Jim Antle, the magazine executive editor, brings to life the pages of the Washington Examiner magazine in the show Inside Scoop. Each episode features exclusive insight from the article authors and expert analysis.
Antle gives his analysis of the Virginia gubernatorial race. The off-year election is often a litmus test for how each party will fare in the midterm elections.
Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears (R-VA), who is vying to succeed Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R-VA), is trailing behind her Democratic opponent, former Rep. Abigail Spanberger. However, when Earle-Sears sat down with Washington Examiner’s Mabinty Quarshie, the only polls the Republican candidate focused on were her approval ratings.
“The polls are telling us, and the people are telling us, that they want what we’re doing to continue,” Earle-Sears said. “And this is where I believe my opponent, Abigail Spanberger, is going to get tripped up, because the people like what we’ve done.”
Spanberger, for her part, is focusing her campaign heavily on the DOGE cuts to the federal workforce, a crucial voting bloc in northern Virginia.
“Voters across Virginia know the choice is a clear one,” Spanberger said in an interview with CBS. “Between a governor who will stand up for Virginians and Virginia’s economy, particularly under these unprecedented attacks on the federal workforce, the economy, and the impacts of the firings that ripple across communities across our commonwealth.”
Four years ago, Youngkin beat Terry McAuliffe, a former governor who had difficulty distancing himself from the national Democratic brand. This time around, Spanberger is trying to separate herself from former President Joe Biden and the recent Democratic Party failures by campaigning as a centrist. But not everyone agrees that her record is moderate.
“Everything that Abigail Spanberger does to claim she’s a moderate, she’s lying,” Carrie Sheffield, a senior policy analyst at Independent Women’s Voice, exclusively told the Washington Examiner. “She overall has an extremist voting record. When you look at her time in Congress, she had only a 5% voting record, according to Heritage Action.”
Sheffield is also the Virginia chapter president of IWV and is spearheading the Sunlight Campaign, an ad campaign against Spanberger in the state.
“She voted against the Laken Riley Act — Abigail Spanberger does not support public safety,” Sheffield said. “When you’re talking about economics, she did all of the bills that Joe Biden wanted that increased inflation and were so painful for families in Virginia and all over the country. You had record inflation under Joe Biden. Hadn’t been seen in a generation. And Abigail Spanberger was all for that.”
Next on the show, Antle discussed Washington Examiner columnist David Harsanyi’s cover article on how anti-ICE rioters don’t speak for Hispanic Americans.
Harsanyi argues that polling and empirical evidence show legal Hispanic Americans are becoming more conservative, not less, and are distinct from anti-ICE protesters who align with trendy progressive movements.
“This has been how the leftists cobbled together their coalition for a long time,” Harsanyi said. “The problem with that is many people who follow legal avenues to come here, the people who go and jump through all the hoops, don’t take kindly to people who just skip the line or just cross the border. I think it’s a big miscalculation to believe someone who’s here legally is going to be open-minded, or want to defend, or want to give amnesty to someone who did it the wrong way.”
This week’s in-depth report looks at how President Donald Trump made lowering prices a key part of his successful 2024 campaign for a second, nonconsecutive term. A bit over six months in, Taylor Millard writes, the results are mixed.
INSIDE SCOOP: SCOTUS RECKONING, BREAKING UP CHINA, TRUMP’S NOBEL PRIZE
The Trump administration is trying to control the inflation narrative. While inflation is down sharply from the record 8% high during the Biden administration, everyday costs continue to rise.
Tune in each week at washingtonexaminer.com and across all our social media platforms to go behind the headlines in the Washington Examiner show Inside Scoop.