The Center for Politics at the University of Virginia has published a report looking at where the only two gubernatorial races in the nation stand as May dawns and the summer campaign season is on the horizon. The report comes to a surprising determination, given recent history.
Virginia and New Jersey hold their state elections the year after the U.S. presidency is contested, and with only two big races in the entire nation at that time and both seen as barometers for public opinion on how the president is doing, media attention is often substantial.
In many cases, these “off-year” elections have seen the party that lost the presidency put extra effort into “sending a message” to the public at large that the presidential victory is not some mandate for his party’s agenda over theirs and to their voter base that the party has not been dispatched into irrelevance.
For example, in 2021, the year after Joe Biden became president, not only did Republican Glenn Youngkin win the governor’s mansion in Virginia, the GOP was within three points of upsetting incumbent Gov. Phil Murphy in New Jersey, a decidedly blue state.
The first “Sabato’s Crystal Ball” report of the 2025 campaign season has been issued, and it shows that both states, which were carried by Kamala Harris by 6 points in 2024, are “leaning Democrat.”
Six points is certainly outside of the margin of error but not by enough to classify either state as “likely Democrat” yet. (The Crystal Ball is named after the Center for Politics’ founder, University of Virginia Professor Larry Sabato, in honor of his record of success in predicting elections, aside from the 2016 and 2024 presidential races)
The center’s J. Miles Coleman wrote in his analysis: “In the smattering of elections held so far in 2025, Democrats have generally been performing similarly to how they performed in 2017, which augured well for them in the following year’s midterm. New Jersey and Virginia represent Democrats’ next big tests: They really should win both races.”
The report points out that New Jersey is still in the midst of a multicandidate primary for the Democratic Party’s gubernatorial nomination and that the center’s prediction is that U.S. Rep. Mikie Sherrill will win and face former state Rep. Jack Ciattarelli, the likely GOP nominee.
In Virginia, with both gubernatorial positions wrapped up by former Rep. Abigail Spanberger for the Democrats and current Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears as the GOP standard-bearer, the center reports that the campaigns are already in “general election mode” and, therefore, the commonwealth has a “firmer” lean to Democrat than the Garden State.
The web publication Political Pulse has aggregated all Virginia polling through April 30 and reports that Spanberger has 42% to Sears’ 37% average. That leaves 21% undecided before Virginia’s early voting begins Sept. 19.
The wild card in these contests is the pace at which the president has been governing—with so much going on in Washington, that has not allowed for the traditional glut of national political news reporters to devote a lot of airtime or column space to these races. That is a factor that may weigh heavily in Virginia.
Additionally, with the most recent real estate report showing that residential vacancies in heavily Democrat-populated Northern Virginia are up 26%, that could make the gap between Spanberger and Sears easier to close with the vast “red” counties in the rest of the state that have lower populations.
While the recent controversies involving the down-ticket race for Virginia’s lieutenant governor have brought a little more raw attention to the Virginia races, especially to the Republicans, the GOP candidates for governor, lieutenant governor, and attorney general will need a coming together as a ticket and a show of unity to get the kind of turnout they will need to win in November.
Though Donald Trump lost Virginia in 2024, 2 million Virginians voted for him. By comparison, 1.66 million voted for Youngkin when he won the governor’s race in 2021. The Republican ticket will need almost all of those Trump voters to do what so many do not do: Come out and vote in the off-year elections come November.
