Trump’s Cuts Are Hammering Virginia in an Election Year

Youngkin is loyal to Trump but not looking all that happy about it. Photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images

The Trump 2.0 enterprise is already conducting a really big gamble with its three-pronged smash-and-grab assault on the federal government via Elon Musk’s DOGE, Russell Vought’s OMB, and congressional Republican budget cuts. Everyone involved understands that the kind of Americans who decide elections tend to dislike big government and bureaucrats as an abstract matter but also like a lot of specific things Washington provides. Much of the game right now involves the size and speed of the inevitable backlash to what the new administration (and particularly Musk) is doing. And for Republican politicians expected to implement and lead cheers for this extravaganza in public-sector demolition, many anxious eyes will be on early electoral tests for the GOP, which now owns the very federal government it’s seeking to disable.

The bad news for Republicans is that one of the very first and most closely watched tests will be in Virginia (which, along with New Jersey, has one of the two off-year gubernatorial contests of 2025). Virginia has an unusually strong tendency to react negatively to the party controlling the White House (11 of the last 12 gubernatorial races in the state have been lost by the sitting president’s party). Worse yet, vote-heavy northern Virginia is a vast bedroom for the federal employees and contractors that Musk is decimating, cackling like a cartoon villain as he goes. It’s not surprising to see that Trump’s current popularity in the state is sinking. A new Roanoke College poll showed just 37 percent of Virginians approving the job Trump is doing and a record 59 percent disapproving. Republicans had thought Trump was doing relatively well in this state: He lost it by 5.7 percent in 2024 as opposed to a 10.1 percent loss in 2020. Indeed, the GOP was bullish about their prospects in Virginia generally with incumbent (and term-limited) Governor Glenn Youngkin remaining relatively popular and the race to succeed him between his lieutenant governor, Winsome Earle-Sears, and Democrat Abby Spanberger looking very close. But the Roanoke College poll showed Spanberger leading that race by double digits (39 percent to 24 percent).

Aside from the near certainty that federal budget cuts and personnel firings are going to be a problem for Republicans between now and the November general election, the Roanoke survey showed other elements of Trump’s agenda not looking great to these highly influential voters. Big majorities felt that wealthy people and corporations do not pay their fare share of federal taxes, which is relevant to Trump’s plans to cut taxes for both. And 76 percent of respondents said undocumented immigrants (of which there are likely many in Virginia) should be allowed to stay in the country “with conditions,” while only 26 percent flatly favored deporting them.

You’d think in these circumstances that the relative popular Youngkin could help Republicans distance themselves from Trump and avoid some of the likely backlash to his policies. But in today’s GOP, that’s just not in the cards, as the Bulwark reported:

[F]ear not, DOGE’d-off workers of the Commonwealth! Gov. Glenn Youngkin has a message for you: Your days of leeching off the public may have come to an end, but with a little elbow grease and pluck, you just might successfully transition to actual productive work in the private sector.

That was the gist of Youngkin’s strikingly tone-deaf press conference yesterday, focused on the cheerful theme VIRGINIA HAS JOBS. “Listen,” Youngkin said, “we have a federal government that is inefficient, and we have an administration that is taking on that challenge of rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse and driving efficiency in our federal government. It needed to happen …”

Online attempts yesterday to soothe Virginia’s laid-off federal workers weren’t going much better. Lieutenant Gov. Winsome Sears, who is running to replace the term-limited Youngkin, released a direct-to-camera video acknowledging “concern about the federal government workforce transition,” and sharing five links to “additional resources to assist.” All five links led to broken “404 Page Not Found” website errors.

Barring an extremely unlikely change of course by the federal administration across the Potomac River, Trump’s policies will continue to be a lodestone for his party in Virginia this year. And the Virginia gubernatorial race will likely remain a source of hope for Democrats looking for concrete signs that the 47th president’s November victory was after all a flash in the pan rather than the sort of remorseless trend MAGA activists seem to assume is in the works. Perhaps Glenn Youngkin’s craven surrender to the team harassing his constituents will earn him a nice ambassadorship somewhere.