RICHMOND — Republican Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears will seek her party’s nomination for Virginia governor next year, she announced Thursday, kicking off a historic bid to become the first woman to lead the state and the first Black woman to serve as governor anywhere in the nation.
“I could have never believed growing up that I could be asking Virginians for their faith and confidence in me to serve them as governor of our great Commonwealth,” Earle-Sears said in the announcement. “Yes, this is an opportunity to make history, but our campaign is about making life better for every Virginian right here, right now.”
A Jamaican immigrant, Marine veteran and former state legislator, Earle-Sears won statewide office in 2021. She quickly developed a loyal fan base for a charismatic, unfiltered style that has variously led her to gavel the state Senate into session with a high-heeled shoe and to break — if only temporarily — with her party’s standard-bearer, former president Donald Trump.
A staunch conservative, Earle-Sears could face competition for the nomination from Attorney General Jason S. Miyares (R), who is widely known to be considering a run to succeed Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R), who is term-limited. Miyares released a statement Thursday that seemed to scold Earle-Sears for announcing her plans ahead of this year’s presidential election.
“We all need to be focused on this November’s elections before even thinking about next year,” the attorney general’s statement said.
Whoever becomes the GOP nominee for the November 2025 general election will probably face Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.), her party’s only declared gubernatorial candidate.
“If she obtains the nomination, Virginia’s guaranteed its first woman governor,” Bob Holsworth, a longtime political analyst in Richmond, said of Earle-Sears.
Earle-Sears is a unique character with strong appeal to the Republican base, Holsworth said, making her “a formidable candidate for the nomination, if she even has competition.”
Her past criticism of Trump could be a liability if the former president regains the White House this fall, he said, noting the fate of Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.), the incumbent congressman who lost a primary battle to state Sen. John McGuire III after initially endorsing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for the presidency over Trump.
But if Trump loses, Earle-Sears could be well-positioned in a party that might be looking to move on, he said.
Holsworth predicted a rollicking campaign for Earle-Sears, who gained widespread attention during her 2021 run for lieutenant governor for campaign photos that showed her gripping an assault rifle against her blouse and skirt.
“She’s not the kind of candidate who’s going to run a consultant-driven campaign,” Holsworth said. “She’s going to be her own candidate, she’s going to say what she wants, say what she means. Which has a lot of appeal to the Republican base and maybe some independents.”
With her announcement, Earle-Sears released a 90-second campaign video called “Ever Forward” that detailed her up-by-the-bootstraps biography and association with the Youngkin administration.
Earle-Sears immigrated to the United States at 6 years old, following her father, who had come ahead of the family with $1.75 in his pocket.
She served one term in Virginia’s House of Delegates in the early 2000s, and in 2003, did not seek reelection — in part to care for a daughter who had bipolar disorder and who later died in a car accident with her two young daughters. In 2004, Earle-Sears ran for Congress, losing to Rep. Robert C. “Bobby” Scott (D-Va.).
“As an immigrant, mother, a United States Marine, a business owner and now as your lieutenant governor, I’m living the American Dream,” she says in the video. “Just like in the Marines, we can either choose to improvise, adapt and overcome, or we can risk falling backwards. Extreme liberal politics have led some states down a path of decline, but here in Virginia, common-sense conservative leadership has refueled our birth.”
Virginia’s lieutenant governorship is a part-time position with only two constitutional duties: presiding over the Senate and taking over if the governor dies or leaves office. But the post is highly sought after as a steppingstone to the Executive Mansion.
Earle-Sears has a flair for showmanship, memorably calling the Senate to order with a patent leather pump on one occasion when her gavel went missing.
After Republicans lost ground during the 2022 midterm congressional elections, Earle-Sears suggested that Trump had become a liability to the party — a notable departure from him after she traveled the country in 2020 to promote his reelection bid that year.
“What we saw was, even though he wasn’t on the ballot, he was, because he stepped in and endorsed candidates,” Earle-Sears said in 2022 about Trump’s impact on that year’s congressional elections. “And yet, it turns out that those he did not endorse on the same ticket did better than the ones he did endorse. That gives you a clue that the voters want to move on. And a true leader knows when they have become a liability to the mission.”
Earle-Sears did not join Youngkin and Miyares at a Trump rally in Chesapeake in July or at the Republican National Convention that month in Milwaukee.
More recently, though, she has seemed to modify her position on the former president.
After Trump was convicted in New York in May of 34 felony counts related to hush money payments to an adult-film actress, Earle-Sears went on Fox News to say Trump was being unfairly targeted.
“I don’t think that this case, the verdict, is doing any good,” she said. “This is not helpful.”
And during an appearance before Republicans in Nelson County earlier this month, Earle-Sears said she would be voting for Trump for president, according to a report in the Lynchburg News & Advance newspaper.
Fond of quoting scripture, Earle-Sears generally presides over the Senate with an air of collegiality, but she can react sharply when challenged.
On Monday, Earle-Sears made remarks at an annual Labor Day festival in rural Buena Vista that turned combative when Democrats in the crowd held up Harris-Walz signs and loudly booed. It was an unusual confrontation for the event, which is in a solid red part of the state.
According to video of her speech, Earle-Sears drew boos as she proclaimed a number of ills that she said Democrats have inflicted on the nation.
“Four years later they’re removing body parts from our children and calling it freedom,” she said. As she went on to criticize a “border that is wide open and criminals are coming across,” as well as inflation and military deaths in Afghanistan, the crowd grew more boisterous, according to the video.
“I’m telling you what, take down that ‘weird’ sign ’cause y’all are the ones who are weird,” she shouted to a mixed response of cheers and jeers. As the crowd shouted back at her, Earle-Sears said she thought she heard someone say “go back to Jamaica where you came from.”
“I just want to be sure, because I understand that y’all are the tolerant people,” she said, pointing out that Vice President Kamala Harris’s father is from Jamaica. The heckling grew worse, and Earle-Sears growled several times “I am speaking” and then broke into a chant of “USA! USA! USA!” joined by a few in the audience.
As she wrapped up her speech, someone yelled “Get off the stage,” and Earle-Sears began intoning, over and over: “The Democrats are telling a Black woman to get off the stage. … It was the Republican Party that voted for me, the first female, Black, immigrant, Marine lieutenant governor of Virginia. God bless America!”
On Thursday evening, Earle-Sears gathered with a couple hundred sign-waving supporters at Chick’s Oyster Bar in Virginia Beach, the area she represented in the House of Delegates.
In a nearly half-hour speech that leaned heavily on her biography, she marveled at how far the nation had come since her father arrived during the civil rights movement in 1963.
“How else could I be second-in-command in the former capital of the Confederate States?” she said. “The Klan is turning over in their graves.”
