It’s a warm Saturday morning in August as I pull up to Dominion Shooting Range in Richmond’s Southside.
I’m meeting one of Virginia’s gubernatorial candidates, Republican Lt. Governor Winsome Earle-Sears, to partake in an experience both candidates for governor are no stranger to: handling firearms. But the interviews I conducted for this story show those issues intertwine with folks across the commonwealth.
“Gimme the small Glock over here, number 44-yellow,” Earle-Sears says to Dominion owner Jerry Thompson.
“Okay, so that’s gonna be .22 caliber, is that okay?” Thompson replies.
“We have a saying in Jamaica,” Earle-Sears quips. “It’s not the size of the gun, but the bullet.”
The Republican candidate tells me her first time shooting was when she was in the military. She was given a M-16, a rifle similar to the one she holds in a famous photo used by Democrats to paint her as a second amendment extremist.
“And you had to be able to break it down in less than two seconds, all the way down to the powder keg, and then TIME!” she tells me, remembering her time training.
“How fast did you pick up on it?” I ask.
“I was good,” she assures me.
I ask her if she has any gun safety tips to share before we hit the range.
“Not exactly, except don’t shoot me. Keep your gun pointed away from me,” she jokes.
After we both empty our magazines, she tells me about her ongoing interest in Second Amendment rights, including her belief that Black women are among the fastest growing new firearm owners
“I think we’re just coming into our own and understanding we need to protect ourselves,” Earle-Sears says. “And the first laws against gun ownership were against Black people.”
On the policy side, Earle-Sears is reliably pro-Second Amendment. She tells me about her opposition to laws that could punish gun owners who fail to keep their weapons secured.
"Pray tell what happens when the criminal is breaking into your house, what are you gonna say, “hang on, Maybel, where did you put the key for the gun?’” Earle-Sears hypothesizes. “Is that what we’re gonna do?”
Democratic candidate Abigail Spanberger and I were supposed to go shooting in Fredericksburg, but the murder of Charlie Kirk happened a few days prior and we were unable to reschedule the date.
In a phone interview, Spanberger shared her extensive history with firearms as well. She said her first exposure was from her family members who hunted when she was growing up, but it kicked into overdrive once she entered training to become a federal agent.
“I was on the range everyday for training for weeks upon weeks. And once I was certified I would carry a gun every single day,” Spanberger, who features images of her at the range in her campaign ads. “And we would do regular qualifications, both on hand guns and shotguns.”
If she wins the governorship, Spanberger said she’d continue Virginia’s expansion of safe storage laws— think tax rebates for gun safes— but she’d also like to see limits on large capacity magazines.
“There have been real life examples of the point in time when the shooter needed to reload and people have been able to escape,” she said.
A win for either candidate could have a direct impact on the life of Clara Elliot.
Born and raised in Virginia, Elliot’s first exposure with guns was also as a child. She participated in Civil War reenactments with her father. She’s been in love with firearms ever since.
Now, in adulthood, she now travels from her home in Pennsylvania to the Commonwealth to teach classes with her company ATW Firearms Instruction.
About a week before I was at the range with Earle-Sears, I was at Cavalier Rifle and Pistol Club in Montpelier with Elliot when she said: “There’s a saying if you move far enough to the left you get your guns back.”
No longer a Virginia voter, Elliot said those like her have a vested interest in the outcome of this election because she fears for her rights on two fronts: as both a law-abiding gun owner and, well, her company ATW stands for Armed Trans Women.
“As a transgender person I believe all marginalized communities need to defend ourselves,” she says before walking me through an extensive gun safety course.
“A gun is always, always, always a tool of last resort,” she warns, making her students understand, if it comes to pulling the trigger, you may not know how the night will end.
“Anything you can do where you can get out of a situation where two people won't be going home at the end of the day,” she said, urging restraint whenever possible. “Cause, if you use your firearm in self-defense, you are going to jail… and the other person is going to the hospital, jail or worse.”
Earle-Sears support for gun rights is well known, but her campaign messaging around transgender students has dominated her discussions of policy.
I asked the GOP candidate why she’s picked this issue to focus on.
“I’m not taking a stand because it's the easy thing to do, of course it’s not easy. I’m being abused for it,” she said. “I’m being castigated for it. And it's almost like it's the civil rights movement all over again. But somebody has to say ‘this is not right.’”
If you’ve seen an Earle-Sears campaign ad or watched the recent candidate debate, her concern with “boys in girls bathrooms” is front and center.
Early October polling from Emerson College put transgender issues way behind the economy, housing and other so-called “kitchen table” concerns for Virginia voters.
