In the News: Virginia 2025 Elections

Aughie and Nia summarize the results of the 2025 Virginia elections.

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J. Aughenbaugh: Jesus Christ, calling.

N. Rodgers: Hey, Aughie.

J. Aughenbaugh: Good morning, Nia. How are you?

N. Rodgers: I'm good. How are you?

J. Aughenbaugh: I'm good because earlier this week, we are recording on Friday, November 7. But earlier this week, democracy got renewed in the Commonwealth of Virginia.

N. Rodgers: As it does every November in the Commonwealth of Virginia, because it's never not an election year in the Commonwealth of Virginia.

J. Aughenbaugh: A long term.

N. Rodgers: When's your next election? November. How do you know? Because it's always in November.

J. Aughenbaugh: Long term listeners of the podcasts have heard you and I comment that we live in a state, the Commonwealth Virginia that holds elections every year. In part, the reason why we do is that we hold statewide elections for executive branch positions the year after the country votes for president.

N. Rodgers: Next year is midterms.

J. Aughenbaugh: Then we have state Senate races in 2027. Then the presidential election.

N. Rodgers: There's no break.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.

N. Rodgers: But one could argue that we are thoroughly democracy oriented.

J. Aughenbaugh: Sure. Yes.

N. Rodgers: Lots of voting here. Lots of voting in Virginia.

J. Aughenbaugh: Listeners, this is going to be one of those in the news episodes. This is going to be a shorty, and we're going to be looking at the Virginia election results from earlier this week, because, again, we voted on Tuesday.

N. Rodgers: Tuesday, November 4?

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. November 4.

N. Rodgers: For us, it was all the statewide executive branch positions and every member of the House of Delegates.

J. Aughenbaugh: It's right. Yes. In Virginia listeners, for our non-Virginia listeners, the state legislature is bicameral, so there's two houses. The upper House is the state Senate, but we refer to as our lower House, the House of Delegates.

N. Rodgers: Delegate Aughenbaugh, Delegate Rogers, delegate whomever from whatever chunk of Virginia you're from. Virginia's broken up into 100 chunks, 100 districts.

J. Aughenbaugh: It's an artifact of our colonial history.We had a House of Delegates. But now, we're going to first start off with the statewide executive branch positions. For governor, the Democratic candidate was Abigail Spanberger. The Republican candidate was the current lieutenant governor, Republican Winsome Earle-Sears. The outcome was not close. The polls pretty accurately predicted what we saw. Spanberger easily defeated Earle-Sears. The final vote is probably going to be somewhere 57% to 42 in change, a little over 50%.

N. Rodgers: It's about 15% spread. That was what Obama would refer to as a show lacking.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, it was. The polls actually were pretty spot on. Spanberger had a double digit lead basically throughout this year. For lieutenant governor, once again, the Democratic candidate, state legislator Hashmi defeated the GOP candidate John Reid. Again, comfortable margin a little bit higher than what the polls predicted, but it was 55% - 44%.

N. Rodgers: I have to admit, I like her first name Ghazala.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, Ghazala Hashmi. She is Virginia's first Muslim American statewide official.

N. Rodgers: She's a former delegate, wasn't she? She came from Chesterfield or someplace like that. She's been in the government.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, and before that, she was a school teacher.

N. Rodgers: John Reid was or is a podcast talk host. Shout out to him. He's a talker, like we are.

J. Aughenbaugh: Then probably the biggest surprise was Democratic candidate for attorney general, Jay Jones defeated the Republican incumbent Jason Miyares. The outcome is 52.7 to 46.9.

N. Rodgers: It's bigger than I thought. I thought that was going to be tighter.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.

N. Rodgers: I thought that'd be 51, 49.

J. Aughenbaugh: This is particularly the case because of the infamous October surprise.

N. Rodgers: Which we got one this year.

J. Aughenbaugh: We actually got one.

N. Rodgers: [inaudible 00:05:51] always get one, but we got one this year.

J. Aughenbaugh: The October surprise for that particular contest concerned the disclosure of Jones sending text messages interestingly enough to a Republican in the state legislature about a GOP leader, hoping that his children would die. He also made some disparaging comments about police officers dying. When you're running to be the chief law enforcement officer of the state.

