The off-year governor’s election in purple Virginia is almost always a win for the party that doesn’t hold the White House, but this year the race is showing how much Democrats have refused to learn their lessons from their massive culture-war losses of 2024.

The battle in the Old Dominion has all the hallmarks of Democrats’ White House defeat in November.

An uninspiring political-insider candidate, hand-picked by the party establishment, is running a campaign that relies on hype from friendly media.

She’s dodging questions about hot-button cultural issues — including trans athletes in school sports and men in girls’ dressing rooms — and betting she can coast to victory on resistance-fueled backlash to President Donald Trump.

A month ago, Democrat and ex-CIA spy Abigail Spanberger’s lackluster basement campaign was chugging along, spending big money on a plethora of ads slamming her opponent, Republican Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, as too conservative for the state.

Earle-Sears, a Marine Corps veteran, rode strong support from the Republican grassroots to become Virginia’s first female lieutenant governor and first woman of color elected statewide.

Thanks in part to a massive spending gap, Spanberger built up a double-digit polling lead over the summer; many in the GOP wrote off the race as lost.

But in recent weeks she’s stumbled badly over the case of Richard Cox, a biological man claiming........

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