With just under a month before election day in the Virginia state elections — an election that will certainly be viewed as a bellwether for next year’s nationwide midterms — the big advantage the Democrats had enjoyed appears to have nearly entirely dwindled over the last few weeks.

In the headline gubernatorial race between Republican Lt. Governor Winsome Earle-Sears and former Democrat Representative Abigail Spanberger, the race is nearing toss-up territory, according to recent polling. A Cygnal poll taken between October 6 and 7 showed Spanberger with 49.2% and Earle-Sears with 45.2%. Back in September, Cygnal’s polling showed Spanberger with a 50.3% edge over Earle-Sears’s 43.2%.

Controversy over Democrat attorney general candidate Jay Jones’s vile text messages from back in 2022, when he was serving as a state delegate, expressing his death wish against then-Virginia House of Delegates Speaker Todd Gilbert and his children, has proven to hamper his election chances.

Yet despite Jones’s violent rhetoric, the Democrat Party of Virginia has stood behind him, as has Spanberger. And that is the primary reason Spanberger has seen her months-long lead over Earle-Sears shrink.

Jones is now down in the polls against Republican Jason Miyares, with Polymarket giving Jones just a 40% chance of victory. That it is that high is likely thanks to Democrats closing ranks, but as noted with Spanberger, it may end up hurting them.

Indeed, when controversy hit back in 2019 regarding a 35-year-old resurfaced yearbook photo of then-Democrat Governor Ralph Northam in either blackface or sporting a KKK hood, Spanberger was quick to condemn and call for his resignation.

However, this time around, when a fellow Democrat who is running to become the commonwealth’s top lawman has been exposed for expressing murderous desires against a conservative politician, Spanberger can’t seem to find the gumption or principle to declare him politically unfit for office and demand he suspend his campaign. She refuses to even withdraw her endorsement, only saying Jones’s words were “absolutely abhorrent.”

Her recent debate performance certainly hasn’t helped her either. Earle-Sears badgered her over her continued refusal to disavow Jones, at one point noting, “You are taking political calculations about your future as governor. Well, as governor, you have to make hard choices, and that means telling Jay Jones to leave the race.” It was a theme Earle-Sears hit on repeatedly, observing vis-à-vis Spanberger, “She has no courage.”

In fact, when Spanberger was asked if she would allow boys who claim to be “transgender” into girls’ bathrooms and play on girls’ sports teams, she demonstrated her lack of courage by dodging, stating, “I think it’s important that we have parents and teachers and administrators making decisions about their individual schools, not politicians.”

It’s clear that Spanberger is trying to run a race not to lose, which means avoiding saying anything that might blow up her campaign, which the last Democrat candidate, Terry McAuliffe, did when he infamously said he didn’t “think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”

The problem is that Spanberger’s careful campaign strategy has turned her into a near-robotic candidate who appears to lack authenticity. Does anyone actually think she believes what she is saying? For example, the last question each candidate fielded at the end of the debate was the “fun” question: Who is your favorite U.S. president from Virginia? Spanberger’s answer was predictable and careful: “As a UVA alumna, I’m going to have to go with Thomas Jefferson. Because he started the university, with all due respect to graduates of other universities.” Earle-Sears, on the other hand, demonstrated her authentic quick wit, while also hitting home on her courage theme: “It would have to be the very first one, George Washington. He was a profile in courage. Absolutely. It is because of him we don’t have monarchs here. It is because of him that we have a constitutional republic.”

Will Earle-Sears be able to close the gap and overcome the overly careful and robotic Spanberger? Hopefully so, but it may be a tall order.