Exclusive: Virginia GOP’s Gov Nominee Winsome Earle-Sears Finalizes Closing Campaign Ad Pitch

Virginia Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earle-Sears’s 2025 gubernatorial campaign will begin airing a new negative ad on Thursday tying her Democratic opponent, former Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger, to controversial Democrats including her party’s embattled attorney general nominee, Jay Jones, National Review has learned.

The new ad, which also ties Spanberger to Joe Biden and hits her on transgender issues, is part of the campaign’s preelection strategy of evenly splitting advertising between negative hits against Spanberger while continuing to run a separate positive spot that boosts Earle-Sears’s brand in the final stretch before Election Day next Tuesday. And it fits with a broader set of pre-Election Day advertisements from Earle-Sears that aim to drag down Spanberger’s favorability as the fallout from Jones’s texting scandal continues to rankle Democrats in the final days of the campaign.

“When Biden and Pelosi wrecked our economy, Abigail Spanberger was so weak, she voted with them 100 percent,” a narrator says in the new 30-second spot, which will run in all media markets in Virginia through Election Day. “When radicals wanted men in girls’ locker rooms, Spanberger was so wrong, she wrote the bill. After Jay Jones talked about killing his opponent, Spanberger is so weak and woke, she voted for him.”

“Abigail Spanberger: She’s weak, she’s wrong,” the ad continues. “We can’t trust her.”

According to the ad-tracking firm AdImpact, the Earle-Sears campaign is currently set to vastly outspend Spanberger on the airwaves in the final stretch of the campaign. That’s thanks in part to a strong October fundraising haul for the Republican gubernatorial nominee: Between October 1 and October 23, Sears raised $9.5 million to Spanberger’s $11.7 million, new campaign finance reports show.

The Republican Governors Association’s Right Direction PAC also poured $4 million into Earle-Sears’s campaign on October 28. And according to a source familiar with the matter, the campaign has raked in more than $600,000 since Monday with a $50 contribution average across more than 12,000 donors.

The advertising campaign comes as polls continue to show Spanberger leading the contest in the RealClearPolitics polling average and follows news last week that Virginia Democrats in the state legislature are joining California in pushing to redraw their congressional map to counteract Republican-led mid-decade redistricting efforts nationwide ahead of the 2026 midterms.

Also of note: The attorney general’s race has narrowed quite a bit following National Review’s October 3 report on the Jones texting scandal, along with an early-October Richmond Times-Dispatch report on his 2022 reckless driving conviction and controversial sentencing. According to the RealClearPolitics polling average, incumbent Republican Attorney General Jason Miyares is now narrowly leading Jones in recent surveys.