general contest, former state Del. Jay Jones faces Henrico Commonwealth’s Attorney Shannon Taylor. Jones is probably a slight favorite here, having outraised Taylor and having acquitted himself well in the 2021 Democratic primary, when he provided a strong challenge to incumbent Mark Herring (who went on to narrowly lose to Miyares that November).
Whoever the eventual primary winners are could find themselves holding office after the November election. Recent trends in Virginia elections and the current political environment suggest a potentially advantageous general election situation for Democrats, which could allow them to sweep all three state offices. That’s not a firm prediction by any means. But two historical data points and President Donald Trump’s current standing may make Democrats slight favorites to accomplish this feat.
First, Virginia regularly swings away from the president’s party in gubernatorial general elections, which always take place the year after a presidential race. In 12 consecutive governor’s contests dating back to 1977, the party in the White House has performed worse than it did in Virginia’s last presidential vote. In the process, the party that didn’t hold the presidency won every race except the 2013 election, when McAuliffe narrowly defeated Republican Ken Cuccinelli. Still, although McAuliffe did win while Democratic President Barack Obama sat in the White House, he won Virginia by a smaller margin than Obama had in 2012.
Now, the degree of that swing has varied quite a bit. In 2021, Republican Glenn Youngkin won by about 2 percentage points over McAuliffe (who sought to win back his old office), a margin that was 12 percentage points better than President Donald Trump’s 10-point defeat against Joe Biden in Virginia a year earlier. But in 2017, Democrat Ralph Northam handily beat Republican Ed Gillespie by about 9 points, roughly a 4-point improvement on the Democrats’ 2016 margin of victory in Virginia.
Still, former Vice President Kamala Harris carried Virginia by about 6 points in 2024, so any swing toward Democrats in 2025 would guarantee victory. In fact, Democrats could actually afford to lose a little ground relative to the last presidential election and still hold the governorship. But Trump is back in the White House, creating a circumstance that has traditionally benefited Democrats. On top of that, he has a somewhat higher disapproval rating than approval rating. Regardless of which publicly-available approval tracker you prefer, he’s in a net negative position. And in a light-blue state like Virginia, Republicans will need Trump’s image to improve to give them a better shot at winning.
These electoral conditions seem likely to help the Democrats’ chances of winning in November. Additionally concerning for Republicans, recent election results suggest that few voters will split their votes between the two parties across the races for governor, lieutenant governor, and attorney general. That means that Democrats could sweep all three posts if the political environment continues to favor them. Tellingly, the last four gubernatorial elections have seen the same party win each office. And in 2009, 2017, and 2021, the three races’ standard deviation — a measure of how much variation a series of data points has compared to its average — was quite small, which speaks to very high levels of straight-ticket voting.
The last notably divergent result actually came in 2013. That year, the weak and controversial candidacy of Republican E.W. Jackson enabled Northam to easily win the lieutenant governorship, even as the races for governor and attorney general were far tighter. Like many lieutenant governors and attorneys general before him, Northam’s initial statewide win in 2013 set up his ultimately successful run for governor in 2017.
This is not to say that a split-ticket outcome won’t happen. Just look at 2005, when Democratic Lt. Gov. Tim Kaine won the governorship by nearly 6 points, but Republicans narrowly won the other two posts. And in 2013, Herring won the attorney general contest by only 0.01 points, barely giving Democrats the sweep. If the political environment is more competitive, a bunch of close races could produce a Democratic winner here and a Republican victor there. Yet absent an especially poor candidate, more recent Virginia contests suggest that voters are unlikely to differentiate much between candidates carrying the same party label on the ballot.
That could spell trouble for Republicans given what early polls and fundraising say about the gubernatorial contest. The two most recent surveys of the race give Spanberger a lead, albeit one inside the margin of error: 46%-43% in a poll from Republican pollster co/efficient and 52%-48% in a Pantheon Insight/HarrisX survey. But Spanberger has also built a sizable fundraising edge over Earle-Sears: The Democrat has raised $19 million in net donations to the Republican’s $10 million (as of June 5), according to VPAP. Per VPAP, this nearly two-to-one advantage represents the most lopsided ratio in pre-primary fundraising for any governor’s race in the 21st century. Plus, Spanberger has a lot more money in the bank, holding $14.3 million to Earle-Sears’s $3.0 million.
Virginia has no campaign contribution limits, so Spanberger’s large fundraising lead is not necessarily permanent. Moreover, each party’s national gubernatorial campaign arm — the DGA and RGA — will invest a lot of money in Virginia (they donated $6.8 million and $10.7 million in the 2021 race, respectively). But Earle-Sears finds herself in a fiscal hole, which has contributed to lingering concerns among some Virginia Republicans that her campaign’s slow start could help sink her.
Lastly, it’s worth mentioning that Miyares, as the incumbent attorney general, could conceivably run ahead of the rest of the Republican ticket and perhaps win even as Democrats claim the other two offices — which would set the stage for both parties to have their likely 2029 nominees for governor lined up right after the 2025 race concludes. However, Miyares only has to look at his victory in 2021 to see that incumbency is no guarantee of an especially strong showing. In that contest, Miyares defeated Herring, the incumbent, by 0.8 points, the slimmest margin of the three statewide races. But that was not dramatically different from Earle-Sears’s 1.5-point victory or Youngkin’s 1.9-point edge, suggesting that Herring didn’t vastly outperform his ticketmates.
Of course, there could be many more twists and turns that affect the political environment in 2025. Trump’s approval rating could improve, the Democratic candidates (or Republican ones) could make a bad mistake or have an especially problematic scandal that breaks through the noise of our oversaturated media environment and hinder their campaigns. But recent trends and early info about the 2025 election should make Democrats somewhat bullish — and Republicans more bearish.
I will admit to a small degree of bias as a born and raised Virginian. Technically, Virginia is one of four states that calls itself a commonwealth, along with Kentucky, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania. Virginia can lay claim to eight presidents who were born there, making it the “Mother of Presidents.”
In Virginia, any primary that has fewer than two candidates does not appear on the ballot.
The President’s Party has not won a majority in the VA-GOV race since 1972.
McAuliffe won in 2013 because the Republican candidate was so bad that the Libertarian pulled 6% of the vote. McAuliffe actually did better when he lost than when he won.