As the sun rose over Whitcomb Court in Richmond’s East End, a young African American woman planted “Abigail Spanberger Governor” signs outside a polling station next to ones already placed for her opponent, Republican Winsome Earle-Sears.
It was an emblematic moment happening in a Black neighborhood at the start of an Election Day that would yield the commonwealth’s first woman governor.
“I’ve been doing this since 4:30; I don’t want a picture taken,” the woman told the photographer (me), politely but firmly. Her hair was not done, she said. She had not taken a shower, and she wasn’t dressed to impress.
Neither my reasoning nor pleading could make her budge.
Rod White, a landscaper who’s lived in the community all his life, came to vote minutes after she drove away. He stopped to talk.
“I want a person that looks out for the people, especially with the health care,” he said when I asked him what he was looking for in the next governor. What White doesn’t want, he said, is “someone that thinks they know everything.”
Eleven miles away, a stream of largely white voters filed in and out of Tuckahoe Elementary School in Henrico County. Roughly a third of people I approached didn’t want to talk. (This was roughly the same situation at all seven polling stations I visited.) A woman needed to get her toddler to day care, she said, as she rushed away.
“I’m good,” a twentysomething man replied to my interview request as he headed to his car.
I don’t speak Gen Z, so I said the first thing that came to mind: “Yes, you are!”
VCU history professor Ryan K. Smith was nonpartisan and suitably professorial when asked what qualities he was looking for in the next governor.
“I’m looking for somebody that’s going to uphold the rule of law — and I’m also thinking about somebody who’s thinking about a future for our state, nation, and community.”
I asked him how he puts the present moment in historical context for his students. “I could go straight into the teeth of it … the purely partisan conflict that we see around us,” Smith said, “but I feel like I’d lose a portion of my class.”
“Most of what I try to do is model civic discourse, get them engaged in issues and willing to discuss things without digging in their heels and refusing to see other sides of issues,” he told me. “I’m hoping I’m modeling the kind of behavior I’d like to see in the world, in our community.”
Michael Irace, a home improvement contractor, voted “straight Republican,” he said without prompting. He’s hoping the next governor will be “someone who’s an adult that looks at things logically, not ideologically.”
“I have so many issues that I’m concerned about,” Irace said. Schools are at the top of his list. Curriculum should be bare bones, in his opinion. Kids “only need to know how to read, write and do arithmetic,” he added.
“They don’t need to know anything else about culture, especially the young ones. All the other things that people get involved with that they’re pushing on the kids, it’s not necessary. Teach them how to think for themselves and the basics.”
Barry Burgess, a 69-year-old “manufacturers’ rep in the plastic surgery world,” said bringing business to Virginia and treating citizens fairly are his main issues.
I asked him about the government shutdown, which is hitting Northern Virginia’s federal workers — and so many other Americans — hard.
“The government shutdown appears to be, in my opinion — seems to be — a filibuster on the Democratic side. They continue to push for Obamacare that is outdated and is still supported by the people, so we need to have a revised policy for the people, by the people, and cut out all the middlemen and all the markups.”
Those middlemen donate a lot of money to both parties, I said.
“They do,” Burgess agreed. “I think we continue like Trump is trying to do, and a lot of people are trying to do, which is cut out the middleman, whether it be pharmaceuticals, health care, cut out those middlemen.”
Poll worker Mary Miley Theobald was stationed at the edge of Tuckahoe Elementary’s parking lot to serve curbside voters. She doesn’t like talking politics: “It’s too inflammatory. I just change the subject.” But she elaborated after some light prodding.
“I’m a historian, and so I’m very aware of historical patterns, and most people do not know or care about them, so I see more dangers to our country and our way of life than most people do, and I see more parallels in history.”
Parallels with what eras, I asked Miley Theobald. “Germany in the 1930s, Italy in the 1920s. The rise of fascism. The playbook that is happening exactly as it did then.”
Miley Theobald said she’d be voting for Spanberger when her shift ended.
Susan Estes, an artist whose husband passed away 10 years ago, was on her way into the school to vote. She was once a Republican.
“I used to be until Trump came in,” she told me. “He hates women. He’s taken my democracy away. He lies. He’s a criminal. I mean, he’s everything that supposedly religious people don’t approve of.”
A woman’s right to choose is non-negotiable for Estes: “I just don’t think a government has any right to tell a woman what they want to do or not.”
Shannon Paul, a Richmond City employee who voted at United Nations Church on Cowardin Avenue, was on the same wavelength as Estes. “I have a 17-year-old daughter, so you know, I had the right to choose when I was young and making dumb decisions, and I want my daughter to have that same right to choose.”
A horde of news media converged on the Greater Richmond Convention Center for Spanberger’s election night watch party.
Journalists were corralled at the back of the cavernous hall, just as they were during President Donald Trump’s rally there in May 2024.
A Spanberger handler periodically escorted photographers to the stage for photo opportunities.
Like her campaign, it was a highly scripted and stage-managed affair — much to the chagrin of some of the free-range reporters.
Huge video screens flanking the stage broadcast political reporters giving moment-by-moment election updates for high-profile races across the country — Zohran Mamdani vs. Andrew Cuomo (and Curtis Sliwa) for New York City mayor; Mikie Sherrill vs. Jack Ciattarelli for New Jersey governor; and Virginia’s matchup between Spanberger and Earle-Sears.
The crowd, buzzing and chattering in a state of expectation, exploded with cheers when MSNBC called the election for her.
Governor-elect Abigail Spanberger took the stage followed by her daughters Claire, Charlotte and Catherine, and husband Adam. She spent a few moments waving and exulting on the way to the podium.
And then she addressed the world.
“Tonight we sent a message,” she said. The chanting — “Abi! Abi! Abi!” — ebbed.
“We sent a message to every corner of the commonwealth, a message to our neighbors and our fellow Americans across the country. We sent a message to the whole world that in 2025, Virginia chose pragmatism over partisanship. We chose our commonwealth over chaos.”
“Let’s show the world what we’re made of. Let’s get to work!”
View Election Day through Brian Palmer’s lens
