Virginia Republican strategist Brian Kirwin said Earle-Sears faced “the wind in her face the entire time,” noting that off-year elections typically punish the party in the White House. But he said her problems went far beyond the political environment. “Her campaign was pretty haphazard,” he said. “She ran a social-issues campaign on transgenders and bathrooms when everybody in the world is screaming [about the] economy.”

As of October 23, Spanberger had raised $65.6 million to Earle-Sears’s $35.5 million, according to the nonpartisan Virginia Public Access Project. That gap shaped everything while Spanberger flooded the airwaves with ads on affordability and later tied Republicans to the October government shutdown. Earle-Sears stayed focused on cultural fights, spending more than $2 million in September alone on commercials about transgender athletes and school bathrooms, more than on any other topic.

The shutdown, which began just two weeks before Election Day, shuttered parts of the federal government and left tens of thousands of Virginians temporarily out of work or without pay. It became a rallying cry for Democrats, especially in Northern Virginia, where Spanberger blamed Republican dysfunction in Washington, D.C., for the disruption. 

Republican operatives say it was nearly impossible for Earle-Sears to blunt the impact. One strategist described it as “a perfect storm that juiced Democratic enthusiasm in exactly the parts of the state she needed to win.”

Rather than closing the race with a forward-looking pitch to voters, Earle-Sears poured millions into ads defending herself.  One of her final statewide spots, a six-figure buy, tried to reframe a viral moment when she told hecklers, “I’m speaking now.” Spanberger’s campaign had looped the clip in a string of attack ads painting her as combative and unprepared. Earle-Sears’s response, opening with, “They pick your worst day,” sought to cast the moment as proof of her grit as a Marine, but it only reinforced the image of a candidate more focused on explaining herself than persuading voters.

Kirwin said Earle-Sears’s message never adjusted. “You can be a victim of your own polling,” he said. “You come off as tone-deaf when people are worried about paying their mortgage or being able to afford rent.”

A campaign in disarray

Behind the scenes, Earle-Sears’s campaign never gained traction. Even before the general election began, her candidacy showed signs of strain. In the spring, she narrowly avoided a primary challenge from former state Sen. Amanda Chase, a staunch Trump ally whose fiery brand of politics threatened to pull the race further right. Party officials ultimately ruled that Chase failed to submit enough valid signatures to make the ballot, sparing Earle-Sears a costly fight, but exposing early fractures among Virginia Republicans. 

By April, those divisions had deepened. Earle-Sears and her running mate, lieutenant governor hopeful John Reid, stopped speaking for weeks after Gov. Glenn Youngkin privately urged Reid, a Richmond radio host and the state’s first openly gay statewide nominee, to suspend his campaign. The request came after allegations surfaced that Reid had reposted nude photos of men years earlier on a Tumblr account linked to his social media. The episode left the Republican ticket splintered for much of the spring, with candidates campaigning separately at a time when they needed to project unity.

The sense of dysfunction soon spilled into public view. In one embarrassing episode, the campaign’s website featured watermarked stock photos on its issues page, prompting veteran GOP strategist Chris LaCivita, a senior adviser to Trump’s 2024 campaign, to deride Earle-Sears’s team as “amateurs.” The blunder deepened doubts about whether Earle-Sears had assembled a team capable of running a modern statewide campaign.

Under mounting pressure from donors, Earle-Sears replaced her campaign manager, a pastor with no prior political experience, in an attempted reset. It didn’t take. The shake-up did little to steady the campaign, as public events were limited, and advisers struggled to sharpen the message, with polls showing her trailing.

“She could never stay on message, could never drive a message, didn’t grind it the way that you just have to in a place as difficult to win as Virginia,” said a Republican strategist based in Virginia.

Earle-Sears’s aversion to fundraising added to the frustration. Several Republicans familiar with the operation said she often went days without making donor calls or holding events, instead taking “personal admin days.” By late summer, conservative radio host John Fredericks publicly urged Youngkin to “take control” of her campaign, calling its lack of visible activity “embarrassing.”

National GOP strategist Brian Seitchik was even blunter: “She was a miserable candidate. Ran a miserable campaign, and her loss was a foregone conclusion. She had no ability to connect with voters, no ability to raise the resources necessary, and was unable to win the confidence of Virginia independents.”

The Washington Examiner reached out to Sears’s campaign for this story.

The campaign’s press operation was highly unorganized and largely unresponsive until the final stretch. Earle-Sears appeared on Fox News several times but granted few interviews elsewhere. Several Virginia outlets reported that their requests had been denied or ignored, including VPM News, which said it had reached out multiple times over two months to schedule an interview for its statewide candidate series, with no success.

Business groups had similar experiences. Cardinal News reported that Virginia FREE, a pro-business organization that meets with major candidates each cycle, tried for three months to secure a meeting with Earle-Sears while her Democratic opponent had already met with them. The pattern left reporters and business leaders uncertain about her positions on key issues as the race entered its final months.

Trump keeps his distance 

The Earle-Sears campaign’s struggles were compounded by the silence from the top of her party.

