Last month, Democratic gubernatorial candidates Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill notched blockbuster victories in Virginia and New Jersey. Spanberger trounced her Republican opponent, Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears by a 15-point margin, while Sherrill defeated businessman Jack Ciattarrelli by 13-points.
The Virginia and New Jersey campaigns relied on similar tactics: A core message on affordability; an emphasis on the national security backgrounds of both candidates; and a willingness to stand up against Trump. One of the chief strategists who devised this approach is pollster Angela Kuefler, a partner at Global Strategy Group who worked with both candidates. Kuefler also brought to both races her perspective as the rare female pollster in a male-dominated field.
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity. The full interview is available at Spotify, YouTube and iTunes.
Anne Kim: Congratulations! Most polls did not indicate such large margins in these races. Did these wins outperform your own expectations as well, or did you have an inkling that this was going to happen?
Angela Kuefler: It was always a possibility. One of the things that is true for off-year elections in Virginia and New Jersey is that they become a referendum on the president who’s just been elected. If you look back to the last time Trump was elected, there were healthy wins by Democrats up and down the ticket in both states. So we always knew it was a possibility. I operate from the place of “let’s expect the worst and hope for the best,” but in our various turnout scenarios, we did see the chance of it hitting this high, especially in New Jersey.
Matthew Cooper: I’m from New Jersey, so I’ve seen my share of politicians rise and fall there, going back to the likes of Jim Florio before Chris Christie. Both Spanberger and Sherrill talked about affordability, and it was clearly on the minds of voters. But did voters think that was something governors could do much about? In other words, who are voters blaming for high prices? Or do they see it as an act of God?
Angela Kuefler: They see it as an act of a lot of politicians from the past not doing their jobs right. They see it to some extent as something that is outside any political control.
But what was different with these two women is the strength of who they are and their past lives and bios as moms, as people with a national security background, and as folks who put mission and service above everything else. Those weren’t just talking points. Those were very important components of their story, of their brand, of their message.
And the reason it mattered is that it allowed voters to believe that they could do something about costs and the economy because they were not traditional tax-and-spend Democrats. These were Democrats who were not viewed as extreme because of their bios and background. These were Democrats who were different from most politicians, or at least how most people perceive most politicians, and that allowed people to hear them and believe them when they said, “I’m going to do X, I’m going to do Y, to help you and your family control the cost of living.”
Matthew Cooper: There was a time when gun safety was a big issue in states like New Jersey. Of course, after the Dobbs decision, there was reason to think choice would dominate pretty much every state race in years to come. But these issues don’t seem to have really been on the radar of voters that much. Are we now in a place where in some states, choice and guns are settled enough that it doesn’t matter that much, or are they still salient issues?
Angela Kuefler: Abortion and guns still matter to people, and abortion was a part of both of these campaigns. I think the difference is how we utilized it strategically to draw a contrast with their opponents.
You could not get two different Republicans than Jack Ciattarrelli and Winsome Earle- Sears. But the work we did to disqualify them was relatively similar, first by disqualifying them on some of the economic brand advantages that Republicans historically have had on cost and affordability by making clear that they have raised people’s costs. And then the other component was to make it clear that they were going to be so aligned with Trump that they would not do what was right to protect the people of the Commonwealth of Virginia and the state of New Jersey.
And then finally, there was a layer of extremism, of which abortion was the main proof point. Not only can you not trust either of these Republicans to do what was right because they’re so aligned with MAGA and Trump, they’re so extreme they want to ban abortion. It’s that combination that did a lot of work to disqualify both of these Republican opponents.
Anne Kim: I want to ask specifically about Virginia. Abigail Spanberger outperformed both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in Virginia, and even though some of those corners of southwest Virginia stayed red, the losses were definitely not as severe as they had been in the past. And in Chesapeake, she did extremely well in her home territory. Do we know at this point who is making the shift back into the blue column and how durable those shifts are going to be?
Angela Kuefler: We don’t really know until the voter files are updated who actually showed up to this election. There’s always some estimation based on precincts, but the reality is we don’t know how much of it was different people showing up and how much of it was persuasion.
I tend to think it was a combination of both those things, given that turnout—while it will never match a presidential year—was still higher. Both Abigail and Mikie have also had multiple races where they have done really great work in winning over more traditional right-leaning swing voters in many different communities.
And that’s part of their superpower. Having a national security background just vibes to folks as not being extreme on one end or the other. It feels moderate. It feels like somebody that they think can trust.
There are certainly lessons that we should all be taking from these victories in candidate recruitment, messaging, and all of that. But I don’t think all Democratic problems are solved by one really good night with electorates that don’t look like the midterm or the presidential.
Matthew Cooper: Going back to New Jersey, all eyes were on Passaic County with its big Hispanic, Arab-American and Muslim populations after its dramatic swing to Trump in 2024. It moved back in a Democratic direction this time. Can you offer some insight about what happened there and among those communities?
Angela Kuefler: It’s probably a combination of a few things. One, we played for them hard. We were on Spanish TV. We did Latino-focused mail. We very much targeted that group. But they’re not a monolith, obviously. There are different factors that they’re persuaded by or not.
In terms of messaging, some of it built on the overreach of what Trump is doing—the mass deportations. That certainly played a role. The bigger role though, again, was the message on cost and affordability. This is a population that is particularly attuned to cost.
Anne Kim: What do you think were the biggest mistakes that the GOP opponents made in both races? I live in Virginia and was inundated by ads from Winsome Earle-Sears that struck me as a little bit tone deaf, but what are the other ways you think in which both candidates may have misfired in their message to voters and in their whole approach?
