The Republican candidate for governor of Virginia rolled out a detailed agenda for the state, the magnitude of which we may never have seen before.
The candidate’s website lists no fewer than 20 different issues, most of them a downloadable PDF that lay out specific actions to be taken or positions to be advocated. You can go online right now and read them all in an astonishing level of detail.
The shortest of these, on rising sea levels in Hampton Roads, runs seven pages. The plans for education, mental health/addiction and public safety run 15 pages apiece. Health care runs 18 pages. The candidate’s plan for transportation is the longest — 21 pages. There’s even a specific plan for economic growth in Southwest Virginia; it weighs in at 11 pages.
Granted, there’s a lot of fluff in these — pictures, lists of endorsements, other happy words — but even if you took those out, there’s still a lot of specificity in these plans about what the candidate would do if elected. For instance, the plan for Southwest Virginia spells out dollar figures for what the candidate thinks should be spent to boost enrollment growth at the University of Virginia’s College at Wise. The plan for the outdoor economy sets a goal for how many access points should be added to the state’s waterways. The transportation document outlines a 30-year plan for road improvements, including an interstate-quality road across Southside Virginia from the port to Interstate 81.
Taken together, these plans leave no doubt about what the Republican candidate would do if elected. Unfortunately, for those of you who agree with these positions, you’re too late. These were the plans of Ed Gillespie, the Republican candidate for governor in 2017. They still live on digitally out on the internet, even though Gillespie lost eight years ago this fall.
You could, of course, go online and read the platform of the current Republican candidate for governor, Winsome Earle-Sears. It won’t take you long. Earle-Sears doesn’t have an “issues” page on her website. If you click around enough, you will find an “on the issues” section as part of her biography. It consists of just nine paragraphs, few of which offer any details. On education, Earle-Sears says she supports school choice and “will prioritize parents’ rights and basic reading and math skills over ideological grandstanding,” but never says what that entails. In his education plan, Gillespie identified 38 specific initiatives he would support — from programs he would fund to how he would reorganize the state’s education bureaucracy. On other issues, Earle-Sears is simply silent. Her website says nothing about economic development or transportation, two issues that typically consume much of a governor’s time. Agriculture? Broadband? Energy? Environment? Health care? Higher education? Earle-Sears has nothing to say there on her website, either.
Gillespie may have gone to extra lengths to show he was ready to be governor because he had no experience in elected office, but his detailed plans were unusual only by degree. Once, it was customary for candidates for governor to release position papers — and then travel around the state to talk about them. This week would be “education week,” that week “transportation week,” and so forth. Earle-Sears has done none of that.
In the pantheon of Virginia political campaigns — many of which I’ve seen close-up over my career of four-plus decades — Earle-Sears is more than just an outlier. She’s just not on the chart. There is simply no comparison to her campaign in my memory. She rarely gives interviews, and most of those are with “safe” conservative news organizations. (She did give one interview with Cardinal, in August, but hasn’t been available since.) This is not a Republican thing, a party rejection of the “mainstream media;” this is very much an Earle-Sears thing. The party’s candidate for lieutenant governor, John Reid, brags on social media about how many interviews he does: “One of the things I’ve been doing in between personal public appearances is media interviews via zoom. I’m accepting every one of them I possibly can — so that the voters hear directly from me.” Republican Attorney General Jason Miyares is no stranger to talking to the news media. Earlier this year, he had an extended interview with Cardinal about cannabis policy.
Here we are in October, and Earle-Sears’ campaign has simply gone radio silent. Her campaign hasn’t responded to any of our messages since Sept. 9. If you ever read a news story that says “Earle-Sears did not respond,” that’s why. There is very little evidence that there is an Earle-Sears campaign — beyond whatever her campaign is posting on social media. In a column last week, I pointed out how she’s passed up meetings with key business groups, which are typically de rigueur for a gubernatorial candidate. In one case, her campaign said she was too busy to talk to the Virginia Trucking Association’s annual convention in Roanoke, even though she was in Roanoke the same day for a fundraiser — but no public appearances where she might earn some free time on the television news.
