ROANOKE, VA (AP/Cardinal News) – Here are five new things that could make a difference in Virginia’s 2025 statewide and legislative elections.

We’re expecting a new Roanoke College poll before the month ends, and that will give us some numerical sense of where Virginia’s governor’s race stands. However, we don’t need polls to tell us about some of the forces that are shaping the contest that will put a woman in the governor’s office for the first time in Virginia history. Some things we knew all along: how voters feel about President Donald Trump, how they feel about Governor Glenn Youngkin, how they feel about lots of other things. Here are five new factors:

“Right-to-work” is the shorthand for the 1947 state law that means if there’s a union in the workplace, workers don’t have to join or pay union dues if they don’t want to. For generations, fealty to “right-to-work” was an article of faith among Virginia politicians of both parties. It still is among Republicans, but increasingly, Democrats have turned against it. All six of the Democratic candidates for lieutenant governor back repeal; so do most of the Democratic candidates running in House of Delegates primaries (see their answers to that question and others on our Voter Guide).

Winsome Earle-Sears, the Republican candidate for governor, signaled early on that she intended to make right-to-work a signature issue — that she’d keep it while Democrats would repeal it. Abigail Spanberger, the Democratic candidate, recently said she wouldn’t support a “full repeal” of right-to-work, which sets her toward a more centrist position in her party. Former Del. Chris Saxman, R-Staunton, who now heads the pro-business group Virginia FREE, posted on his website that Spanberger’s announcement was “a big political win” for her candidacy. “Spanberger adroitly took a major general election issue off the campaign table — and early,” he wrote. “Now, Earle-Sears will have a harder time raising money on this issue while Spanberger can go after more votes in the business community. … It also seems to have been begrudgingly accepted by Labor and Democratic officials as there has been virtually no push back thus far.” Indeed, one union endorsed Spanberger after she made this announcement.

Earle-Sears, though, is still pressing the issue, and Spanberger’s statement does raise the question of what changes to the law, short of a full repeal, she would support — so this issue may not be as “off the campaign table” as some think.

From a policy standpoint, Earle-Sears is on solid ground: The business community cares deeply about keeping right-to-work. The question is whether the general public does. In 2016, Virginia Republicans tried to enshrine the right-to-work law into the state constitution. To everyone’s amazement, they failed. Virginians voted down the proposed amendment, 53.6% to 46.4%. The most surprising part of that is how poorly the amendment fared in some strongly Republican parts of the state — mostly rural communities in Southwest Virginia that in some cases voted “no” at higher levels than Democratic communities in Northern Virginia did. Alleghany County voted 57% no. Floyd County voted 58% no. Covington voted 59% no. All those were more statistically louder than Fairfax County, where 56% voted no. Most of the coal-producing counties voted no, with Dickenson County topping out at a 63% no vote, meaning that Republican-voting Dickenson was more opposed than Democratic-voting Arlington, which voted 62.5% no.

Repealing the law is not quite the same as trying to put the law into the state constitution — in theory, you could support the law but not think it should be a constitutional amendment. Still, that 2016 vote raises the question about whether voters feel as strongly about right-to-work as Earle-Sears thinks they should.

Republicans have been grappling with how to respond to President Donald Trump’s downsizing of the federal government — and his tariffs. Cutting federal jobs certainly plays well with Republican activists, but the problem is that many of those jobs are in Virginia, particularly the state’s economic engine of Northern Virginia — and the worry is that a lot of jobless Northern Virginians will slow the state’s economic growth. After all, 42% of the state’s general fund revenue comes from Northern Virginia. Democrats have an easier time: They’re against anything Trump does.

So far, the state’s unemployment rate hasn’t changed that much, and Gov. Glenn Youngkin has said the state has plenty of jobs available for those out-of-work federal employees. Terry Clower, who runs a regional economic think tank at George Mason University, has warned that there’s not necessarily a lot of overlap between the skills that those federal workers have and the jobs that might be available. We’ll see. Meanwhile, the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service at the University of Virginia has issued its regular quarterly economic forecast. It says that Virginia has already lost 8,000 jobs this year and, by year’s end, those losses could total 32,000 jobs. “Losses are projected to deepen in the second half of the year and extend into early 2026,” the report says. “Recovery is expected to begin late that year, with a net gain of approximately 17,000 jobs in 2026, or 0.4% growth.”

