Trump economy drives working class to Spanberger
A surge in working class voters propelled the Virginia Democrat to victory.
If Republicans weren’t worried before last night’s election, they had better be worried now. Massive Democratic victories in Virginia, New Jersey, New York and California were an unmistakeable rebuke against Donald Trump’s presidency so far. Socialists, of course, were understandably focused on the historic win of socialist mayoral candidate Zohrab Mamdani, who won a clear majority in New York City with well over a million votes.
But Virginia’s governor’s race was worth paying attention to as well. Democratic candidate Abigail Spanberger trounced Republican opponent Winsome Earle-Sears by fifteen points, a margin the state hasn’t seen in a governor’s race in more than fifteen years. But while Spanberger ran up her numbers among every income group, some helped a lot more than others.
Unfortunately no income data was available for the 2021 election, but Virginia’s 2017 gubernatorial election and the national 2024 presidential election numbers should give a sense of just how much the electorate has shifted. This year, the party’s biggest gains were with the poor and the middle class. The latter represented a dramatic six point swing from Kamala Harris’s performance in 2024, but Spanberger also ran up her numbers among voters making less than $30,000 a year.
These margins are absolute, however — that is, they take voter turnout into account. This is important when gauging performance, of course, but turnout dynamics can confound underlying trends about preference. Since it is harder for poor voters to get to the polls, for example, any shifts in their preference will likely be muted by their lower turnout. When we remove turnout from the equation, the trends in voter preference become a lot clearer.
The relatively low turnout among poor voters masked a gargantuan 32-point surge in support for Democrats between 2024 and 2025. Their support was so overwhelming that they gave Spanberger just as much support as middle class voters did — even though middle class turnout was more than three times higher. This is, by far, the most dramatic income-based trend in voter preference I have ever seen. Nothing else in the exit polls compares to it.
And I don’t think the explanation is particularly hard to figure out. If you are a poor American right now the two foremost political concerns on your mind are this weekend’s SNAP cuts and the Trump budget’s looming Medicaid cuts. And Spanberger voters were overwhelmingly concerned about the economy:
Spanberger won a whopping 75% of voters who said that their family’s financial situation was “falling behind”; 79% of voters who said that Virginia’s economy was not good or poor; and 82% of voters who said that federal cuts affected their finances a lot.
These are extraordinary numbers, but they should not invite complacency for Democrats. Trump has not merely presided over a faltering economy; between mass DOGE layoffs and his welfare austerity measures, Trump has seemingly gone well out of his way to hurt Virginians. In this political climate it is hard to imagine anyone with a (D) beside their name who wouldn’t have won the governor’s race; indeed, this is why I’ve argued that the Spanberger candidacy was such a wasted opportunity.
Nevertheless, there are at least two useful lessons to be learned from Virginia’s election. The first is that while some progressive causes remain extremely controversial, one can support them without endangering one’s campaign. A majority of Virginians said that trans rights have “gone too far”, for example, and only a quarter of them said that they have “not gone far enough”; but Spanberger captured a whopping 90% of voters who were satisifed with the status quo on trans rights and even peeled off 22% of those who thought they have gone too far.
Which brings us to the second lesson: when Democrats focus on economic issues affecting the working class, they win. The implications for turnout deserve particular attention since Republicans are increasingly building their electoral strategy over suppressing the Democratic vote. Poor voters turn out in lower numbers than anyone, but the economic stakes for them were so high that they simply flooded out that problem through the sheer proportion of their support. The effect is most comparable to how black voters in the past have made an outsized impact on elections not because they are a majority of the population but because they have leaned so heavily towards Democrats. Run on kitchen table issues like affordability and welfare and you’ll win such strong support from the working class that it will overwhelm whatever turnout obstacles or bigotries that the right has tried to mobilize against you.
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