By Stephen J. Farnsworth, ADVANCE CONTRIBUTOR
As Virginia Republicans survey the wreckage of Tuesday’s election results, one key question remains: what is the party’s best path forward?
One possible response to the debacle involves nothing more than the passage of time. Perhaps the losses of two congressional seats and the blowout in the US Senate contest stem mainly from the unpopularity of President Trump and the costs of his policies. The president did offer an unusually clueless campaign narrative this fall: that the economic problems are not as serious as people think they are. That belittling of citizen financial pain, and Trump’s frequent desire to talk about his plans to rebuild part of the White House, to restore the Reflecting Pool, and to construct a proposed triumphal arch near Arlington Cemetery, were a sharp departure from Trump’s previously effective efforts to connect with voters and their fears.
Trump’s unpopularity and his unresponsiveness to public concerns certainly made a bad situation worse this year, and not just for Republicans in Virginia. The president was a millstone that sank Republicans all over the country. Some Red state candidates for governor and senator, including those in Texas, Kansas and Iowa, fell short this week.
If Trump is indeed the entirety of the party’s problems, Virginia Republicans may not need to change much beyond the calendar. A new president will take office in January 2029, and after that, the theory goes, the president’s impact on the Commonwealth’s politics will be a thing of the past.
But a longer-term view of the party’s electoral performance suggests the great risks of a wait-and-hope-for-the-best strategy. The pattern of election day losses is not limited to this fall. A year ago, Virginia Republicans suffered huge defeats. They lost the race for governor by a double-digit margin and endured a net loss of 13 seats in the House of Delegates, creating the largest Democratic majority in the lower chamber since the 1980s. Veteran Fredericksburg area Republican lawmakers, including Bobby Orrock and Paul Milde, were among those defeated by first-time Democratic candidates for delegate in 2025.
A survey of recent U.S. Senate contests is particularly bleak for the party. Virginia Republicans have lost every contest for the U.S. Senate since John Warner was re-elected to his final term in 2002. Warner, an ideological moderate, famously feuded with conservative Republicans year after year. But he was a consistent general election winner, serving five terms. Since then, a series of mostly conservative Republicans endorsed by party activists have failed where Warner repeatedly succeeded.
Perhaps Virginia Republicans need to offer more centrist statewide candidates in today’s increasingly blue Virginia. In fact, such a strategy has been shown to work. Five years ago, Virginia Republicans worried about selecting too extreme a nominee for governor. In response, they deliberately structured their nomination system to ensure that business executive Glenn Youngkin would stand for the party in the general election, rather than a pro-Trump conservative. He ran on a low-tax, moderate agenda and was elected, offering the possibility that he would govern in a way that resembled the moderate Larry Hogan, the Republican two-term governor of even more blue Maryland.
In the end, though, Youngkin governed in a far more conservative and combative direction than his campaign messaging would have suggested. These days, the former governor’s political prospects in Virginia and nationally seem less promising than they once did.
Republican conservatives did well in the 1990s, winning elections for governor in 1993 and 1997. But Virginia has changed a great deal since then. These days, the suburbs cast a much larger share of the statewide vote than they once did, and over time the suburbs have grown to contain far more Democrats than a few decades ago. Each election cycle, the Commonwealth’s population is more racially and ethnically diverse, with conservative white voters making up a steadily decreasing percentage of the statewide vote.
In response to these demographic and political patterns, maybe Virginia Republicans should be looking for and promoting their next John Warner, rather than handing statewide nominations to evangelical conservative warriors who can’t—and don’t—win statewide elections. That course may be easier for Republicans to follow, in fact, now that Trump’s influence is in decline following the party’s painful 2026 midterms.
***
Dr. Stephen Farnsworth is professor of political science emeritus at the University of Mary Washington and the author or coauthor of nine books and dozens of research articles on U.S. and Virginia politics. His website is stephenfarnsworth.net.
