GOP Governor Candidate “Caught In Outright Lie” About Unemployment, Says DPV

Virginia’s Republican 2026 gubernatorial candidate, Lt. Governor Winsome Earle-Sears, sat down for a one-on-one interview with Fox News Sunday anchor Shannon Bream and said unemployment is down in the state of Virginia.

As seen below, Bream noted that Earle-Sears’s Democratic opponent, former Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger (D-VA), points to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics which shows that when Earle-Sears took office in January 2022, the unemployment was 2.7 percent, and it’s now 3.6 percent.

When Bream asked Earle-Sears, “Do you quibble with the data?”, the Lt. Governor said: “Well, what I’m telling you is we’re creating jobs. We have over 15,000 new business startups that never existed. So how is it possible that, you know, we have to figure out, what is the data? What are they measuring? I don’t know, I don’t know where they’re getting the stats from.”

The Democratic Party of Virginia has accused the Lt. Governor of lying during the interview. In a statement the DPV wrote: “Winsome Earle-Sears was caught in an outright lie about Virginia’s unemployment rate claiming ‘unemployment is down.’ Fox host Shannon Bream then pointed out that data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows the unemployment rate increasing from 2.7% to 3.6% while Sears has been Lt Governor. This year, unemployment in Virginia rose for seven straight months – the longest stretch since the 2008 Great Recession.”

Earle-Sears is not, of course, the first Republican to “quibble” — as Bream puts it — with data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In a controversial move this summer, President Donald Trump fired BLS commissioner Erika McEntarfer after the publication of what the Council on Foreign Relations called a “surprisingly bad” July jobs report. The president derided the report as “rigged” to hurt him politically.