DOGE will be on the ballot in this year’s biggest election

Spanberger’s party has spent every day of Trump’s second term so far defending federal workers, inviting them to share their personal stories even as Trump calls for Musk to “get more aggressive” in DOGE’s cuts. Democrats cheered last week when progressive groups helped organize protests at the town hall meetings of House GOP lawmakers.

Virginia Rep. Don Beyer catalogued the effects he felt during a meeting this week with constituents in the D.C. suburb of Arlington. “A scientist at the National Science Foundation, just let go. A guy who’d been laid off from NASA. A person at the Defense Department who expected to be let go in the next couple of weeks because he worked on a contract for USAID. The room was just filled with pain.”

Beyer added of the departing governor: “I know Glenn wants to be president in 2028, but it’s really important that he fight for Virginia citizens right now.”

Outside of Virginia, fired federal employees even left their state for the chance to interrogate Republican lawmakers about DOGE’s cuts. Daniel Scharpenberg, a 45-year-old IRS employee in Overland Park, Kan., drove 30 minutes on Monday to question Missouri Rep. Mark Alford, who faced an angry crowd at a suburban coffee shop.

“I wanted him to understand: Investments in the IRS lead to increased revenue, and firing people from the IRS increases the deficit,” Scharpenburg told Semafor.

Federal workers “are anxious all the time,” added Scharpenburg. He wasn’t satisfied with Alford’s answers, including a promise that DOGE would “right-size our government and get our deficit under control.”

Democrats have rejected that completely. In Virginia, the party has positioned itself as the bulwark against DOGE and further layoffs; the Democratic majority in the state legislature is using a special session to study what can be done.

Spanberger, a former CIA operations officer who briefly worked as a consultant after leaving the service, talks about that experience on the trail and connects her own government work to that of Virginians who chose public service only to get hit with DOGE cuts.

“Some people just don’t understand what it is to serve a mission,” she said. “They don’t understand what it’s like to work long hours and make less money than you’d make in the private sector. You go home and you think, ‘Because of what we did, there’s not going to be a veteran who might die by suicide. There’s not going to be a nuclear disaster somewhere.’”

Some Republican lawmakers have bristled at the questions they’re facing back home about cuts to reliable federal employers, and they’ve sought guidance on how to respond.

In Virginia, Earle-Sears has straddled the line between support for Trump’s agenda and sympathy for worried federal workers.

“He’s making an audit of who’s doing what,” she told the Associated Press this month, only to later tell government employees on X that “we see you,” directing them to information about unemployment benefits and potential jobs.

Despite her early Youngkin endorsement, Earle-Sears got a primary challenger on Wednesday: former state legislator Dave LaRock, who has endorsed a “Virginia DOGE” while promising to “help displaced workers transition into private sector roles.”

Republicans who don’t have to face Virginia voters this year are far more skeptical that fired federal workers will have any electoral might.

“Seventy-seven million voices outweighed the voices at those town halls,” House GOP conference chair Lisa McClain said on Tuesday, deriding the Democrats’ “share your story” messaging campaign for federal workers. “Let’s talk about those who can’t tell their stories, like Laken Riley, who was raped and murdered by an illegal alien.”

One Republican line that I’ve frequently heard outside D.C., but never in Virginia, is that it’s an outrage how much wealth is concentrated in the capital’s suburbs. That wealth increased in Trump’s first term, when the president’s crusade against the “deep state” didn’t involve shrinking the federal workforce.

Nowadays, however, the idea of driving workers out of Virginia, D.C. and Maryland is pretty popular in the GOP — unless you live in Virginia, D.C., or Maryland.

That reality has given Spanberger a clear theme for her gubernatorial campaign and created a challenge for Earle-Sears. The Republican has posted five times about transgender issues in recent days, a clue about what she’d rather talk about.

Simply put: it’s always easier to campaign on what you actually believe. Democrats largely believe in the federal workforce as a force for good, both a boon to everyday Americans and a reliable career track for veterans. Republicans largely believe that most public-sector workers would be better off, and likely wealthier, in the private sector.

But that comfort increases with distance from the D.C. suburbs, where Spanberger can now claim a way to corral more support with every new DOGE email.