And let's hear now from one of last night's winners.

William Brangham spoke earlier today with the winner of Virginia's race for lieutenant governor

about the issues that fueled her victory and those that powered Democratic gains across the country.

Last night, State Senator Gazala Hashmi defeated former conservative talk radio host Republican John Reed,

and she will assume the second-in-command

position in Virginia next year. Lieutenant Governor-elect, congratulations on your victory last night,

and thank you so much for being here on the program. Well, thank you so much. Delighted to join you.

In your victory speech last night, you talked about the challenges that Virginia faces,

mentioning that some of those, you argued, were generations-old challenges.

What do you see as the biggest issues facing your state going forward?

Well, the immediate challenges that we are facing here in Virginia are really compounded by what's happening in Washington these days.

You know, Virginia is home to tens of thousands of federal employees, and the Doge cuts that have started since January of this year have had a massive impact on so many Virginians. Those loss of jobs have

impacted the economy of Northern Virginia, but most importantly, they've seriously impacted

the lives of so many of our citizens. And on top of that, now we have the compounding crisis

of the federal shutdown, which is creating many hardships for those same families, but also accelerating the issues that we are seeing on a variety of issues, whether it's health care access, the cuts to SNAP benefits, and many of our issues around

rising costs. So those are the immediate concerns that we're facing here in Virginia.

A lot of the narrative about your victory in Virginia and other Democrats around the country

was that this was a repudiation of the Trump administration.

What do you make of that analysis?

I think for us here in the Commonwealth, that's certainly a very important part of it.

You know, Donald Trump's policies are not popular, most especially because of the critical

harms that we have seen on the ground here.

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