Washington Post: Virginia’s Republican Candidates for Governor Are “Fully Embracing President Donald Trump.”

Latest News Mar 17, 2025

A new Washington Post report is detailing how Virginia’s GOP primary for governor has already become a race to the far-right, as all of the GOP candidates “are elbowing one another to strike the most pro-Trump pose” and “can’t afford to alienate the MAGA base of the party” – even as Donald Trump and Elon Musk continue to wreak havoc on Virginia’s jobs and economy.

After running as the only GOP candidate for months, Sears earned herself two right-wing challengers in former delegate Dave LaRock who is “promising to take a buzz saw to Virginia’s government a la Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service” and former state senator Amanda Chase who is running as the self-anointed “‘Trump in heels.’”

But Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears (R) has at least two challengers from the right for the GOP gubernatorial nomination, and all of them are elbowing one another to strike the most pro-Trump pose.
Meanwhile, former GOP delegate Dave LaRock (Loudoun) is running against her for the nomination by promising to take a buzz saw to Virginia’s government a la Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service, and former GOP state senator Amanda Chase (Chesterfield) is mounting a challenge as the self-anointed “Trump in heels.”
“Logically, it makes little sense,” said Mark Rozell, dean of the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. “This is their own constituents and people are mad, and trying to find some middle path just isn’t working. … Following Trump is clearly not the path to success in Virginia.”
This year, Democrats have repeatedly highlighted the potential danger Trump’s policies hold for the Virginia economy…
Yet some Virginia Republicans are clearly on edge about the cuts.
Rep. Jen Kiggans (R-Virginia), who represents a military-heavy swing district anchored in Virginia Beach, wrote to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on March 3 to “express concern” over plans to reduce the Defense Department’s civilian workforce by 5 to 8 percent — reductions, she wrote, that would have a “significant impact … on both national security and the veterans who reside in my district.”
More than 320,000 Virginia residents, or 10 percent of the state’s overall workforce, are full-time civil service employees according to statistics from the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments.
Bill Bolling, a Republican and former Virginia lieutenant governor, has been supportive of Trump in some areas but expressed concern about his tariff policies on Facebook on March 4.
“At a time when inflation remains our major domestic economic challenge, tariffs will only drive up prices for American consumers and make inflation worse,” he wrote. “President Trump was elected in large part to get our economy growing again. This will not help.”
Earle-Sears supported Trump in 2016 and traveled the country to promote his reelection in 2020, but in 2022 she said he had become a liability for the party after candidates he endorsed in congressional midterms underperformed.
She got on board with Trump’s 2024 campaign after he survived an assassination attempt.
But with the Republican gubernatorial candidates headed toward a June primary, they can’t afford to alienate the MAGA base of the party — those who are most likely both to vote and to turn against a candidate not sufficiently Trump-y.