May 06, 2025

Coalition to Strengthen America's Healthcare

Welcome back to The Best & The Brightest. I’m Peter Hamby. Tonight, a dispatch from my hometown of Richmond, where an openly gay G.O.P. candidate for lieutenant governor is changing what it means to be a Republican in the Trump era. Talk show host John Reid is winning over the MAGA base by turning his cannons on Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who tried and failed to push Reid out of the race after he was linked to a salacious Tumblr account. The many-layered scandal is damaging the Virginia G.O.P.’s already dim hopes of winning the governor’s race in November—and scuffing Youngkin’s precious brand as he flirts with going national.

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Abby Livingston

Kemp fallout, cont’d: The most significant development for the Senate map this cycle was Georgia Republican Gov. Brian Kemp’s announcement yesterday that he would not be challenging Democratic freshman Jon Ossoff in next year’s Senate race. Kemp’s decision fits with the conventional wisdom that governors are less interested in going for the upper chamber these days (“The Senate sucks,” as one Hill source put it), but also squares with his contentious history with Donald Trump. (Recall that Kemp refused to go along with the president’s claims of Georgia voter fraud after the 2020 election.)Meanwhile, New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu also took himself out of contention last month for a 2026 Senate race to replace the retiring Democrat Jeanne Shaheen. It’s yet another setback for the G.O.P., since recruitment is the foundation of a party’s battleground plan in the general election. That said, it’s likely still premature to draw any sweeping conclusions about the cycle’s climate; we will have a much better sense of Republican recruitment in mid-July, which marks the end of peak season for candidates to announce their campaigns. What we do know is that Democratic candidates are coming out of the woodwork—a good problem for any party.In Georgia, a House Republican operative tells me, many potential Senate candidates are in watch-and-wait mode. Meanwhile, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that a potential Marjorie Taylor Greene Senate campaign has Republican leaders “on edge.” Would Trump endorse her? After all, he cleared the way for Herschel Walker’s disastrous campaign in the very same state in 2022. Greene had a middling first quarter, raising $655,000, which doesn’t exactly signal early-cycle planning for a Senate race. But it’s worth remembering she raised $12 million in her freshman term, and nearly $8 million in her second term. The small-dollar donations are probably there if she decides to open the faucets. I asked one Democratic Senate leadership aide whether party operatives are prepared to crack open their tested playbook of boosting the Republican primary candidate whom they see as least electable in the general—in this case, with M.T.G. “They will do what they need to,” the source said. This play has mostly worked for Dems over the past two cycles, but has also deeply concerned some in the party who worry the strategy could backfire and elevate an unqualified and/or incendiary MAGA loyalist. For now, the hand-wringers appear to be losing this particular debate.

The Virginia Monologues

A Republican sex scandal has upended the Virginia governor’s race—but not in the way that anyone expected, with the MAGA base flocking to John Reid, an openly gay Trump supporter, and turning on Glenn Youngkin for trying to push Reid out. “Trump broke the evangelical stuff,” said a campaign operative in Richmond. “There is purity, and there is winning. And they are both drugs, but one of them is a lot more addictive.”

Peter Hamby

Thanks to Donald Trump, we are confronted on a near-daily basis with vivid reminders that the Republican Party is not what it used to be. In Boston this week, Mike Pence was hanging out with the Kennedys, who bestowed upon him a Profiles in Courage Award for standing up to Trump on January 6. In Georgia on Monday, Gov. Brian Kemp, a God ’n’ guns Republican straight out of ’90s G.O.P. central casting, passed on a Senate run, essentially ceding the nomination to MAGA conspiracy theorist Marjorie Taylor Greene. But the tension between the G.O.P.’s past, future, and bizarre present also happens to be flaring right now in the worst possible venue for Republicans: Virginia, where the party’s brittle unity is being tested by a scandal involving an openly gay candidate, a Tumblr porn page, drag shows, and accusations of extortion leveled at Gov. Glenn Youngkin and his inner circle. It was already shaping up to be a difficult cycle for the G.O.P. in the commonwealth. “A horrible year for the ticket,” one experienced Virginia Republican told me. But until now, the governor’s race—this year’s most watched political campaign—had at least been following a predictable rhythm. Republicans are facing anti-incumbent headwinds blowing south out of Washington, especially with DOGE cuts landing hard in Virginia, home to almost 200,000 federal employees. The party’s gubernatorial nominee, Winsome Earle-Sears, is a Jamaican immigrant, a Christian conservative, and the state’s first female lieutenant governor. But she’s also a strange and dreary campaigner who has flip-flopped on her support for Trump and left a Rappahannock-sized wake of disgruntled ex-staffers behind her. “Bizarre and tone-deaf” is how one G.O.P. campaign vet in the state described her. Democrats, meanwhile, have their dream nominee, former congresswoman Abigail Spanberger, a moderate mom custom-built to appeal to suburban voters who care about public schools and economic development. The off-year Virginia race is always a political bellwether, a gauge of how voters in a purplish state are reacting to whoever is in the White House. With Trump at a lowly 38 percent approval rating in Virginia, Spanberger’s campaign has been coasting.

