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RICHMOND — House Speaker Todd Gilbert fought off an effort to oust him from Republican House leadership on Sunday, defeating a group of GOP delegates who blamed their party’s losses in Tuesday’s elections on his failure to stand up to Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s political team and their strategy to highlight abortion late in the campaign.
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In a closed-door meeting in Richmond on Sunday afternoon, Republicans voted to make Gilbert (R-Shenandoah) their minority leader in the House of Delegates.
“I’m honored that my colleagues have once again put their trust in me to lead our Republican team for the coming term,” Gilbert said in a written statement issued by the caucus, which did not disclose vote totals. “I look forward to working with our caucus to advance our shared Republican values and serve as a check on the worst far-left policies put forward by the incoming Democratic majority.”
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Gilbert’s survival spared Youngkin yet another humiliation in a week full of them, as his party failed to hold the House and flip the Senate in elections the governor had billed as a referendum on the first half of his term. The outcome on Election Day dashed Youngkin’s hopes for enacting his conservative legislative agenda in his two remaining years and for making a much-teased, 11th-hour entry into the 2024 presidential campaign. News the next day that the federal government had picked Maryland over Virginia for the FBI’s new headquarters topped it off.
Even though Gilbert held on, the infighting within the Republican House Caucus could complicate the party’s efforts to regroup in a newly blue General Assembly.
In the aftermath of the elections, some Republican delegates wanted Gilbert out, saying he should have stopped Youngkin and his Spirit of Virginia political action committee from putting so much emphasis on the governor’s plan to ban most abortions after 15 weeks.
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Abortion appeared to be a motivating force for Democrats and female voters in the elections, with all 140 seats in the House and Senate on the ballot. Virginia is the only Southern state that has not imposed new restrictions on the procedure since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year.
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Virginia Republicans have tended to play up kitchen table issues — such as the economy, schools and crime — and downplay abortion. Youngkin himself did so in the 2021 general election, after winning the GOP nomination on a vow to “protect the life of every Virginia child born and unborn.”
After abortion seemed to hurt Republicans across the country in last year’s midterm elections, Youngkin tried a new approach — playing up what he billed as a compromise between total bans adopted in some states and the laws on Virginia’s books, which allow abortion for any reason through the second trimester (about 26 weeks) and in the third only if three doctors agree it’s needed to preserve the mother’s life or health.
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He proposed banning abortion after 15 weeks, with exceptions for rape, incest and when the life of the mother is at risk. His PAC promoted that stance with a $1.4 million TV campaign launched in late September.
Three delegates who sought to oust Gilbert, and who spoke on the condition of anonymity earlier in the weekend to share private caucus deliberations, said the governor’s PAC did not consult candidates about the ad buy or the flurry of mailers on the same theme that the PAC sent to some districts.
The three said they had no problem with Youngkin’s abortion stance — most Republican candidates took the same position — but they objected to aggressive advertising of it late in the cycle. Some delegates believed they had sufficiently responded to Democrats’ attacks on that topic and had turned the page to new issues, such as crime or the economy.
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The delegates complained more broadly about what they described as a top-down approach from the PAC, which they said did not consult with individual campaigns on strategy before blanketing their districts with TV ads and mailers. Some also said the PAC ignored their concerns and made last-minute demands for them to appear at Youngkin-led rallies and other events, which they said were primarily meant to promote his presidential prospects. Some also contended that decisions about which campaign would get funding were not transparent.
Youngkin’s office declined to comment on the controversy, as did Gilbert’s spokesman. Spirit of Virginia officials also declined to comment, but PAC Chairman Dave Rexrode and executive director Matthew Moran have defended the PAC’s work on X, formerly known as Twitter.
The delegates unhappy with Gilbert sought to install Del. Terry Kilgore (R-Scott), a veteran legislator from the state’s far southwest corner, as minority leader instead.
Kilgore said in a brief statement to The Washington Post ahead of the vote that he fully supports the governor and his agenda, but “this isn’t about the Governor — it’s about the future of leadership in the House of Delegates, and making the changes we need to make to be successful in the long term for the Virginians we represent.”
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