In the past few weeks, Earle-Sears’ campaign has promoted a bus tour of the state. Those have become popular, a modern-day nod to the whistlestop campaigns of yore, a way to demonstrate that the candidate is willing to go meet people, especially in smaller communities. Youngkin had a bus four years ago. After the Democratic primary filled out the rest of the party’s ticket in June, Abigail Spanberger had an eight-day bus tour. Earle-Sears has a bus, too — but she’s not on it. A bus tour without the candidate is an all-too-fitting metaphor for the Earle-Sears campaign.
More seriously, we simply have very little idea of what Earle-Sears would do if she wins. We know she supports the state’s so-called right-to-work law and has conservative views on social issues. Beyond that, she’s largely a mystery. For whatever reason, Earle-Sears has become a stealth candidate.
This seems a serious problem, particularly for the business community, which tends not to be particularly ideological but is intensely interested in the details of what an administration might do. Youngkin was fond of describing a campaign as an extended job interview; that fit his profile as a business executive. If that’s so, Earle-Sears is the job-seeker who skips the interview but sends in a video saying she still wants the job. There is precious little evidence that she’s prepared to be governor or given any thought to what she’d do if she were to win. I have found that candidates’ campaigns often foreshadow what kind of governor they will be. It’s impossible from Earle-Sears’ campaign to tell — unless this means as governor she will disappear from public view for extended periods of time, only to resurface on national cable network shows where she sometimes spars with the host.
If it weren’t for Earle-Sears’ bizarre behavior, we’d be focusing more on Spanberger’s frequent lack of specificity and reliance on platitudes. Spanberger, though, has honored the basic conventions of a political campaign. She’s done interviews, she’s released plans. They often have been vague — she’s no Ed Gillespie — but there is, at least, some hint of what her priorities are, while with Earle-Sears, there often is none. (I realize that what I see as “vague” many Democratic operatives might see as “disciplined” and “gaffe-free.”) If it weren’t for Earle-Sears’ disappearance from the campaign, we might be paying more attention to how Ghazala Hashmi, the Democratic candidate for lieutenant governor, has refused to debate — something else that used to be required. Earle-Sears is, at least, doing that; she and Spanberger are set to debate Thursday at Norfolk State University. Debates are a useful way to see the candidates side-by-side, but they typically aren’t a good way to explore policy: They’re often a better test of which candidate has done the better job rehearsing their prepared sound bites.
Not that long ago, candidates for governor would visit the editorial boards of the state’s major newspapers — and sometimes smaller ones — where they would be grilled at length on their plans. In that 2017 campaign, both Gillespie and Democrat Ralph Northam came to The Roanoke Times, where I worked at the time. Northam came alone, prepared to talk about his goals. Gillespie brought a policy aide — and a thick briefing book.
Eight years is not that long a time, but it’s been long enough to upend how candidates — at least this year’s candidates — run for governor. Newspapers, once powerful institutions in their communities, are but a shell of their former selves. At least six once-daily newspapers in Virginia are no longer dailies. Many no longer have local opinion pages. The result: Candidates no longer pay much attention to them. Instead, they prefer to communicate directly to voters through social media — a fine thing, except there are fewer opportunities for candidates to be questioned.
In an attempt to replicate the intense questioning that candidates once got from newspapers, we at Cardinal invited both candidates to meet with our staff virtually. Both said that wasn’t possible, but both said they’d accept questions in writing. In fact, that was the last communication we’ve heard from the Earle-Sears campaign beyond press releases. On Sept. 9, we were told, “please send over your questions.” So we did — to both campaigns.
We’ve heard nothing from the Earle-Sears campaign since, despite at least seven inquiries. The Spanberger campaign did reply to our questions, all 25 of them.
In tomorrow’s column, I’ll take a look at what she had to say.
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