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Lording above it all is Youngkin, who won his race in 2021 by stirring up suburban discontent with Joe Biden. He’s term-limited to four years and leaving next year, but is still mindful of his legacy and reputation as he considers a future Senate or presidential campaign. A former private equity honcho at Carlyle Group, Youngkin became a quasi-MAGA star four years ago by threading a tricky Republican nomination process and then vanquishing former Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe, ably code-switching between friendly dad-in-a-fleece-vest and Fox News fire-breather, depending on the hour. During the 2024 G.O.P. primary, when Trump was rolling toward another victory, Wall Street donors occasionally floated Youngkin as a white knight who could save the party from another round of MAGA—amusing in hindsight, but a testament to his appeal with the megadonor set. But the days of Youngkin as a Republican rising star, with or without Trump in the mix, now seem quaint thanks to this new springtime scandal consuming Richmond. Youngkin and a top political aide are now facing MAGA grassroots fury for trying (and failing) to pressure the party’s nominee for lieutenant governor, longtime Richmond conservative radio host John Reid, out of the race, having discovered what Youngkin’s political outfit called “disturbing online content” attributed to Reid. The Youngkin cabal’s best laid plans are now backfiring in spectacular fashion, giving Reid new superpowers with the Republican base, and underscoring once again that MAGA voters don’t really care about a politician’s private life, so long as they oppose the hated establishment, whatever that term means in any given moment. “The Youngkin shine had been wearing off with a lot of Republicans before, but this really hurt him,” said Matthew Hurtt, chairman of the Arlington County Republican Committee. “If he built the party in 2021, he probably destroyed it with this Reid thing.” Here’s the CliffsNotes version: Reid is openly gay—the first openly gay statewide candidate for office in Virginia—a fact that hasn’t seemed to bother Republican primary voters at all, even in a state that gave rise to Pat Robertson and the Christian Coalition. Reid, a prep-school-reared son of a politician and loyal Trump supporter, basically clinched the G.O.P. nomination in April after his only rival dropped out of the race for health reasons. But two weeks ago, Reid posted a stunning video to Twitter, urging viewers “to send your kids out of the room” before watching. In it, Reid said he had been approached by some evangelical activists threatening to release photos of him at a Richmond drag show unless he ended his campaign. The activists had been fighting a losing war against Reid’s candidacy, calling it an affront to “biblical values,” with the Virginia Christian Alliance posting an open letter last month attacking his “homosexual lifestyle.” In his video, Reid said that “drag is not for kids,” but seemed rather unbothered by the threats from Christian right “radicals.” Instead, Reid dropped a bigger bombshell. He says Youngkin himself had called Reid personally, also pressuring him to drop out of the race—but for reasons other than attending a drag brunch. The governor’s team had obtained an old Tumblr page, attributed to a username that matched Reid’s social media handles, displaying a curated assortment of naked gay men. As one Richmonder told me, “Someone—it’s not totally clear who—went to the governor, and said, ‘Hey, there’s a lot of dick pics here.’” Youngkin said the material would be a “distraction” for Republicans as they faced a tough campaign. But there were two problems. First, I’ve been told that, as these things go, the photos on the Tumblr account were actually pretty tame. (The Washington Post described the pics as “ranging from male genitalia to milder fare comparable to an underwear ad.”) This was not nearly as scandalous as the Susanna Gibson episode in Virginia in 2023, when a Democratic candidate for the House of Delegates was caught livestreaming sex acts with her husband. Said one Republican macher in Richmond: “This was a lot of political capital for the governor to spend on something that really wasn’t a big deal. It’s weird.” The other problem for Youngkin: Reid is not the quitting type. He is a practiced media performer who immediately turned Youngkin’s pressure campaign to his advantage, delivering a passionate, straight-to-camera defense of his private life in the face of what he called discrimination. “I have been openly gay for 30-plus years,” Reid said defiantly in his Twitter video. “Am I really expected to answer every twisted, intrusive question about my previous relationships, every person I ever had sex with? Every dating app I was ever on? Must I share my gay Tinder profile, every profile picture on the internet? The 78,000 photos on Facebook? Every late-night text? Is anyone at the Richmond state capitol or in D.C. planning on doing the same?” He denied that the Tumblr page was his—a stretch, given that his digital fingerprints are all over it—and said he has never posted anything pornographic online. “Have I seen porn? Yes. Have I had one-night stands? Are my exes still in love with me? No. What more can I possibly tell you? Why am I the candidate who has to answer these questions? It’s because I am openly gay, and I have never bowed down to the establishment and I will not.” It wasn’t exactly the Checkers speech, but Reid had quickly seized control of the story and put Youngkin on his heels, accusing him and other nefarious, unidentified enemies of a smear campaign. Reid went on to accuse a top Youngkin political advisor Matt Moran, of extortion and defamation—which Moran later denied in an affidavit. Moran had met with Reid’s team on April 27 after the Youngkin call, telling them that further damaging research on Reid would come to light if he refused to abandon the campaign. Moran denied that he directly urged Reid’s team to end their campaign, until a recording of the meeting surfaced, contradicting his claims. “If [Reid] stays in the race, it is going to continue,” Moran said in the recording, which was obtained by the Virginia Mercury. “That hurts our candidates up and down the ticket. Him getting out of the race is the only way it stops, and then, yeah, it absolutely would have to stop.”

