Falls Church, VA —

It’s early on a Thursday evening and Winsome Earle-Sears, Virginia’s Republican candidate for governor, is in a familiar place. She’s standing outside of a school board meeting to call attention to policies related to where transgender students can use their elected bathroom and play school sports.

“Let’s have girls have their private spaces and boys have their private spaces,” she said to applause. “It has worked for how many millennia and certainly it can work now.”

Earle-Sears has blanketed the airwaves with ads that characterize Abigail Spanberger, the Democratic nominee, as “being for they/them,” replicating the messaging used against former Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election. She is airing the ads during college and pro football games just as President Donald Trump’s campaign did last year.

On Friday, she will address an event hosted by the conservative group Moms for Liberty, an organization that says it works to defend parental rights at all levels of government.

Polls in Virginia and elsewhere suggest the top issue on voters’ minds this fall is affordability. But Earle-Sears has made trans policies a centerpiece of her messaging ahead of the November election, hammering her Democratic counterpart for not answering whether she agrees that trans youth should be able to use any bathroom in a school b