From 1989 to 1997, Republicans carried Henry County in three straight elections for governor as rural Virginia began realigning their way.

Then in 2001, something happened. The Republican vote in Henry County collapsed, and Democrat Mark Warner won the county with 61.4% of the vote. This wasn’t a permanent change; Republicans eventually returned to winning the county by landslide margins, but 2001 stands out as an anomaly.

What happened to cause that? Well, many things happened, but one driving factor in Southside Virginia was the collapse of the region’s economic pillars — textiles and furniture — and what was perceived to be the unfeeling response of the state’s Republican governor at the time. Warner was the electoral beneficiary of that.

How does that story from a quarter-century ago relate to the present? Here’s how.

Late Friday, an audio recording of Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, the likely Republican candidate for governor, rocketed around the blue corners of the internet. Released by MeidasTouch, a liberal advocacy site, the audio records Earle-Sears discussing the loss of federal jobs due to President Donald Trump’s downsizing of the federal government: “Now I’m hearing about DOGE and all that. Yes, we don’t want people to lose their jobs. We have over 250,000 jobs that we’ve created since we began in office. So if you’ve lost your job, and how many of you have ever lost a job? Oh you mean it’s not unusual? It happens to everybody all the time? Okay, and the media is making this out to be this huge, huge thing. And I don’t understand why.”

You can listen here. Earle-Sears’ office did not respond to a request for comment; neither did MeidasTouch about how and where it obtained this audio.

I will be gentle, far more gentle than the Democrats who blasted Earle-Sears. House Speaker Don Scott: “Your 2025 Gubernatorial Republican economic development plan . . . ‘So you lost your job, lost your home, lost your healthcare — what’s the big deal? Stop making a big deal about it! Get over it!’”

I will even be more gentle than one former Republican office-holder, former Del. David Ramadan of Loudoun County, who posted: “The media is highlighting federal workers losing their job as a big deal in Virginia — because it is a big deal. Anyone who doesn’t get that has no business being the next governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia. Period.”

Instead, I will simply say there’s a technical phrase in politics to describe the impact of Earle-Sears sharing those thoughts: “Not helpful.”

Factually, she may be right: People do often lose their jobs. Politically, though, the Republican response right now to Trump’s job cuts is not particularly helpful to their cause.

I prefer cold math over hot rhetoric, so let’s see what the math tells us (I once had a personality test that concluded I was a Vulcan, the pointy-eared species on Star Trek that famously suppressed their emotions in favor of logic).

To win in 2025, the Republican candidate for governor will need to replicate what Glenn Youngkin did four years ago: Boost turnout in rural Virginia and cut into Democratic margins in Northern Virginia, the state’s biggest population center. I went over all these numbers in a column in early March .

This is certainly doable, because Youngkin did it (and so did Earle-Sears, although it’s the top of the ticket that drives the election).

The challenge for Republicans is Trump. Virginia have voted against him three times in a row and the recent Roanoke College poll shows his disapproval rate in the state at a record high — 59%. That poll, as well as others, consistently show Democratic Abigail Spanberger with a lead over Earle-Sears. It’s early, and polls are often volatile, but the point is that Earle-Sears starts out behind so shouldn’t be doing anything that makes her task more difficult.

We also know what happened in Virginia the last time Trump was president: The Democratic vote in the 2017 state elections surged beyond what even Democrats at the time expected. A 68,065-vote Democratic margin in Fairfax County in the 2013 governor’s race became a 138,059-vote Democratic margin in 2017. A 3,905-vote Democratic margin Loudoun County became a 23,380-vote margin. And so it went across all of Northern Virginia — as well as other Democratic-voting localities elsewhere. In Roanoke, a 3,928-vote Democratic margin became a 6,209-vote margin. In Lynchburg, a more conservative city, a Republican margin of 2,709 in 2013 was cut to a 912-vote margin under Trump.

This is what Democrats hope to repeat this year and what Republicans need to avoid.

There are certainly ways Republican can try to do this. They’ve seen the potency that immigration and transgender issues have in campaigns, and there’s scant evidence that Democrats (aside from maybe California Gov. Gavin Newsome, who is angling for a presidential run) have learned how to handle those. This is why four of the last six posts on Earle-Sears’ Twitter feed are about immigration-related issues, even though that’s not really the purview of a Virginia governor.

One big difference between Trump’s first term and Trump’s second term is that he’s figured out how the federal government works and he’s doing a lot more — his radical downsizing of the government workforce being a prime example. The moves he’s making no doubt cheer Trump partisans, but they also have a real impact on the ground, particularly in Northern Virginia. In Northern Virginia, 6.3% of the workforce is employed directly by the federal government, according to a report by the Northern Virginia Regional Commission . In some specific communities, the figure is much higher — 16.4% in Falls Church, 14.5% in Arlington County. These figures do not include a larger number of federal contractors. A 2015 study found that there are 2.5 federal contractors for every government employee.

