On Thursday night, at a Arlington County School Board meeting in northern Virginia, the Republican candidate for governor, Winsome Earle-Sears finally felt like she had found her lane.
Near the stomping grounds that helped propel Virginia’s Gov. Glenn Youngkin to victory in 2021, the lieutenant governor got the kind of primetime reception that has thus far eluded her struggling campaign. “This is insane,” she said during a speech to the school board. “This is nonsense. Our children need to learn.” It was the exact sort of messaging that worked wonders for Youngkin and Earle-Sears in Loudon County four years ago. Then, Virginia parents expressed deep concerns after a male student was found guilty of assaulting two female students at two different schools, once in a classroom and once in a bathroom, during a six-month time span.
The incident became a national flashpoint for Republicans who promised to root out such incidents in the state’s school system. Amid a searing backdrop of anti-government resentment at the height of the Covid pandemic, Republicans were rewarded with a victory that seemed unimaginable in years prior. The Loudon County bathroom incident acted as a fulcrum to springboard Youngkin into the governor’s mansion. Against all odds, the Republicans stormed to victory as the Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe struggled to find his footing before making an ill-timed and ultimately fatal gaffe regarding the role of parents in Virginia’s educational system.
And so for Earle-Sears, a black immigrant and former Marine whose particular brand of social conservatism puts her among the staunchest of today’s evangelical wing of the GOP, the schools of northern Virginia represent an opportunity to speak to Virginia voters on her terms. Conservative voters who pulled the lever for Youngkin and Earle-Sears four years ago have expressed growing anger at the rebellious attitudes of the state’s northern school districts, whose officials have openly fought the Youngkin administration on Title IX.
But 2025 is not 2021. And though the threat of transgender bathrooms will always loom large for the socially conservative wing of the Virginia electorate, the greatest concern facing voters in the state is the cost of living. In the latest round of polling conducted by the Wilder School at Virginia Commonwealth University in August, 30 percent of Virginia voters say they are most concerned with the cost of living, which has only increased in the first eight months of the new Trump administration. Second on the list of concerns for Virginia voters is reproductive rights—a topic that is near and dear to the pro-life Earle-Sears, and one that she has mostly avoided on the campaign trail. Her support for a 15-week ban on abortion is wildly out of step with Virginia’s increasingly liberal and secular electorate.
“Let’s keep a good thing going,” reads the Earle-Sears campaign slogan on placards spotted around the state. But troubling for Earle-Sears and Republicans alike is polling that suggests Virginia voters are ready to turn the page on what has been seen by many commentators as a quietly successful four-year term for Youngkin and Earle-Sears. Which is precisely why Earle-Sears, who is trailing Democratic warhorse Abigail Spanberger by nearly double digits, went searching for a fight in northern Virginia on Thursday. As fate would have it, she got one.
“Hey Winsome, if trans can’t share your bathroom then blacks can’t share my water fountain,” read one of many signs held by hundreds of assembled protesters. But this sign was unlike the others and soon the internet was making hay. “Democrats are the real racists” became the rallying cry across social media (again) on Thursday night.
“I’m disgusted, but not surprised,” wrote Earle-Sears on Twitter. “There is no place for this disgusting hatred in our Commonwealth. Anyone who doesn’t condemn this sign is complicit in approving it.” But, though the message from Earle-Sears was strongly worded, the gubernatorial candidate failed to include an image of the offensive sign—leaving many users to question what she was even talking about. Nothing summarizes Earle-Sears’s failure to launch better than this episode. Earle-Sears, who had traveled north on Thursday looking for a moral panic, and found one, now didn’t know how to leverage it.
Boomer Republicans, who are always up for a fresh round of outrage politics, glommed onto the story and predicted this was the moment that would springboard Earle-Sears back into serious competition with the dominant Spanberger. The syndicated columnist Selena Zito said that the elderly white woman, who had clearly and unintentionally missed the mark with her stupid sign, had “just handed the Republicans lightning in a bottle.” After a good night’s rest, Zito was back at it again on Friday morning, suggesting that the older lady’s indifference to being informed that her sign had gone viral across the internet was a “troubling” sign for the ascendent Left.
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In reality, it was a story without legs that had already come and gone. At time of writing, heading into the weekend, it is unlikely to receive even passing coverage. In fact, besides her one statement sans picture, Signgate was already old news by Friday morning as the media turned its attention toward FBI agents who raided the home of the former National Security Advisor John Bolton. In the recent past, Signgate would’ve precipitated days if not weeks of outrage with Fox News leading the charge. But not this year—not in 2025.
The Fox News host Brian Kilmeade, who gave Earle-Sears a shot at spinning up his audience only hours after Signgate, spent most of Thursday evening’s interview discussing the issue of transgender bathrooms, a topic that is barely registering on polling concerns in the Commonwealth. Dressed in all white, Earle-Sears told Kilmeade that she will “fight for our kids” and blamed Spanberger for “enabling predators.” A loud thumping sound could be heard emanating from the background audio as Earle-Sears tried to hit her marks in front of a national audience. No greater example of Earle-Sears’s sputtering, out-of-tune campaign could be made if she had tried to sabotage her big shot at currying new favor among the Republican base in Virginia.
In less than three months, the true accounting of Earle-Sears’s misfiring campaign will come, and the Republican Party of Virginia will probably be forced to soul-search despite four years of consistent governance, during which time Youngkin received favorable ratings across a broad swath of the electorate. The Republicans will have to find new voices and a new message in a state that has ever-increasingly moved to the left on social and fiscal policies. Whether the Republicans can thread the needle among independents will be the true test of their political might in years to come. For now, though, it appears obvious that the days of moral panic have ceased and winning the votes of Virginians will require a trail yet to be cut by the GOP.
