Hey there,

The big news in my world is that I’ve moved my office from my basement out to the shed in my backyard.

My basement had little to no natural sunlight. My shed has a nice window where I can bask in the fall sun.

I’m typing at the former owner’s workbench. It somehow feels like a metaphor for the decline of American manufacturing and rise of email jobs, but that’s for another time.

Below, I share an update on Virginia’s economic outlook and some poll numbers that show this fall’s statewide elections are closer than previously thought.

Plus, I recommend you watch Tim Robinson’s new show on HBO.

Michael O’Connor

Reporter, Dogwood

Maintenance workers Enaytullah Hafizi, left, originally from Afghanistan, Eric Frimpong, center, originally from Ghana, and Melvin Palmer, right, originally from Sierra Leone, fix an overhead light at Goodwin House Alexandria, Thursday, Oct. 16, 2025, in Alexandria, Va. (AP Photo/Eric Lee)

The other day a message landed in my Facebook DMs from a bar manager who’d lost his job at an Arlington restaurant.

It’s one of the joys – and sometimes one of the perils when the messages come from trolls – of being a reporter. People seek you out to share their story. In this case, I had the good fortune to be hearing from Ricardo Ortiz who found me by googling around for Virginia reporters.

Ortiz shared a bigger story I hope to tell in the coming weeks, but for today, I included some of his thoughts about the local economy, which is suffering from the Trump administration’s mass layoffs of federal workers.

“People that live in the DMV that have been laid off and stuff like that, well, they don’t have the money to go out as much anymore,” Ortiz said.

Ortiz’s take on what he sees as a longtime worker in the service industry jibes with a new economic forecast from the University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center. At a high level, Weldon Cooper’s report said Virginia’s economy is slowing and the state’s rising unemployment figure will continue to go up as 2025 comes to a close.

“Historically, Virginia has been kind of very similar to the nation, or maybe even better than the nation, and what we’re seeing now is Virginia sort of underperforming the nation, at least for the time being,” Eric Scorsone, Weldon Cooper’s executive director, said on a press call Monday.

You can read my coverage here.

Click here to listen to me ramble about my work as a recent guest on Network NOVA’s Friday Power Lunch show.
Virginia Mercury’s Charlotte Rene Woods has a good update on how federal funding cuts are impacting rural public health in Virginia.
Toby Cox at WHRO reports on the “intense demand” seen at a recent Norfolk food distribution event amid the ongoing federal government shutdown.

(Caleb Woods/Unsplash)

I’m not a polls guy. But today we got a nonpartisan poll on the upcoming elections that’s hard to ignore.

The poll was from Virginia Commonwealth University and showed Democrat Abigail Spanberger’s lead over Republican Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears in the race for governor tightening to seven points and Attorney General Jason Miyares overtaking his Democratic challenger and ill-advised texter, Jay Jones, by three points.

The VCU poll also showed that Republican and hard-right radio host John Reid is just one point behind state Sen. Ghazala Hashmi. That’s despite an intraparty attempt to oust Reid and reporting linking him to an account that shared sexually graphic images from accounts that shared Nazi imagery and graphic sexual violence.

What a time to be alive.

The numbers are sure to give Democrats some heartburn as we are two weeks away from Election Day. But for some coolheaded analysis, here’s what Sam Shirazi, one of Virginia’s most followed poll guys, had to say about the VCU numbers:

“AG race is very hard to get a read, but it’s going to be close,” Shirazi said on X. “There will be lots of undecideds in most polling making it hard to predict a winner.”

(Tim Mossholder/Unsplash)

I’m a big Tim Robinson fan. If you don’t know who he is, you probably recognize the meme where the guy is dressed up as a hot dog saying, “We’re all trying to find the guy who did this.”

For my money, Robinson is a genius, and I’ll watch whatever he does. Lucky for me, he’s out with a new show called The Chair Company on HBO.

My wife and I watched the first episode and loved its mix of office culture satire and mystery thriller.

It’s giving Twin Peaks, if you’re into that kind of thing.

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