If that figure is still true, then we need to multiply all these figures by 2.5 and add that number into the mix — which would mean 22.05% of Northern Virginia’s workforce is tied to the federal government one way or another.

For context, Tultex accounted for 18.3% of the jobs in Martinsville when it shut down in December 1999, throwing that city into an economic trauma that lasted for decades. Now, Tultex went away entirely and the federal government is not going away — it will continue, just at a smaller size. Still, some economic pain for Northern Virginia seems to lie ahead.

Youngkin has talked up how many jobs have been created during his term, and he certainly has talking points in his favor there. However, Terry Clower, who runs a regional economic think tank at George Mason University, has pointed out that there’s only a 30% overlap between the qualifications of federal workers and the new jobs being created — which may not necessarily be in Northern Virginia.

A laid-off federal worker in Northern Virginia — who probably has a college degree, maybe even two or three — is likely in a better economic position than a laid-off factory worker in Martinsville and Henry County a quarter-century ago. Still, it’s never a good thing when a region’s biggest employer starts downsizing in a big way.

I understand Earle-Sears is in something of a political bind. She doesn’t want to run afoul of Trump, or Republican activists who are cheering on his job cuts. However, it’s never a good look to seem unconcerned about constituents who are losing their jobs. Surely Republican wordsmiths can come up with some clever language that seems more sympathetic than what she’s recorded saying here.

Politically, this is potentially damaging because these words will make it harder for her to tamp down the outrage that Democrats will want to stoke in Northern Virginia. To be fair, this is not quite on the level of Hillary Clinton’s infamous quote about how “we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.” That quote was often cited out of context. In context, she expressed more sympathy toward coal miners, but we also see how negatively coal country voters responded. In Virginia’s Buchanan County, the Democratic vote fell by by 43% from what it had been under Barack Obama. Some of that fall may have happened anyway, but this was a dramatic plunge. Clinton’s quote is a cautionary tale about how not to handle impending job losses. Democrats paid a heavy price, in percentage terms, for not seeming to be very interested in coal miners losing their jobs, but at least they paid it in lightly populated areas. Republicans do not want to be a position where they have to pay a heavy price, or any price at all, in the state’s most populated metro area.

This is not purely a Northern Virginia issue, either. The highest unemployment rates in Virginia are typically in Southwest and Southside — strongly Republican areas where Earle-Sears will need to maximize turnout. If people there hear her downplaying job losses in Northern Virginia, some may wonder if that means she’ll be just as cavalier about any job losses they may face in those rural areas — where are there a lot fewer job options. We don’t know yet what impact Trump’s trade war will have, but we know that Canada, China and the European Union have all responded with retaliatory tariffs — which are primarily directed at industries located in Republican communities, with Buena Vista being the place in the state most vulnerable to foreign tariffs levied in response to ours. (For details, see this column) . We haven’t clearly seen tariff-related layoffs yet but if they happen, Democrats now have these words from Earle-Sears that they can use against Republicans. This is an unforced error. We just don’t know yet how big an error it is.

To be fair, Earle-Sears is not alone in showing insufficient empathy for people losing jobs. I recently devoted a column to how many on the left — granted, random voters and not office-holders or party representatives — have disparaged the workers at a Smyth County plant who are being laid off. I suspect those laid-off workers in Smyth County now have many of the same concerns as terminated government workers in Northern Virginia.

Beyond the transitory politics, however, there are some significant issues that the next governor of Virginia may have to deal with, no matter who it is.

Northern Virginia accounts for 42% of the state’s general fund tax revenue. In effect, Northern Virginia helps subsidize the rest of the state. Rural school systems — in other words, school systems in Republican-voting counties — get most of their funding from the state, and the biggest chunk of that comes from Northern Virginia. If the Northern Virginia economy goes south, that will be felt all the way out to the Cumberland Gap.

“If Fairfax County’s economy suffers because of this, and we know that it already is, Virginia’s economy is doomed,” Fairfax County Chair Jeff McKay said recently. “They’re doomed.”

Clower, who analyzes the Northern Virginia economy, doesn’t go that far. He simply says he’s “concerned.” Given the region’s importance to Virginia’s eonomy, we all ought to be, the candidates for governor who want to be responsible for the state’s economic well-being, most of all.

Want more political news and analysis? Sign up for West of the Capital, our weekly political newsletter. In last week’s edition, we looked at President Trump’s early endorsement of Rep. John McGuire in the 2026 election cycle as well as some recent endorsements in two contested Republican nominations for the House of Delegates in Southwest and Southside.