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(from left) Democratic gubernatorial candidate and former U.S. Rep. Abigail Spanberger; Former U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg
The gay former transportation secretary and Democratic star will join the pro-LGBTQ+ candidate for governor in Charlottesville.
Exactly two weeks before Virginians vote for their next governor, former U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg will appear alongside Abigail Spanberger at a get-out-the-vote rally in Charlottesville on October 21 in a campaign increasingly defined by competing visions of inclusion and identity.
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The event, scheduled from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m., comes as Spanberger, a three-term former congresswoman and the Democratic nominee for governor, escalates her contrast with Republican Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, who has repeatedly said she opposes marriage equality on “moral and religious grounds.” During the candidates’ recent televised debate, Earle-Sears said that her opposition to marriage equality and to protections against firing LGBTQ+ people because of who they are was “not discrimination.”
Spanberger’s campaign responded with a new ad that intercuts those comments with Earle-Sears’s past handwritten note on a General Assembly bill opposing same-sex marriage. The ad ends: “Winsome Earle-Sears — so far right she’s wrong for Virginia.”
The clash over LGBTQ+ rights and the backlash to President Donald Trump’s second term have placed Virginia’s off-year election into the national spotlight. A spokesperson told the Richmond Times-Dispatch that “Pete knows and understands the stakes for the election this November,” describing the race as pivotal for working families and for protecting health care access amid federal spending cuts and the ongoing government shutdown.
Buttigieg, who is gay and is raising 4-year-old twins with his husband Chasten Buttigieg, is lending more than just a national profile. In a recent conversation with New York Times opinion editor David Leonhardt, Buttigieg reflected on how Americans might recover from political exhaustion and polarization.
“I think part of what has to happen is a sense of a shared national project,” he said. “Even if we bitterly disagree on how those institutions were destroyed, we can come together on what we should build in their place.” He added that Democrats must become “more interested in what we can do next than in preserving the status quo that is being smashed to pieces.”
Buttigieg also connected today’s politics to the lessons of the marriage equality movement, which, he said, showed that “enormous change can happen when you have a willingness to play out that strategy over the long term.” The movement’s trajectory, he told Leonhardt, “shows us that enormous change can happen… It took ideas that were preposterous for one generation and made them consensus for the next.”
For Spanberger, that perspective reinforces her campaign’s closing argument: that inclusion and pragmatic governance must prevail over exclusion and grievance.
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