Virginia voters elected Abigail Spanberger governor on Tuesday, according to The Associated Press, delivering a potent repudiation of President Trump after a campaign that was laser-focused on attacking his policies.
Ms. Spanberger, a moderate Democrat who served three terms in Congress, defeated Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, a socially conservative Republican who pledged her allegiance to Mr. Trump even though he did little to help her cash-starved campaign.
Ms. Spanberger’s victory was hardly a surprise. She raised nearly twice as much money as Ms. Earle-Sears did and held double-digit leads in public and private polling of the race in its final weeks. When she takes office in January, Ms. Spanberger, 46 and a former C.I.A. agent, will be the first woman to serve as governor of Virginia, following a streak of 74 men.
Ms. Spanberger made little mention of the historic nature of her campaign, instead seeking to harness anger over Mr. Trump’s cuts to the federal work force. Those cuts had a disproportionate effect on Virginia, which sits across the Potomac River from the nation’s capital.
She said she would be a governor who would “stand up for Virginia,” a catchall phrase to describe her intention to be a bulwark against the Trump administration.
“I will work tirelessly to stand up for Virginians in the face of the chaos we may have coming out of Washington,” she told a crowd last Thursday in Alexandria, Va.
Her victory caps a political rise that has happened entirely within the Trump era of American politics. First elected to Congress in the Democratic wave of 2018, she proved herself willing to buck her party, voting against Representative Nancy Pelosi in the 2019 contest for speaker of the House and, in 2021, when Virginia voters threw Democrats out of power in the state, castigating President Joseph R. Biden Jr. for being too progressive.
“Nobody elected him to be F.D.R.,” she said then.
That maverick image appears to be helping Ms. Spanberger now, as she outruns a Democratic Party whose image has suffered in recent years. Throughout the campaign, she ran well ahead of the Democratic candidates for lieutenant governor, whose campaign was lackluster, and attorney general, who by October was engulfed in scandals related to violent text messages and reckless driving.
From the moment she announced she was running in 2023, Ms. Spanberger oversaw a surgical campaign. She raised enough money to scare off any potential Democratic primary opponents and, after Mr. Trump won a second term last year, resisted the conventional wisdom that her party needed to develop a suite of new ideas to win elections.
Instead, Ms. Spanberger campaigned on the same issue that propelled her to victory during her first House race in 2018: opposition to Mr. Trump.
She offered few new ideas beyond tying Ms. Earle-Sears, 61, to unpopular moves from the Trump administration, like the firing of federal employees. Ms. Earle-Sears, who won a meager endorsement from Mr. Trump in the campaign’s final weeks, sought to align herself with the president to energize his supporters.
“Virginians, they see the impacts of what’s happening in Washington in real time and are looking for state leaders who are going to fill in those gaps and address that harm,” said Representative Jennifer McClellan, a Democrat whose district stretches from Richmond to the state’s border with North Carolina.
Ms. Spanberger will replace Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican financier who rode a wave of anger at Mr. Biden to a surprise victory in 2021. Virginia forbids its governors from seeking re-election in consecutive terms.
Mr. Youngkin helped clear the Republican field for Ms. Earle-Sears, but he did little to bolster her campaign. When she struggled to raise money, Mr. Youngkin donated to her just a fraction of what he spent in an ill-fated 2023 effort to win Republican majorities in the state’s General Assembly.
And while Mr. Youngkin spoke of the need to elect Ms. Earle-Sears, the top priority for him and his allies this fall was re-electing the state’s Republican attorney general, Jason Miyares.
Reid J. Epstein is a Times reporter covering campaigns and elections from Washington.
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