Moran resigned from Youngkin’s PAC over the weekend, an obvious tell that Youngkin was losing the fight he started and taking on water with the base. Hurtt, the Arlington G.O.P. chairman, sent an email condemning Youngkin to his list of 10,000 activists. “If this is how the governor’s political operation wants to close out his term in Richmond—by tossing a grenade into the statewide Republican ticket—it’s truly a shame.” Asked by reporters last week about whether he would continue to press Reid to drop out, Youngkin answered more in sorrow than anger: “The decision is John’s and up to John.”

“There Is Purity, and There Is Winning”

Reid has continued to play the whole incident to his advantage, stealing the spotlight from Earle-Sears and winning the affections of Republican voters who haven’t seemed very enthused at all about the party’s nominee for actual governor. (One Republican I spoke with floated a not-impossible hypothetical—that Reid suddenly becomes so popular with the base that he gets more votes than Earle-Sears come November.) Earle-Sears, who calls herself “a Christian first and a Republican second,” is clearly uneasy sharing the ticket with an openly gay candidate. Last week, Reid appeared at a packed Republican “unity rally” in Henrico, where he was supposed to be joined by Earle-Sears and the G.O.P. attorney general, Jason Miyares. But while Reid was rallying hundreds of newly energized conservatives and attacking “the Richmond swamp” for trying to silence him, Earle-Sears had changed her schedule to stay away. She opted to throw out the first pitch at a Richmond Flying Squirrels game across town at the Diamond, where the ball didn’t even make it to the plate. It had taken a full week for Earle-Sears to make her first public statement about the Reid-Youngkin imbroglio. Ultimately, she said, “It is his race and his decision alone to move forward. We all have our own race to run.” But as Earle-Sears slinks away and hides behind tweets and Facebook posts, other brand-name Republicans hailing from the party’s old guard are openly siding with Reid—including former governors George Allen and Jim Gilmore, as well as former Lieutenant Governor Bill Bolling. All of those men hail from an era when evangelical voters wielded enormous veto power over Republican primaries and would never have tolerated an openly gay candidate. That all changed with Trump, as one campaign operative in Richmond reminded me. “Trump broke the evangelical stuff,” this person said. “The base has managed to look past purity tests and say, Hey, we can elect a real son of a bitch and get stuff done! There is purity, and there is winning. And they are both drugs, but one of them is a lot more addictive.” Allen, the former governor and senator—who once employed Reid as a staffer, and has endorsed his campaign—told me that “standards have changed” for Republican voters over the years, and that a candidate’s sexual orientation isn’t relevant to their abilities. (Again: If Allen had uttered those words in 1993, there would have been hell to pay with the pastor crowd.) “It’s certainly a mess,” Allen told me. “But we don’t live in a theocracy. I hope people will look at John’s overall message and vision. That’s what they should be looking at in a candidate, not their sexual orientation.” When I asked about Youngkin or Earle-Sears distancing themselves from Reid’s defiant campaign, Allen wouldn’t comment. A party man in full, all he told me was this: “You gotta get all the wings of the Republican Party flapping together in the same direction.”

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