Trump’s distance from Virginia politics is nothing new. In 2021, he endorsed Glenn Youngkin’s campaign for governor. Still, he stayed off the trail as Youngkin kept him at arm’s length, avoiding joint appearances and downplaying the MAGA agenda to win over suburban voters. The dynamic, though, was far different today. Back then, Trump was an unpopular former president. Now he’s back in the White House.

Throughout this year’s race, Trump kept Earle-Sears at a distance. He phoned into two brief get-out-the-vote calls for Virginia Republicans ahead of the election, urging voters to “vote Republican up and down the line” but never mentioning Earle-Sears by name. The gesture stood in sharp contrast to former President Barack Obama, who spent the weekend campaigning in person for Spanberger.

The omission appeared deliberate. Trump declined to issue a formal endorsement, referring to Earle-Sears only as “the Republican candidate” and saying he “hadn’t been too involved in Virginia.” His list of social-media endorsements in the campaign’s final days included dozens of other GOP hopefuls, but not her.

The distance reflected both political pragmatism and personal history. Earle-Sears drew Trump’s ire in 2022 after suggesting he had become “a liability” to the party following midterm losses. Trump shot back, labeling her “a phony.” The two have maintained a polite but distant relationship ever since.

Strategists say that dynamic left Earle-Sears stranded, too cautious to embrace Trump but unable to energize his base without him. “You need great candidates, real money, flawless execution,  and this was none of those,” said a Republican strategist based in Virginia.

A message that missed the moment

In the end, Earle-Sears’s biggest problem wasn’t money or organization; it was the message.

She built her candidacy around cultural flashpoints, devoting more time to transgender issues than to the economy, even as polls showed inflation and the cost of living were voters’ top concerns. A September survey of likely Virginia voters by Christopher Newport University found that affordability was the dominant issue across the electorate, followed by threats to democracy. Democrats overwhelmingly named threats to democracy as their biggest concern, while Republicans were divided among economic pressures, immigration, and crime.

“Spanberger ran a pretty textbook good campaign,” said David Richards, a political science professor at the University of Lynchburg. “She didn’t make any major mistakes, didn’t leave a door open for Earle-Sears to get in very easily.”

“At the end of the day, people were worried about the economy,” Richards added. “It was going to be very difficult for Earle-Sears to really run on that when her party is supposedly in charge of everything.”

When Democrats called a surprise redistricting session in early October, forcing her back to Richmond just as early voting ramped up, Earle-Sears barely mentioned it on the trail, beyond holding a press conference a week before the election. 

While other Republicans running blasted the move as “election interference,” she glossed over it for days before adopting the same language, a sign, strategists said, of her difficulty adapting to fast-moving events.

The same problem surfaced with the controversy surrounding Democratic attorney general nominee Jay Jones, whose leaked text messages appeared to reference violence toward Republican House Speaker Todd Gilbert. The story dominated headlines for a week, and Republicans across the state seized on it. But rather than folding the episode into a broader argument about Democratic governance or accountability, Earle-Sears and the entire Republican ticket made it their singular focus, hammering it long after voters had moved on.

“It was appropriate to call attention to something that outrageous,” said a Virginia Republican strategist. “But it shouldn’t have been the centerpiece of the message. You can use it to motivate turnout, not as your entire argument for why people should vote for you.”

Earle-Sears’s stump speech evolved little over the course of the race, though she frequently returned to familiar themes and routines. At many campaign stops, she performed a recurring bit in which she mimed speaking directly to Spanberger, responding to the Democrat’s reaction to the Jay Jones controversy. She would raise her voice and imitate her opponent’s tone, “Abigail, all she said was unhappy, she was disgusted. Oh, so it’s all about you, Abigail,” drawing laughter from loyal supporters. The act became a regular feature of her rallies in the campaign’s final weeks.

To many strategists, that moment summed up the problem. “It’s not that voters disagreed with her,” said a separate GOP operative in Virginia. “It’s that she wasn’t talking about what they cared about. When people are worried about paying their bills, they don’t want a lecture on bathrooms or a comedy bit onstage.”

The fallout extended beyond her own race. “This could have been a closer contest,” the operative added. “But the margin that she lost by isn’t just the wave; a good chunk of that percentage is her campaign messaging and her actual campaign organization. That margin brought other Republicans down with her.”

Where Republicans go from here

For Virginia Republicans, the scope of Earle-Sears’s defeat was devastating. Her fifteen-point loss to Spanberger didn’t just end a campaign; it wiped out the gains the party made under Glenn Youngkin and left Republicans without a single statewide officeholder for the first time in nearly a decade. 

“It’s a low point right now for sure,” said Zack Roday, a Republican strategist based in Virginia. “We were at rock bottom in 2017 and 2019, then Youngkin came along and the pendulum swung back. It can happen again, but only with great candidates, real money, and flawless campaigns.”

DEMOCRATS WIDEN MAJORITY IN VIRGINIA STATE HOUSE TO MAINTAIN LEGISLATIVE CONTROL

Roday said the party’s challenge now is rebuilding credibility in a state that has steadily trended blue. “There absolutely could be a snapback election,” he said. “But you need to run really good campaigns with really good candidates that are really well funded. There aren’t a lot of Glenn Youngkins out there.”

The bus fire that came days before the election captured the state of her campaign, overheated, off-course, and unable to recover. For Virginia Republicans, the blaze may be out, but the scorch marks remain.