And a Christopher Newport University’s Wason Center poll from last week gave Spanberger a 13 point advantage on transgender policies.
Governor Glenn Youngkin, who’s spent his term painting the removal of transgender students from bathrooms as a matter of parents’ rights, called the poll nonsense, saying Wason has failed to pick a winner in years.
“There’s just a massive common sense moment here,” he told Radio IQ at a recent event. “And the safety of our children, the dignity of our children has to go up the list, has to be a priority.”
But as Spanberger sees it, voters are more worried about their pocketbook than what she called Earle-Sears’ “vilifying kids.”
“Particularly efforts to heavily politicize a group of kids who need a bit of grace, and the adults around them to show thoughtfulness,” she said of her double-digit lead on the policy. “I’m not surprised by those numbers frankly.”
Spanberger also reiterated her disinterest in policing the state's trans kids from the governor's mansion: "I think those difficult conversations should happen between parents, teachers and administrators."
As for Youngkin’s theory on the Wason Center polling, the final poll of his 2021 election put the then-candidate within the margin of error against former Governor Terry McAuliffe. It also picked up on the likely Achilles heel in McAuliffe’s campaign: Democratic voters were significantly less enthusiastic before the state picked its first Republican governor in a decade.
Is Spanberger worried about a similar enthusiasm gap this year?
“Anyone who’s worried about costs, or scared for their personal rights. Or anyone scared about the direction of our politics and our country at this moment. Those people are motivated,” she said. “And I think there is a level of excitement but importantly there’s a level of resolute focus.”
Back at Cavalier Rifle and Pistol Club, Clara Elliot says interest in her courses from LGBTQ folks has skyrocketed in the wake of Trump’s second term and a recent spike in anti-LGBTQ violence: “My phone hasn’t stopped ringing.”
How that translates politically is complicated.
“We have two choices and that’s it. We have the choice of voting for somebody who will preserve our right to defend ourselves, but at the same time wants to take away our right to exist in public,” Elliot says as we pack up our guns after her in-depth shooting class. “On the other side we have people who want to support our right to exist, but they also want to take away our right to defend ourselves.”
“As marginalized communities that’s a very difficult place to be because there’s always going to be people who don’t want us around,” she adds.
Spanberger called Clara's concerns a "tragedy."
"Owning a gun is a personal choice, but the idea someone would feel so unsafe because of who they are, that they think their only recourse is to carry a firearm every day speaks to the need everyone, in all communities feels safe," she said. "And that safety must, public safety must be a priority for me for governor."
In an off-off year election where a candidate must motivate their base to come out, that lack of surety could spell trouble for Spanberger.
Meanwhile, that Wason Center polling which showed Republican voter enthusiasm up double digits in Youngkin's' race has Democrats up now, but only by a few points. In a further warning sign for Spanberger, it’s a seven point enthusiasm drop for Democrats from just last month.
Still, Narissa Rahaman with Equality Virginia PAC said she also wasn’t surprised by Spanberger’s lead on trans policy.
“Earle-Sears has no other policies to run on and she’s using an outdated page playbook from Trump’s 2024 campaign,” she said of the political effort that lost Virginia by 6 points. “She’s put all of her chips into ‘by attacking trans children, that’s a value Virginia voters will get behind.’”
“Virginia voters have very real issues that are impacting voters' daily lives," she added. "Where trans kids use bathrooms doesn't impact voters' daily lives.”
On the other side of the debate, Victoria Cobb with the Family Foundation of Virginia has long defended Youngkin and Earle-Sears’ efforts to remove trans kids from locker rooms.
“Since the last election, the conversation around transgender policies has moved from theory to reality,” Cobb said in an email to Radio IQ, likely referencing ongoing claims of religious discrimination from two male students in Loudoun County who claimed a trans male student in their school locker room made them uncomfortable.
In court filings last week Loudoun County Public Schools responded to those claims for the first time saying the boys in question engaged in a months-long bullying campaign against the trans student. And while the judge seemed open to those arguments, she maintained an order blocking punishment of the boys for now.
Elliot, meanwhile, offered one bit of advice to whoever wins Virginia's highest office.
"There have always been trans people and there will always be trans people," she said in a text message. "No attempt to legislate us out of existence will succeed, nor will any attempt to legislate away our right to defend ourselves, our families, or our community."
Early voting in Virginia’s gubernatorial election has already begun. Election day is November 4th.
This report, provided by Virginia Public Radio, was made possible with support from the Virginia Education Association.
