Virginia’s new ‘centrist’ governor goes full California on Day One

Published January 27, 2026 8:00am ET



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“Nobody elected him to be [President Franklin Roosevelt], they elected him to be normal and stop the chaos,” then-Rep. Abigail Spanberger harshly said of then-President Joe Biden in 2021, after her Democratic Party lost the governorship of Virginia. Her point was that Biden had followed a radical agenda that betrayed how he had run and how the media had presented him: as a centrist.

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