SEARS WANTS BLACK VOTERS TO RETHINK GOP
Virginia official seeks to expand Republican outreach
On a December afternoon, Winsome Sears, Virginia’s lieutenant governorelect, stood at the podium in the state Senate chamber where she will soon preside. It was empty but for a few clerks and staffers who were walking her through a practice session, making pretend motions and points of order. Sears followed along as the clerks explained arcane Senate protocols, although she occasionally raised matters that weren’t in the script.
That she was standing here at all was an improbability built upon unlikelihoods. Her campaign was a long shot, late in starting, skimpily funded and repeatedly overhauled. The political trajectory that preceded it was hardly more auspicious: She appeared on the scene 20 years ago, winning a legislative seat in an upset, but after one term and a quixotic bid for Congress, she disappeared from electoral politics. She briefly surfaced in 2018, announcing a write-in protest against Virginia’s Republican nominee for U.S. Senate, but this earned her little beyond a few curious mentions in the press.
Yet, just three years later, she is the lieutenant governor-elect,
having bested two veteran lawmakers for the Republican nomination and become the first Black woman elected to statewide office in Virginia history. She will take office Jan. 15, along with Gov.-elect Glenn Youngkin.
The focus on Sears’ triumph, in news profiles and in the post-election crowing of conservative pundits, has been on the rare combination of her biography and politics: a Black woman, an immigrant and an emphatically conservative, Trumpboosting Republican.
“The message is important,” Sears, 57, said over lunch with her transition team at a restaurant near the state Capitol. “But the messenger is equally important.”
This is the question that Sears embodies: whether she is a singular figure who won a surprise victory or the vanguard of a major political realignment, dissolving longtime realities of race and
partisan identification. Democrats say that there is little evidence for the latter, and that Sears won with typical Republican voters in an especially Republican year. But Sears insists that many Black and immigrant voters naturally side with Republicans on a variety of issues — and that some are starting to realize that.
“The only way to change things is to win elections,” she said. “And who better to help make that change but me? I look like the strategy.”
Sears began her political career in 2001, when she was elected to the House of Delegates, winning a seat that had been held by a Democrat. She did not run for reelection, instead launching an underdog campaign against Democratic U.S. Rep. Bobby Scott. Scott returned to Congress, where he remains, and the House of Delegates seat returned to Democratic hands. Sears was “done with politics,” she said.
While Sears was absent from politics, Barack Obama won the presidency, Trayvon Martin was killed, the Black Lives Matter movement rose up, Donald Trump was elected, and neo-Nazis marched on Charlottesville, Va.. Sears’ political example, as a Black woman Republican representing a majority Black district in Virginia, went unrepeated.
Republicans, she said, rarely even tried to sever the old ties between Black voters and the Democratic Party. This is partly why she decided to run this year.
“I just took a look at the field, and said, ‘My God, we’re gonna lose again,’ ” she said. “Nobody was going to reach out to the various communities that needed to be heard from: women, immigrants, you know, Latinos, Asians, Blacks, etc.”
Lieutenant governors in Virginia are fairly limited in their responsibilities, but they have a public profile — and they almost always run for governor. If Sears advocates for policies that improve the day-to-day lives of Black people and, more crucially, if she can persuade her Republican colleagues to go along, Wes Bellamy, a Black political activist and a former vice mayor of Charlottesville, said, “I think she’s gold.”