NORFOLK, Va. — With four months until Election Day in Virginia, the campaigns for statewide office are heating up. Both parties are projecting a message of unity, but the ways they’ve sought to demonstrate unity among themselves has varied.

Immediately after June’s primaries, Democratic gubernatorial nominee Abigail Spanberger embarked on an eight-day bus tour across the state, where she was joined at stops by Ghazala Hashmi and Jay Jones, the nominees for lieutenant governor and attorney general.

Meanwhile, Republican candidates Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, Attorney General Jason Miyares and conservative radio host John Reid — who have been the presumptive nominees for months — appeared together for the first time Tuesday night.

“To describe the Republican rally as a unity rally requires a very flexible definition of unity,” said Stephen Farnsworth, a political science professor at the University of Mary Washington. “The party candidates barely appeared on stage together, did not have a lot to say about each other, and generally have a kind of problematic history for imagining that they’re going to be able to work together this fall.”

Statewide candidates are elected separately, meaning it’s possible to have a governor and lieutenant governor from different parties. In 2005, Virginians elected Democrat Tim Kaine as governor and Republicans Bill Bolling and Bob McDonnell as lieutenant governor and attorney general.

But whether Republicans Earle-Sears, Reid, and Miyares — candidates for governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general — have convinced voters they’re past their infighting, Farnsworth said a split ticket is unlikely.

“I do think that in this political environment, there aren’t going to be very many swing voters,” he said. “The reality of 2025 is that of a very, very partisan time, and so most voters are likely to vote a unified ticket, because the parties have become increasingly distant from each other nationally and in Virginia.”

That means voting for candidates and policies for or against President Donald Trump.

“I think most people, particularly given the very combative approach to governing from President Trump, have decided they’re either all in with the president or all not in with the president,” Farnsworth said. “The old saying that all politics is local I don’t think really applies these days when you’re looking at what’s motivating people.”

Meanwhile, the Democratic statewide ticket campaigned together in Hampton Roads last weekend as part of Spanberger’s bus tour. The tour concluded Saturday with stops in Williamsburg, Newport News, Norfolk and Virginia Beach.

Jones seemingly took aim at the Republicans, who had then not appeared in public together.

“We got a ticket with Ghazala Hashmi and Abigail Spanberger,” he said at a speech at Lafayette High School in Williamsburg. “And I’ll let you in on a little secret this morning: We actually like each other.”

Jones made the same comment in Norfolk later that day.

Democrats are running on a staunchly anti-Trump platform. Along the trail, Jones pledged to enter Virginia into lawsuits against the Trump administration brought by Democratic attorneys general. Hashmi criticized Gov. Glenn Youngkin for telling laid off federal workers to polish their resumes. And Spanberger said she would defend veterans’ access to health care.

“At the theoretical level, people are more likely to describe themselves as conservative,” Farnsworth said. “But when people start seeing programs cut, they’re a lot less conservative than they thought there were … the challenge for Republicans in this environment is not unlike what Democrats faced during the Biden years.

“You have to live with the consequences of the policy choices in Washington, even if you had nothing to do with them.”

Statewide Republicans on the campaign trail are engaging less with federal policy, and instead spoke on issues such as transgender children, school choice and Virginia’s status as a right-to-work state.

At a rally before a packed house Tuesday in Vienna, Earle-Sears spoke at length about her father fleeing socialism in Jamaica and the nomination of Zohran Mamdani as Democratic mayoral candidate in New York.

“You’ve seen where my old hometown New York has nominated a socialist,” she said. The crowd booed. “And make no mistake about it, the ideas that my opponent has are socialist in nature, because it’s all about what government is going to do and to take your money to do it.”

In Williamsburg, Spanberger dismissed the connection to Mamdani.

“I’m kind of a little bit laughing because it’s New York City — we’re Virginia,” she told reporters. “I don’t know anything about New York politics.”

Farnsworth was not convinced that was an effective political strategy.

“It strikes me as a desperate move to imagine that the voice of Democratic primary voters in New York City has any bearing on the Virginia gubernatorial election,” he said. “People always wish they were running against the politician that they mention, but they’re actually running against the politician whose name is on the ballot, or the national figure, the president.”

Farnsworth predicted that Republicans will face some significant headwinds this election. Historically, the party out of power in the White House does well in statewide elections in Virginia the following year. For example, in 2021, a year after Joe Biden was elected as president, Republicans regained control of the House of Delegates and won all three statewide positions.

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