Winsome Earle-Sears, the Republican Lt. Governor of Virginia who is running the commonwealth’s top job, is in trouble. Religious-right leaders hope that their voter turnout machine can turn the tide. Outgoing Gov. Glenn Younkin told attendees at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s recent activist conference that the Virginia governor’s race is the most important election in the country this year, and he urged them to help put Earle-Sears into office.
Signs of trouble for Earle-Sears’ campaign abound. With the election just three months away, recent polls show her trailing her Democratic opponent, former Rep. Abigail Spanberger, by double digits. Spanberger has outraised Earle-Sears by millions of dollars. Earle-Sears recently replaced her campaign manager, who political activists said was not up to the job. Earle-Sears has not yet been endorsed by Trump—possibly because she had urged him to “step off the stage” in 2022—though she says she voted for him three times and met with him recently, presumably to seek his endorsement.
Earle-Sears, an alumna of the business school at Pat Robertson’s Regent University, is aligned with Christian nationalists and their regressive social agenda. She is opposed to legal access to abortion, which she has called genocide and vowed to stop. An opponent of LGBTQ equality, she declared that she was “morally opposed” to a legislation that forbids public officials from denying marriage licenses to couples based on sex, gender, or race.
On the campaign trail and in a fundraising email she compared diversity, equity, and inclusion programs to slavery. The email declared “DEI is a cancer” and claimed that “Democrats think minorities can’t succeed without DEI.” She has also downplayed the impact of DOGE cuts on federal workers in Virginia and refused to answer CNN’s Manu Raju when he repeatedly asked if she supported Trump’s purge of the federal workforce. She also declined to tell him whether she would act as governor to further restrict access to abortion.
Republicans in the state are hoping for a repeat of Youngkin’s come-from-behind victory in 2021, when he ran as an affable suburban dad while aggressively courting the support of anti-equality and anti-abortion groups, who mobilized to put him in office.
Both Youngkin and Earle-Sears spoke at this year’s Road to Majority conference, an annual activist gathering sponsored by Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition. At the conference held in late June, Reed bragged about the Coalition’s big-data empowered voter ID and turnout operations, which he claimed played a major role in moving swing states into Trump’s column. Reed pledged to put that strategy to work in this year’s statewide elections in Virginia and in next year’s midterms.
The Faith and Freedom Coalition has been investing millions in voter turnout operations over multiple election cycles. Reed described a refinement of its turnout strategy, which was essentially not to expend resources on highly engaged religious-right voters who are already likely to vote. Instead, he said, the groups’ thousands of volunteer door-knockers focused on conservative Christians who shared the movement’s worldview but hadn’t bothered to vote in the past couple of elections. During the early voting period, volunteers appeared repeatedly at the doors of those who hadn’t yet voted.
According to Reed, this hectoring strategy was effective at turning out thousands of conservatives who would otherwise have been unlikely to vote. He said the group had identified about 1.85 million “Bible-believing born-again Christians” on the voter file in Georgia, and that about 56 percent of them voted early in 2024, including 150,000 who hadn’t voted in either 2016 or 2020.
“Without this effort—and hear me—Kamala Harris would be sitting down at the resolute desk and not Donald Trump,” Reed declared.
Reed wasn’t the only one crediting Faith & Freedom’s operations for Republican victories. Congressional Republicans and high-ranking members of the Trump administration did the same. “God used you,” Speaker Mike Johnson said at the Friday night gala, saying Republicans would not have held the house without them. Johnson said that with their help, Republicans will defy historical trends and expand their House majority in next year’s midterm elections.
At Road to Majority, Youngkin said he told Trump the day after the assassination attempt last year that God had made it clear he wanted Trump to be president again. He described current politics not as a struggle between right and left but light and darkness, right and wrong. It is right, he said, to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, and right to collaborate with ICE.
Treating politics as spiritual warfare was a theme of Road to Majority, one that both Youngkin and Earle-Sears deployed.
Warning that “the enemy is relentless,” Youngkin warned the religious-right activists that if they let up for a moment they will “invite darkness back.”
In her remarks, Earle-Sears cited a hymn and scripture, adding, “Faith is not a feeling. Faith is obedience to his word,” she said, before launching into an attack on her opponent and on unions, renewable energy, transgender people, and immigrants who are “criminally illegally here.”
She ended by seeming to compare herself to the biblical figure of Daniel, adding, “We are going to make the darkness tremble!”
