'Hard to overstate' how badly Trump hurt Republicans in Virginia: political strategist

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Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin at the 2024 Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on July 15, 2024 (Maxim Elramsisy/Shutterstock.com)

Political strategist Max Burns says President Donald Trump would have had to work hard to do Democrats any more favors in the upcoming gubernatorial race in Virginia.

“Trump’s government shutdown led to widespread fury among Virginia’s more than 320,000 struggling federal workers,” argued Burns at MSNBC. “Now, [Republican candidate Winsome] Earle-Sears is performing the worst of all GOP statewide candidates and trailing [Democratic candidate Abigail] Spanberger by roughly seven percentage points. Ouch.”

Tuesday’s election is a referendum on Trump’s shutdown and his disdain for the federal workers “who make up the backbone of the Commonwealth’s economy,” said Burns, adding that Virginia’s Trump-enabling Republican leaders “have earned the drubbing” voters are likely about to give them.

“It’s hard to overstate how badly Gov. Glenn Youngkin and other state Republican leaders misjudged the public response to Trump’s war on federal workers,” said Burns. “Back in March, Youngkin seemingly forgot that his state led the nation in total federal workers when he cheered on Trump’s mass firings of government employees. Of course, that was before Trump’s firings sent Virginia’s unemployment rate climbing for seven months in a row, to 3.6% in September. That’s the highest since August 2021, when the Covid-19 pandemic was still upending the job market.”

Trump’s layoffs hit particularly hard in Washington, D.C.-adjacent Fairfax County, where unemployment spiked 28 percent over 2024. Burns said nearby Alexandria saw the number of jobless residents rise 35 percent in the wake of mass federal firings under Trump and DOGE. And the ongoing shutdown has “only made matters worse,” said Burns, now that paychecks have stopped for some federal workers.

Earle-Sears played her part when she downplayed the tragedy of Trump’s mass firings in leaked audio earlier this year.

“How many here have ever lost a job?” Earle-Sears told a private gathering. “Oh, you mean it’s not unusual? It happens to everybody all the time? Okay. The media is making it out to be this huge, huge thing. And I don’t understand why.”

But Burns said people voting in this election appear to think their jobs are indeed a “huge thing,” and Spanberger deftly played that up in her campaign message, arguing that “Not only do Republicans not care about what’s happening to you, they don’t even understand it.”

If elected, Spanberger may prove the key to enshrining abortion rights and marriage equality in Virginia’s constitution and restoring the right to vote to former felons who have paid their debt to society — all of which Earle-Sears opposes.

This, said Burns, is a big step down from Republicans’ hopes that Trump’s strong 2024 performance would “bode well for Earle-Sears’ chances of becoming the first woman to hold the state’s governorship.”

“Virginians have spent years watching Youngkin and his ramshackle Republican Party conspicuously fail to lead,” said Burns. “Worse still, Youngkin seems to delight in defending [Trump’s] sweeping job losses.”

Read the MSNBC report at this link.

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