Republican Ticket in Virginia Seeks Unity Going Into Campaign Season

Virginians don’t elect their statewide executive officers as a party “ticket” like the U.S. president and vice president do, so, the races can be “every candidate for him/herself.” Sometimes, the candidates exemplify that and run on their own rather than as a team. And oftentimes, that can be to their collective detriment.

One example of voters “splitting the ticket” was in 2005, when Democrat Tim Kaine was elected governor with Republicans Bill Bolling and Bob McDonnell elected as lieutenant governor and attorney general, respectively.

Granted, a divided executive branch has not occurred since, but that has mostly been due to the example set in 2009 by McDonnell’s gubernatorial campaign, Bolling’s reelection team, and then-State Sen. Ken Cuccinelli’s bid for attorney general (led by an up-and-comer named Chris LaCivita). The three candidates coordinated in such a thorough fashion that they were able to hold rallies in each area of the commonwealth every week for the whole summer and early fall.

In 2021, Gov. Glenn Youngkin, Lt. Gov. Winsome Sears, and Attorney General Jason Miyares used the same strategy in their stunning upset of Terry McAuliffe, Hala Ayala, and Mark Herring (who was a two-time incumbent attorney general).

So, in 2025, the Republicans in the Old Dominion had become nervous as their three statewide candidates hardly even acknowledged each other in the wake of former Gov. George Allen aide and talk radio host John Reid taking the nomination for lieutenant governor and allegations of salacious social media posts attributed to him began to circulate.

Then news leaked this past weekend of “the phone call.” The three candidates spoke, I’m told, at length, and plans began to form for joint campaign events beginning on July 1 in Vienna, Virginia, with Youngkin as the special guest.

Reid told The Daily Signal, “I’m delighted to stand with my ticketmates. I’ve been saying it for weeks. We need reasonable and responsible Republican leadership to continue. I’m committed to that and I’m going to work hard to help us all win in November.”

Miyares told the Virginia Mercury news site, “We have unity, we’ve talked this weekend, I look forward to campaigning with both Winsome and John this summer and this fall.”

The challenge for the Republicans is great as more quarterly fundraising numbers show Democrat Abigail Spanberger’s gubernatorial campaign collected $6.5 million over the last two months after raising $6.7 million between January and March, according to the nonpartisan Virginia Public Access Project. Overall, Spanberger has raised $22.8 million and still has $14.3 million unspent.

On the other side, the Sears campaign collected $3.5 million in April and June while spending $4.6 million. Sears has collected nearly $9.2 million since launching her campaign last September with a little under $3 million in the bank now, according to Virginia Public Access Project data.

It’s been said often, and again here, that money doesn’t equal victory. For example, in 2021, McAuliffe spent $72.1 million to Youngkin’s $69.3 million in the governor’s race and still lost. In 2005, Republican Jerry Kilgore spent $33 million to the aforementioned Kaine’s $27 million and lost.

One may also note that both Spanberger and Sears are closer to the 2005 money totals than the eye-popping 2021 totals, but the summer is just heating up and the usual onslaught of national media attention still has not materialized. That’s mostly due to the breakneck pace of the news that keeps coming from the Trump administration and the media attention focused there.

That plays into the Sears/Reid/Miyares ticket because the “tradition” in Virginia is that the party that didn’t win the White House the year before pushes “all the chips in” (including lots of out-of-state money) on a statewide victory in Virginia, and President Donald Trump has not seem inclined to let them do that yet. Maybe now that there is unity in the Republican ticket, could a Trump rally be far behind? Stay tuned.

For now, the GOP seems to have embraced what that great political consultant Ben Franklin once said, “We must all hang together, or most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”

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