Angela Kuefler: My job is to do the research to help inform campaign strategy. It’s a much bigger team, obviously, but the way it works is that you do the research, and you come up with the ideal message narrative. You always plan for shifts your opponent might make, and I like to assume my opponent is smarter than us and is going to do the smart thing.
So as part of that planning, I and I think others on both these campaigns were quite sure each of these candidates would try to distance themselves from the president, try to make themselves seem more moderate, try to push back.
The vast majority of swing voters have never wanted a politician who was just going to be a party line vote. That is a longstanding belief. So regardless of who the president is, they still should have been trying to promote some separation.
But they never even tried, and I frankly couldn’t believe it. It was a gift. I don’t know how they weren’t advising their candidate to push back against a president who is completely underwater in each of these states. The logic didn’t make sense. The best I could figure out is that maybe they recognized that turnout was the one of the key levers here and they could galvanize the Trump base and create a different electorate. But that is risky, and that has historically not happened when Trump isn’t on the ticket himself.
Part of it could be they didn’t want to upset daddy. Maybe they both knew they were going to lose and wanted to preserve that relationship.
Anne Kim: I want to ask a question about the business of polling before we bring it back to your advice for candidates in 2026. As I understand it, your client roster is pretty exclusively female. You have led independent expenditure polling for Kansas Governor Laura Kelly, for instance, and you’ve worked for Georgia politicians Stacey Abrams and Lucy McBath.
Polling is also very much a male-dominated profession. What do you bring as a female pollster to the candidates you work with? And given that polling as a profession has been beaten up over the last few cycles, how does your perspective improve polling as a profession or represents perspectives that have not been represented as fully in the past?
Angela Kuefler: I don’t think I’m providing anything different or better from the literal steps of polling methodology. I do think where it makes a difference is in the team environment. It’s not just polling that is male-dominated, it’s the entire political consultant industry.
So it helps to sometimes have a different voice. I think that how I and other women think about branding a candidate, or the narrative of a candidate, is a little bit different. It’s robust. It’s deeper. And I hadn’t even clocked that as a way that women see the world slightly differently until somebody flagged it for me relatively recently.
For example, when I’m thinking about how to build up a candidate brand, I have a framework about how one connects to someone emotionally, how one bonds with them based on lived experience, and how one connects their motivation to run with what people believe is pure—stuff that in my experience builds a deeper candidate brand. And that’s not how a lot of folks think about it. They’re like, “We test whatever polls really well on policy, and let’s call it a day.” There’s no shame in that. That has worked for many years. But it doesn’t always work, and it certainly doesn’t work in really hard races where you need to develop deeper connections with voters, especially if you’re a Democrat running in a redder place.
I think it’s important to have women’s perspectives on these campaign teams, which are predominantly men. And I get even more joy when I’m not the only woman on the team, which does happen sometimes.
Anne Kim: I think it’s just so important because women candidates at the presidential level just have not fared well. And it does seem that there needs to be something different that happens in order to break that final glass ceiling.
Angela Kuefler: I think women, people of color, and people who have been historically marginalized in any way see where power lies more acutely. And so I think we tend to see our own vulnerabilities a little bit more too, which is sometimes the role I play in campaigns.
For example, there are a lot of academic studies out there that say women candidates who go on TV and are perceived to be attacking first get more blowback. If you don’t know that, and you’re just operating with the playbook for how to win a campaign that was written for men by men, then you’re pushing your candidate and not taking that nuance into account.
It’s the same thing when you’re balancing when you should talk about being a mom versus when you should talk about being a Navy helicopter pilot or a CIA agent. Both of those things says different things to different voters—both good things—but it’s a balance.
Anne Kim: And at the risk of going off on a tangent here, I do think that this consideration of what it means to be a woman candidate becomes even more fraught because of what’s happening on the other side of the aisle with traditional gender roles becoming so much a part of the conversation. Being that CIA analyst or being a veteran pushes against this paradigm that they’re constructing on the other side. It’s going to be really interesting to see what happens over the next few cycles with female candidates and how they brand themselves.
Angela Kuefler: Yep. It pushes against it in a way that is helpful, but because they are both moms, it also doesn’t bust those traditional rules too much to backfire. That combination has proven to be really powerful, and I think will continue.
Matthew Cooper: If you’re meeting with someone who is thinking about running in 2026, what are you going to tell them about the personal travails of running and also the landscape coming up?
Angela Kuefler: The first thing is to make sure candidates are aware how much work it’s going to be. I think a lot of them intellectually get it, but when they’re locked in call time for multiple hours a day, when they’re on the road constantly, it wears.
Next, I’m feeling pretty bullish about 2026 at this point—all of the redistricting conversations aside, because that obviously throws a wrench into a lot of different things.
But if we think about 2026 as a replay of 2018, much like 2025 proved to be a relatively similar replay to 2017, we won big, and we won districts that were considered R+10 or up to R+13. That means compared to the national average in the last two elections, they voted Republican 10 points more than the national average or up to 13 points more than the national average.
Last time, we moved some of those really, really hard districts, and keep in mind that in 2018, Abigail Spanberger herself beat Dave Brat in an R+7 district. And he was not a hated guy.
So I feel pretty bullish that we’ll be able to swing some of these harder places. And then it becomes: Are you a candidate who has an appealing profile and are you willing to do the work? If you are both those things, then you can catch that wave and potentially, much like Mikie and Abigail both did, in less than a decade be governor.
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