AUDIO: Earle-Sears said Trump, budget cuts hurt her campaign

In audio from a June event in Virginia Beach, Earle-Sears blamed Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency for her unpopularity.

Winsome Earle-Sears has embraced President Donald Trump’s unpopular federal cuts, despite multiple polls showing her lagging behind her opponent, Abigail Spanberger.

Earlier this month, Earle-Sears, Virginia’s lieutenant governor and the Republican nominee for governor this fall, told the conservative station Newsmax TV that Trump’s massive policy bill that’s expected to take away health care from hundreds of thousands of poor and middle class Virginians “does so many great things.”  

Those comments followed others in which she downplayed the pain of laid off federal workers, saying she doesn’t understand why, “The media is making it out to be a huge, huge thing,” and telling workers, “Don’t despair.”

But previously unreported audio obtained by Dogwood shows that Earle-Sears understands the challenge her campaign faces in aligning with an unpopular president advancing policies that are putting Virginians out of work and threatening their health care. 

Listen to the audio here:

Photo: Steve Helber/AP

In audio from a June event in Virginia Beach, Earle-Sears blamed Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency for her own unpopularity. She said that at the start of her campaign she and Democratic nominee Spanberger were “neck and neck.” But, Earle-Sears continued, things changed when Trump got elected and he began going after the jobs and rights of federal workers. 

“She was throwing that on the left and right,” Earle-Sears said of Spanberger, who has made Earle-Sears’ support for Trump a sticking point of the campaign. “Just DOGE, DOGE, DOGE, DOGE and Trump and DOGE and Trump. And so then I started down six points. Dropped me six points in January.”

Earle-Sears went on to strike an upbeat note about her then improving numbers in the polls. 

Virginia, of course, is home to hundreds of thousands of people either living or working for the federal government, and Trump’s cuts have taken a significant toll. Virginia’s unemployment claims for the week ending July 5 were up 33% compared with the same time a year ago. The University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service estimates about 11,100 federal civilian jobs in Virginia have been cut with another 10,500 possibly at risk. 

A spokesperson for Spanberger said in a statement to Dogwood that people across Virginia are hurting because of the “Trump Administration’s attacks on Virginia’s economy.”

“The Lieutenant Governor should be addressing the damage being done to our Commonwealth and standing up for Virginia’s federal workers, government contractors, and small business owners who are worried about their jobs and financial futures,” the Spanberger spokesperson said. “Abigail has been speaking out against DOGE’s reckless cuts for months — and as the next Governor of Virginia, she won’t be afraid to stand up for Virginia workers and Virginia’s economy.”

 

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Other state and local leaders are also raising alarm bells about Trump’s federal cuts. Both chambers of the state legislature have convened committees to track the impacts of Trump’s federal cuts and explore ways Virginia lawmakers can respond.

Virginia Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell and Fairfax County Board of Supervisors Chairman Jeff McKay – both Democrats – issued a joint statement on Wednesday decrying what they described as an “unemployment crisis” in Fairfax. 

“As we face some of the highest unemployment rates in nearly four years, it is evident that the leadership of Trump, [Gov. Glenn] Youngkin, Earle-Sears, and [Attorney General Jason] Miyares is out of touch with the realities facing working families,” Surovell and McKay said in their statement. “Their misguided approach to governance has resulted in real suffering for our residents, and it is unacceptable.”

VPM’s Jahd Khalil reported this week that Virginia lawmakers are standing by for a possible return to Richmond in September for a special session to address the fallout from Trump’s policies. Despite Republicans’ insistence that this is “what people voted for,” Trump and his administration’s actions to shrink the public safety net and enrich the wealthy are proving unpopular.

More than half the country, or 52%, disapproves of Trump, while 44% of Americans support him, according to an average of the latest polling on Trump calculated by The New York Times. And 55% of respondents to a survey from the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan nonprofit, agreed that cuts to the federal government will hurt the US economy.

Trump is even more unpopular in Virginia, with 55% of Virginians saying they disapprove of the job the president is doing, according to a new poll from Virginia Commonwealth University’s L. Douglas Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs.

The VCU poll found that Spanberger is leading Earle-Sears by a double-digit margin of 49% to 37% among registered voters in Virginia. 

Dogwood shared the June audio with the Earle-Sears campaign prior to publishing it with this story. The lieutenant governor’s campaign did not respond to requests for comment.