N. Rodgers: That's going to have some repercussions. He's going to struggle, I think. My prediction is that he will struggle to get the police unions behind him to get police to forgive. Because, I hope these people die is a pretty harsh critique. It's one thing to critique police officers is another thing entirely, too. There's some real complication there. But the flip to that is Jason Miyares was not beloved either, as is clearly noted by his defeat. What I think is interesting is we had a DEI love fest in the Virginia voting this year because we were going to have a woman as governor no matter what. No matter who vote.

J. Aughenbaugh: First time in the state's history.

N. Rodgers: That's right.

J. Aughenbaugh: Nearly over 400 year history.

N. Rodgers: TJ is somewhere twitching, because he would never have expected that. Sorry Thomas Jefferson. For those who are not in Virginia, Thomas Jefferson, TJ.

J. Aughenbaugh: Tammy Dugger, he was going to be either woman or a gay Republican.

N. Rodgers: A gay man. That was going to be a first, no matter what.

J. Aughenbaugh: Then for Attorney General, the incumbent already broke that glass ceiling in regards to Hispanics, but it was either going to be Hispanic or an African American male.

N. Rodgers: That whole thing where Donald Trump hates DEI. Man, he must be feeling the stress about living right next to Virginia. You know what I mean?

J. Aughenbaugh: I even Nia remarked, I did a media interview a few days before the election, and I went ahead and pointed out. I said, the diversity we see in Virginia in regards to our elected officials is rather noteworthy in a state that was once referred to by a well known political scientist V.O. Key Jr. V.O. Key Jr. wrote a very influential book in the 1950s, Southern Politics and State and Nation. The chapter on Virginia, he entitled Virginia is a political museum piece.

N. Rodgers: Surprise.

J. Aughenbaugh: Virginia has come a long way in regards to diversity in our elected positions.

N. Rodgers: That was going to happen no matter what. No matter which party won, there was going to be diversity, which is also interesting. It wasn't all in one party. It was across the parties. Because not only do we have two women running, we had an African American running for governor. The woman from the Republican side is also African American. This was going to be newsworthy, no matter what. What I think is also interesting is the Democrats picked up a whole bunch of seats in the House of Delegates, didn't they? Like a wanking bunch of them?

J. Aughenbaugh: In the House of Delegates, the Democrats increase their control to a likely 64 to 36 seat margin.

N. Rodgers: That's a Flipsterpof margin, if you ever saw one, Aughie.

J. Aughenbaugh: In effect, the Democrats picked up about 10 seats. Currently, they had about a 4-5 seat margin. They picked up roughly 10 seats. They basically took every contested race that political scientists were focusing on. They basically won them.

N. Rodgers: We didn't have an election this time for Senate, but they also have a tiny little margin in the Senate, don't they? Democrats?

J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, the Democratic margin in the state Senate is slim, 21 to 19. But in the last two years, those 21 Democrats have been remarkably faithful in their voting per the wishes of the party leadership.

N. Rodgers: They've voted block voting quite well.

J. Aughenbaugh: Let's face it, Nia.

N. Rodgers: We would not expect that to change?

J. Aughenbaugh: My larger point was Virginia political parties are much like the political parties at the national level in the United States right now. They are so polarized that there aren't moderates in the party who occasionally will vote with the opposition party. There is next to no my prediction is the Democrats have complete control of the political branches of Virginia government. There won't be any defections even in the state.

N. Rodgers: There'll be no dissent. They'll just be like, we're steam rolling. That's your first prediction. Is that there will be some steam rolling action going on. You said to me off recording a prediction that I thought was interesting and I would like to make sure we get in, which is that because federal workers are a huge portion of not only the population of Virginia but the tax base of Virginia. That Virginia if they continue to not get paid, if the shutdown continues for any real for much longer, that's going to affect Virginia's rainy day fund. It's going to affect Virginia's financing. All these things that Democrats like to do, which are lean towards entitlement programs. They lean towards funding schools and funding all that stuff. What if they don't have the money to do that?

J. Aughenbaugh: Let's take a step back. In these elections, in the campaigns, the Democratic candidates made it very clear that they have a robust policy agenda if they were to win all these elections. Some of the things that they mentioned won't require money. To give you an example, safeguarding civil liberties for abortion and reproduction care are not necessarily revenue expenditure heavy. You're just protecting a liberty.

N. Rodgers: That's getting an amendment to the state Constitution to enshrine that.

J. Aughenbaugh: But there are other things that they want to do require revenue. For instance, environmental protections will require the expenditure of revenue, transitioning to renewable energy. That requires the expenditure of state revenue, economic fairness. If you raise the minimum wage, it's not only raising the minimum wage for the private sector, that's also raising the minimum wage for state and local employees.

