This story was reported and written by our media partner the Virginia Mercury.
For much of 2025, Democrats in Virginia campaigned on addressing affordability issues and federal funding cuts handed down by President Donald Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress. Virginia’s GOP candidates often campaigned on anti-transgender policies in alignment with Trump — a strategy that voters seemingly rebuked amid the Democratic sweep of the state’s executive branch and gains in the House of Delegates.
Sen. Danica Roem, D-Prince William — Virginia’s first and only trans elected official — doubts her Republican colleagues will make as much of a fuss over her community nor introduce many anti-trans bills in the 2026 legislative session.
“They have 13 fewer House of Delegates members who could possibly do such a thing,” she said.
This year, nearly a dozen anti-trans bills were introduced and failed in the Democrat-controlled legislature. Still, the matter featured prominently across campaigns. Republicans had also pointed to a Northern Virginia sex offender who has identified as transgender in court documents as cause for cracking down on bathroom access.
Gov. Glenn Youngkin, Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears and Attorney General Jason Miyares were joined by national anti-trans activist Riley Gaines to celebrate the introduction of a bill that would ban transgender athletes.
Most prominent, however, were digital ads, text message campaigns and stump speeches from Earle-Sears, the GOP gubernatorial nominee who lost to Democrat Abigail Spanberger by about 15 points in unofficial election results Tuesday night.
Roem said campaigns make “strategic assumptions” on key issues they assume can rally and sustain their bases. For Republican candidates this year, they sought to build on successful campaigns from Youngkin and Trump, for which trans issues had featured. They were bolstered by outside organizations like the American Principles Project PAC, which sent a pre-Halloween mass text message featuring an artificial intelligence image of Spanberger posed like a horror movie poster.
“Monsters preying upon children. Predators in little girl’s locker rooms,” it read. “This isn’t a horror movie, it’s Virginia under Abigail Spanberger.”
Likewise, the closing messages from Earle-Sears’ campaign in attack ads against Spanberger asserted she is “for they/them not us” an echo of an attack Trump levied against Kamala Harris.
Though the debate over transgender rights have percolated nationally in recent years, transgender individuals make up a small demographic of Americans. Data shows 3.3% of youth nationwide identify as transgender.
Recent polling from the Washington Post and George Mason University shows that 3% of voters saw transgender policies as a top-of-mind issue.
“They put this out there, and they were wrong,” Roem said of the Republican strategy and added that the Republican Governors Association “wasted millions of dollars” it poured into Virginia’s races this year.
While not referencing specific cultural issues, the Republican Party of Virginia posted a statement to social media that noted how remaining Republicans in the state legislature are “committed and determined to continue fighting for the values that make our Commonwealth great and for the policies that will empower Virginians to thrive.”
“We look forward to working with all of them to push back against radical Democrat extremism in Richmond and beyond,” the account wrote.
While Virginia lawmakers will prepare for the 2026 legislative session in the coming months and which priorities they will agree to tackle, national political mechanisms are already at work for the 2026 Congressional midterm elections.
U.S. Rep. Sarah McBride, D-Delaware, joined a call with the Human Rights Campaign and Equality Virginia on Wednesday afternoon. As the nation’s first transgender member of Congress, she celebrated the Democratic wins in Virginia, New Jersey and New York City on Tuesday.
McBride called Virginia’s election results amid the anti-trans messaging that saturated it, a “clear repudiation of a cynical political strategy.”
She added that candidates’ attitudes of being “curious, not judgmental” of constituents with different viewpoints while keeping their platforms rooted in solving affordability issues may offer a winning blueprint for next year’s contests.