Tomorrow, Sept. 19, begins the 2025 fall election with early voting in Virginia, culminating on Election Day Nov. 4, with all three statewide offices on the ballot – for governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general – all 100 state delegate offices and key local elections, like those in the City of Falls Church where six candidates are competing for four of the seven seats on the Falls Church City Council and five candidates are competing for four of the seven seats on the Falls Church School Board.

Cutting to the chase, the News-Press is endorsing for these Falls Church elections the following:

For City Council: incumbents Marybeth Connelly, Laura Downs and David Snyder, along with Arthur Akin.

For School Board: incumbents Kathleen Tysse and Anne Sherwood, along with MK Hughes and Sharon Mergler.

We also endorse the Democrats for statewide and delegate races, being Abigail Spanberger for governor, Ghazala Hashmi for lieutenant governor and Jay Jones for attorney general, and incumbent State Del. Marcus Simon for re-election in the 13rd district that covers Falls Church.

We also back darn near every Democrat running for state delegate seats statewide, because this is the first major election since Trump has come to power with the near full backing of the Grand Old Party, so we in Virginia have a special opportunity to send a very loud and important message to the nation and the world with this election. It couldn’t be more important.

But we are not running the table for Democrats overall. We have chosen again to endorse David Snyder, who has run to hold his seat on the City Council every election since he first won the job in 1994 and was the unsuccessful Republican candidate in the first election in 2001 for the reconfigured state delegate seat here against the late and beloved Del. Jim Scott.

We continue to back Snyder as a conscientious leader in our community even though we are on different sides of many, not all, issues, and because he made a major statement of leaving the Republican Party last year to disassociate with Trump and what he stands for.

We know the local Democratic Committee has struggled with whether or not it should endorse him, too, but has chosen not to because the City Council election is technically a non-partisan race.

We are confident in our endorsement decisions, also, not only because of what we’ve observed with our own eyes and ears covering local government here week in and week out for, low, these many years, because we have sought important counsel from among those who work behind the scenes in City Hall and at the City schools. We are mainly motivated by a desire to get it right for our readers and all citizens of Falls Church.

In this important election, we urge active participation, to study, to engage and to exercise this greatest of all gifts of our now-challenged democracy, to choose who will lead us.