N. Rodgers: I see.

J. Aughenbaugh: Assuming that they want to go forward with that kind of agenda, now you have to ask the question, what is the status of Virginia's, if you will, state government budget?

N. Rodgers: Can we side note something about Virginia Doug Wilder, who was the first African American government post civil war? Governor. Yeah, governor. He actually put in place the Virginia Rainy Day Fund. He looked around at other states, and there were a few states that had some, and he was like, we need one of those. We need a fund where if we get into real trouble in Virginia, we have a cushion. We have something to fall back on. That was heavily opposed when he first suggested it. It was not a warmly regarded thing, but it has become, that's probably a pretty good idea. It's like you having an emergency fund at your house. In case your HVAC goes out in the dead of winter, you're going to need somebody to come fix your heat or whatever. That's what we mean by a rainy day fund. It's theoretically not touched unless there is real economic distress. It's not touched for light hearted or even personal reasons. It's touched when something is really big.

J. Aughenbaugh: Virginia was not the first state to create a rainy day fund?

N. Rodgers: No.

J. Aughenbaugh: But nevertheless, in part because Virginia was always a very conservative state in regards to expenditures. But you mentioned former Governor Wilder. When he came into office, early into his first year in office, there was a recession that hit the United States nationally. It impacted Virginia, and he had to impose Draconian budget cuts across state agencies. What he learned from that, and it was initially very unpopular was that to better manage future economic downturns, Virginia, like a lot of states needed to have a rainy day fund. We have one. This rainy day fund has become extremely important listeners because, again, the federal government has encountered shutdowns on a more regular basis in the last 30 years.

N. Rodgers: As we're recording this, this one's the longest, the one we're in now.

J. Aughenbaugh: Now. What Virginia has learned from previous federal government shutdowns is that because Virginia has the highest percentage of its GDP accounted for by federal government spending that when the federal government shuts down even for just a few days, it has a ripple effect in the Virginia economy.

N. Rodgers: It hits Virginia hard.

N. Rodgers: Federal employees, contractors, the military, Virginia's economy is hugely tied to the federal government in a variety of ways.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. It's not just the fact that these federal government employees are not earning any money, which means the state is not earning any income tax. It's the fact that these employees normally don't have money that can be taxed by the state, they're not spending money, so we're not getting sales tax. We're not getting taxes on purchases of washers, dryers, or cars or anything like that.

N. Rodgers: Restaurant tax, gas tax.

J. Aughenbaugh: Tax.

N. Rodgers: They're not buying stuff.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, we're not getting any of that revenue.

N. Rodgers: Even if they started back tomorrow, what will happen first is that people will pay their back rent and their back like all the bills that are overdue, they'll pay all that first. Even if you get a shutdown that stops, it takes a couple of months for things to come back into the economy. Because people are paying off their old bills. They're not buying new stuff.

J. Aughenbaugh: According to most economists, it typically takes anywhere from a minimum 3-4 weeks after a federal government shutdown. For those employees to resume normal new economic, if you will, transactions, in other words, spending. How's this potentially impact the new slate of elected officials. I'm going to refer to it as the Spanberger administration. Governor Spanberger will take office in Virginia in January. If the federal government's shutdown continues, God forbid, to Thanksgiving or bleeds into December, you're basically looking at an entire quarter, October, November, and December, of significantly declining revenue in Virginia, which means we're dipping into the rainy day fund, but the rainy day fund is not designed to go ahead and handle more than a quarter's worth of declining significant tax revenue. This could put a huge crimp and what the Democrats might want to do at least next year.

N. Rodgers: Your desire to have collective bargaining will be nothing if people don't have any money. I'm not talking about people. I'm talking about companies. They also want to do public employee?

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.

N. Rodgers: We're public employees. Again, are public employees of VCU university, Virginia Commonwealth University. VCU next year may not have the money to collectively bargain with us. They may not be able to raise because they may not have the money flow to do that. That's one of those things that they've said, we're going to fix that, and we're like, but are you? Not if this thing keeps rolling on, you're not like, this is bad.

