Winsome Earle-Sears, the Republican lieutenant governor, is no longer not only the presumptive Republican nominee for governor in the 2025 cycle, but her campaign, once a sure-thing, is in stunning free-fall.
First it was a challenge from former state delegate and college dropout Dave LaRock. Then it was self-styled “Trump in heels” Amanda Chase, who is teasing an endorsement from Donald Trump, which of course would tip the scales in her favor, were it to come.
“I know that he is watching this race. I have received a phone call from the White House, and I know that he’s watching this race,” Chase, a former state senator, said in an interview with Virginia Scope.
You almost feel bad for LaRock here, if that’s the case, and Trump ends up endorsing Chase, after LaRock did the heavy lifting, being the first to challenge the Republican establishment, which had coalesced behind Earle-Sears early in the 2025 cycle.
Both LaRock and Chase were on the premises for the Jan. 6 insurrection, and both did their best to both diminish the criminality of the MAGA mob and praise the bravery of the patriots who tried to overthrow the government that day.
You’d think it would serve the interests of the MAGA side in the 2025 nomination cycle for one of the two to drop out of the race, at the risk of splitting the MAGA vote and giving Earle-Sears, a reformed Never Trumper, a fighting chance.
For now, the two seem to be in a ceasefire vis-à-vis the other, their armaments aimed squarely at Earle-Sears
“She’s been in office for three years, she has a bully pulpit of the lieutenant governor’s office, and I haven’t seen any action from her on these really critical issues,” LaRock said in an interview with former Trump Virginia campaign chair John Fredericks, taking direct aim at Earle-Sears, who was elected lieutenant governor in the 2021 cycle.
It’s hard for a lieutenant governor in Virginia to build a record. The job is officially part-time, with very little in terms of delineated duties, other than banging the gavel for the State Senate when the General Assembly is in session, and when you serve under a governor of the same party, as is the case for Earle-Sears, you’re largely reduced to running for the top job on the record of the person at the top of the food chain.
The record to that end is mixed at best. Glenn Youngkin, who led the Republican statewide sweep in 2021, wasn’t able to lead the party to victory in the 2023 General Assembly midterms, amid criticism that he was more focused on pulling together a run for the 2024 presidential nomination that never actually materialized.
The early polling in the 2025 race has had Earle-Sears trailing the presumptive Democratic Party nominee, former congresswoman Abigail Spanberger, by double-digits, which is what provided the opening for the intraparty challenges from LaRock and now Chase.
“In order to win in November, we need a unifier. We need somebody that brings together the Republican base around a problem-solving approach to governance,” LaRock said in his interview with Fredericks.
Chase, teasing a Trump endorsement, is trying to seize the mantle of “unifier.”
“I feel very positive that by my being in this race that there could be a, um, an endorsement in this race,” she said in the Virginia Scope interview. “President Trump has said in a video that he was going to be with me in my next campaign. So, I would love to have his endorsement.”
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Chris Graham
