A new poll from Roanoke College shows Democratic gubernatorial candidate Abigail Spanberger with a significant lead over her likely Republican opponent, Lieutenant Governor Winsome Sears.
The Institute for Policy and Opinion Research (IPOR) at Roanoke College interviewed 690 Virginia residents between Feb. 17 and Feb. 20, 2025. The survey has a weighted margin of error of 4.66%.
Party affiliation of respondents to the poll:
- Democrat 35%
- Republican 27%
- Independent 25%
- Other/None 12%
86% of the people polled said they were registered voters.
Respondents were asked: “[IF REGISTERED] As you know, Virginia will elect a new governor in November. If the election were held today and you had to decide right now, would you vote for..”
39% of respondents said they would support Spanberger, and 24% said they would support Sears.
32% chose undecided.
4% said they would vote for someone else.
“Still hungover with joy or grief from the elections of 2024, Virginians haven’t yet focused on November 2025,” said Dr. Harry Wilson, interim director for IPOR and professor emeritus of political science at Roanoke College. “Even with one-third undecided, a candidate would prefer to be in Abigail Spanberger’s position with a 15-point lead over Winsome Earle-Sears. But there is an eternity of political time and much work to do before this election takes center stage.”
Republicans pushed back on the sample of respondents used in the poll.
“This isn’t a poll, it’s a game of Marco Polo in the ocean,” said Matt Moran, a senior advisor to Youngkin. “The methodology is garbage and the weighting needs an ozempic shot. This poll is about as accurate as my four year old trying to color inside the lines during an earthquake.”
The only other potential candidate in the gubernatorial race is former Del. Dave LaRock, who confirmed last week that he is considering running for the Republican nomination.
Spanberger is the only Democrat seeking the nomination.
The filing deadline is April 3.
More from the poll:
- 53% of respondents approve of Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s job as governor, while 39% disapprove.
- 37% of respondents approve of the job President Donald Trump is doing, while 59% disapprove.
- 37% of respondents have a favorable view of Spanberger, and 37% have an unfavorable view.
- 59% of respondents prefer a progressive tax system, compared to 40% who prefer a flat tax.
- 81% of respondents generally favor increasing opportunities for legal immigration to the U.S.
“With regard to taxes, no one likes to pay them, but respondents would be happy to make the wealthy and corporations pay more,” Wilson said. “On the issue of immigration, Virginians would like to see more legal immigration, but aren’t too unhappy with more restrictions on those coming to the U.S. illegally.”
Methodology
Interviewing for the Roanoke College Poll was conducted by the Institute for Policy and Opinion Research (IPOR) at Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia, between Feb. 17 and Feb. 20, 2025. A total of 690 completed interviews came from random telephone calls and texts to 377 Virginians, and 313 responses were drawn from a proprietary online panel of Virginians. Interviews were conducted in English. Cellphones constituted 44% of the completed phone and text to web interviews.
The phone sampling frame was provided by Marketing Systems Group with the landline sample generated by random digit phone numbers with area and exchange code coverage in proportion to the population density in Virginia; the cellular sampling frame was randomly divided so that half of the potential respondents would receive a text message with an invitation to complete the survey on their own before we would call them, and the other half would be called and interviewed over the phone by a live agent and sent a text message afterwards with an invitation if the respondent was not available when we called. Cint USA, Inc., facilitated the online panel with completion time and attention check questions used for quality control. IPOR regularly uses bootstrap analysis of post-survey results to control for quality within the blended frames.
Questions answered by the sample of 690 respondents are subject to a weighted error margin (including design effect) of plus or minus 4.66% at a confidence level of 95%. This means that in 95 out of 100 samples such as the one used here, the results should be at most 4.66 percentage points above or below the figure obtained by interviewing all Virginians with a home telephone or a cellphone. Where the results of subgroups are reported, the error margin is higher.
Quotas were used to ensure that different regions of the commonwealth were proportionately represented. The data were statistically weighted for gender, race and age. Weighting was done to match Virginia data in the 2022 one-year American Community Survey (ACS). The design effect was 1.559.
A copy of the questions and all toplines may be found here.