J. Aughenbaugh: The other thing I want listeners, particularly our Virginia listeners to pay attention to here is, we don't know yet what will be the impact of the Trump administration's tariffs on economic growth in the United States. If those tariffs lead to even just a slight recession, in a recession, people are not spending money. They are receding. Economic activity is receding. When that happens, it's not only the federal government that doesn't get tax revenue, it's also state and local governments.

N. Rodgers: How do you want the roads in Virginia to be fixed?

J. Aughenbaugh: If you got big plans that require the expenditure of tax dollars, you want steady economic growth. You don't want inflation, but you certainly don't want recession. You want steady economic growth to where people are spending money, they have jobs, so you can tax their income.

N. Rodgers: You feel safe to spend money.

J. Aughenbaugh: When they feel secure about their jobs, then they feel secure about making big ticket purchases. Why?

N. Rodgers: It's time for a new car.

J. Aughenbaugh: A new car. Hey, that washer or dryer is 13-years-old and it's making some strange noises. We should probably replace it.

N. Rodgers: Let's go on vacation as a family. Which having a kid, that's not a cheap thing to do.

J. Aughenbaugh: Of course not.

N. Rodgers: You want people to do those things in the economy, if you can, because then they add revenue in other places. Virginia is a destination spot. Parts of Virginia are destination spots, but also Virginians go to other places and spend money there, which is helpful to the overall larger economy. I was saying to Aggie offline and I hope this doesn't sound rude, but sometimes you watch dogs chase cars, and you think to yourself, what are you going to do if you catch it? Because a dog can't drive a car? What's a dog going to do with a car? You can't take it home with you. Part of me wonders if Abigail Spanberger in some ways, has not caught the car in her teeth because one, she's a one time governor. She can't have two consecutive rounds. She could come back later. But she's got four years. If the first half of the first year is jacked up while she's trying to figure out money and finances, now she's down to three and half. We know that the last half of the last year is lame duck. Very few governors in Virginia get to do anything big or useful in their last six months because they're done. It is known that they will not be re winning that election.

J. Aughenbaugh: The state legislature knows that. Listeners who aren't Virginia residents, what you may not know is Virginia is one of those rare states in the United States where the governor cannot run for re-election. They are limited to one term. They have to sit out a term if they want to be governor again. Basically, listeners, Abigail Spanberger basically has about three and half years to accomplish her agenda. If the first part or the first year is dealing with a budget mess, now you're looking at two and half years. It reminds me of a movie I always assign in my politics and film class. The name of the movie is the candidate. It stars Robert Redford. He's a long shot candidate for a Senate race, and he wins. On the night of his election, he goes, what do we do now? You won the election, Abigail Spanberger to be the next governor of Virginia, the first female governor, you're feeling good. You're like, oh, hey, and my lieutenant governor and my attorney general are also from my party, and my party has majority control of both houses of the state.

N. Rodgers: It's a unified government.

J. Aughenbaugh: We can get stuff done.

N. Rodgers: There's no money.

J. Aughenbaugh: Then you meet with the budget people.

N. Rodgers: The state auditor who says, ah.

J. Aughenbaugh: The budget people say, we're going to recommend that you be prepared for 2.5-3% budget cuts when you take office, and you're like, what?

N. Rodgers: What happened? You have your guy who keeps your books comes in and says, you have $2 and 46 cents. Spend it wisely. You're like, wait, what? I thought I had more than that. I think that'll be an interesting test of her leadership and of her transparency if she's honest with people about that, if she's honest about the pain, whatever else you may think about Governor Wilder's time as governor, and he was controversial. He was very upfront about, nope, we got to do this. We got to do this, and it's going to hurt. She may have to do a similar thing. She may have to say, yep, we're going to have to do this, and it's going to have to hurt. Sorry, folks.

J. Aughenbaugh: That's going to require some leadership skills within the Democratic Party. How do you go ahead and say to somebody who just swung a seat that previously was held by a Republican? The things that you promised in your campaign we may not be able to do.

N. Rodgers: She could pull out a George H. W. Bush and say, yep, I said no, read my lips, no new taxes, but guess what, people. The only way we're getting out of this mess is taxes. She could be that person, or she could be a person who tries to dodge it for a couple of years and hand it off to somebody else. But part of her difficulty, too, is that the midterms will look towards her election and then her performance for the next year, and see where that's going.

J. Aughenbaugh: Now, the one thing that I want to note to our listeners is if it sounds like Nia and I are running around screaming the sky is falling, we don't want to rain on the parade here, metaphorically speaking. All we're saying is, yes, if you're a Democrat in Virginia, you should feel good about what happened earlier this week. On the other hand, now you have to transition to governing.