Government jobs will account for 9,000 of those 32,000 job losses, but that’s not the biggest category, the report says. The hardest-hit sector will be tourism-related jobs (which includes general restaurant jobs), at 14,226. Also projected to shrink is manufacturing, by 4,500 jobs, even though that’s a sector that Trump says his tariffs will help grow.

While not all forecasts come to pass, this one is still bad news for Virginia Republicans. If true, this forecast means the economy will be going south during the fall campaign — with Democrats eager to blame that on Trump (and Republicans in general). Spanberger has already seized on this report with the same gusto with which Earle-Sears has campaigned on right-to-work: “These Virginians deserve a Governor who will put Virginia first — not leaders who swear an unfaltering allegiance to DOGE and President Trump at the expense of our Commonwealth’s economic strength.” Republicans have yet to come up with a clever way to distance themselves from whatever economic harm his downsizing brings for Virginia without alienating either him or his supporters.

On April 28, the Spanish electrical grid went down, taking with it Portugal and part of Spain. The power was out for most of an afternoon. Nobody knows why — formal inquiries are underway — but some have already blamed Spain’s reliance on renewable energy, which does flow into the grid differently than more conventional sources. For details on all this, see my Monday column. Here’s what we need to know politically: Virginia Republicans were already going to run against the Clean Economy Act, the Democratic-sponsored 2020 law that mandates a carbon-free electrical grid by 2050. Their line of attack was going to be that the transition to renewable energy has driven up costs. Democrats counter that renewable energy is cheaper and ought to lower costs. Regardless, Republicans can now point to the Spanish blackout and claim that renewables are simply unreliable. For now, that’s not proven, but if one of the formal inquiries comes back with that conclusion (either in whole or in part), then what started at a single substation in Granada, Spain, could impact Virginia’s fall elections.

There are a lot of things that campaigns can control — their own messaging. There are things they can’t control but can anticipate — how the other side is likely to respond, for instance. What always worries campaigns is some outside event over which they have no control and which they can’t anticipate — the so-called “black swan” events. Depending on what the reports say, the Spanish blackout could be one of those.

All 100 seats in the House of Delegates are up for election this fall, and the current balance is the bare minimum: 51-49 in favor of Democrats. In practice, there aren’t many seats, maybe a half-dozen, that are truly competitive. Those are the ones that will determine the makeup of the next House. However, Democrats have fielded candidates for all 100 seats, thanks largely to the recruiting efforts of a California doctor, Fergie Reid Jr., the son of former Del. Fergie Reid, D-Richmond, the first Black legislator in the House since the 19th century. Republicans, by contrast, are only contesting 70 or so seats.

There are philosophical differences involved here: Some believe a party has an obligation to offer a choice in every district, even ones that strongly tilt the other way. Others believe a party shouldn’t waste its efforts on no-win districts.

However, there’s a practical dimension to this in a gubernatorial year: By having House candidates in every district, Democrats have someone locally who can help boost turnout. Democrats don’t expect to win in rural areas, for instance, but if a losing House candidate can help Spanberger pick up a few extra votes she wouldn’t have already gotten, that could help in a close election. Democrats will have that advantage in parts of Southwest and Southside Virginia; Republicans won’t have the same thing helping them in, say, deep blue parts of Northern Virginia.

John Curran, a James City County business consultant, failed to make the ballot for the Republican nomination for lieutenant governor. He didn’t submit enough signatures. He now blames a staffer for failing to turn in their petitions and says he’s embarked on trying to get on the ballot this fall as an independent. If he does, that could potentially draw votes away from John Reid, the official Republican nominee. Some in the evangelical community aren’t keen on Reid, who is gay.

The odds of Curran winning are virtually nil — independents simply don’t win except under the rarest of circumstances — but, in a close race, he could keep Reid from winning.

None of this impacts the governor’s race, except to the extent that it further highlights Republican uneasiness over Reid. Earle-Sears has distanced herself from her official running mate, saying, “We all have our own race to run.” You can bet that a few days after the June 17 primary, Spanberger will make a point of standing with the winners of the Democratic Party’s primaries for lieutenant governor and attorney general, holding hands aloft in a show of unity that Republicans have so far avoided. A Curran candidacy — if he makes the fall ballot — would be a daily reminder of that Republican discomfort, whatever size it may or may not be.