N. Rodgers: There are headwinds.

J. Aughenbaugh: There are a lot of headwinds, there's a lot of moving parts. The skills that you utilize to win the elections, good for you. You won the campaign. But now you need to govern. As we've discussed on this podcast, governing requires some different skill sets.

N. Rodgers: I personally think that she will be fine as a governor. I think she's got a lot of those skills that she needs to do that. That is my hope. I think that there is this weirdness right now about female governors, and they're getting a lot of attention because New Jersey has a new female governor as well. They're getting what I think of as weird media attention. You wouldn't treat a man the way you're treating a woman in these instances. One of the things that Abigail Spanberger has been really good about is saying, don't look at me as a woman, look at me as the candidate for this position and my skill set. She's not done a lot of that, and neither in fairness to Winsome Earle-Sears, neither did she. They didn't try to pull a woman card of women should vote for me because I'm a woman. There wasn't a lot of that, which I was impressed by. I was impressed that both of them ran clean campaigns in terms of, you should vote for me because you think my ideas are good, not because I'm a woman.

J. Aughenbaugh: Female candidates, but also to a certain extent, candidates of color in the United States have to walk a fine line. Because they're oftentimes the ground breakers. They are the ones who are breaking the metaphorical glass ceiling, and their accomplishment should be recognized. But at the same time, they have to govern. We're not yet at a point, unfortunately in the United States to where it's no longer a big deal. That a candidate is a woman or is a person of color.

N. Rodgers: In two or three generations, that probably will be different. There will have been enough women.

J. Aughenbaugh: There is this fine line. Into a certain extent, I agree with you. A lot of Abigail Spanberger supporters championed the fact that she is the first female governor, and rightfully slow. But at the same time, many voters are like, how's she going to govern? Because they're looking for the government to be run well. We want to get to a point to where these candidates, how they govern, they are judged based on, did they get things done? How did they govern? Were they an effective leader. That's always a difficulty right now because we're not yet at that point, historically, culturally in the United States. That is unfortunate. On the other hand, let's go ahead and recognize that now, over 30 states have had female governors elected to the position.

N. Rodgers: It's becoming normalized. It's a good thing.

J. Aughenbaugh: Arizona has already had five. Which when I was doing my research for an interview that I did with a reporter, I was like, I did not know that Arizona's had five.

N. Rodgers: Has California had a female governor? I don't think they have.

J. Aughenbaugh: There's a good chance that they will in 2028. The leading candidate for the Democratic Party nomination is Porter, who is a Democratic female representative in the House.

N. Rodgers: Katie Porter.

J. Aughenbaugh: That is, if she can stop blowing up at reporters who ask her difficult questions.

N. Rodgers: Whole separate issue.

J. Aughenbaugh: That's a different podcast episode.

N. Rodgers: That's a different podcast episode. But what we do wish for is that I think I speak for Aughie. I know I speak for a lot of Virginians when I say, I want her to be successful. Not because I particularly care about Abigail Spanberger. I don't. I'm sure she's perfectly pleasant. I have no animosity towards her or towards Winsome Earle-Sears. I personally don't trust most politicians, so I probably don't trust them either. But I do hope that the Spanberger administration is successful because it will make the lives of Virginians better.

J. Aughenbaugh: I'm going to repeat what I said after the 2024 presidential election and the 2020 presidential election. What I said basically after every presidential election, since I've been an adult, I've been able to vote. I may or may not have liked the winner, but I want them to be successful.

N. Rodgers: The people of Virginia, I want her to be successful.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. As somebody lives in Virginia and works for the state government, I want it to be run well. Because if we're going to have government, I want it to run well.

N. Rodgers: If I have to be governed, I want it to be done by people who are making a good faith effort to do the right thing.

J. Aughenbaugh: Then that's doubly the case, Nia, for you and I, because we're state employees.

N. Rodgers: We actually do have a dog in this hunt.

J. Aughenbaugh: Because we've made a commitment. We are public servants. We want the government to be run well. Even if that means, you got to go ahead and tell us, as a state agency, your budget is going to have to get cut. How are you going to do it? What are the things?

N. Rodgers: Are we going to do this fairly? What's the long term recovery plan?

J. Aughenbaugh: But anyways, thank you, Nia.

N. Rodgers: Thank you, Aughie.