It would be apt to describe the new Democratic governor of Virginia the same way Joe Biden described Barack Obama when the two men were running against each other for president in 2008 — “articulate and bright and clean.” Abigail Spangerger looks the part.
In her trim blue suits, she gives or gave the impression of being ready to govern the commonwealth efficiently and effectively. But looks deceive, and you cannot judge this book by its cover. If you had never seen her kempt conventional exterior and were to base your expectations only on reading a list of her actions since taking office on Jan. 17, you’d picture a radical leftist of the most repellent kind, perhaps replete with purple hair and a pierced eyebrow.
What you see with Spanberger is not what you get. It is also not what you were led to believe when she was hopefully trawling for votes all over Virginia. Looking at the path she chose, it’s clear that the Abby Road to power is a crooked one.
Back in the mists of time, the autumn of 2025 to be precise, Spanberger carefully made it seem as though she would focus on middle-class economic concerns, such as about the price of everything from groceries to housing.
But that hasn’t happened, and the reason it hasn’t is that the new governor is the very model of a modern bait-and-switch Democrat. Her party loves her for it. The gulf between her presentation and reality is the measure of her cynical approach to elections, treating them as confidence tricks in which winning is all and honor is nothing. Her modus operandi dispenses with the notion of democratic accountability. It is all about conning citizens rather than persuading them. In this approach, you do not show voters what you are or what you believe, then convince them that such attributes and policies are what is best for their future. Instead, you pretend you are not what you are and hope the dupes will be fools enough to fall for it.
If the bigwigs of the Democratic Party didn’t approve of this hustle, they wouldn’t have chosen Spanberger to make the party’s official televised response to President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address. Getting the nod to do that, and thus to become the face of the party, did two things. It made plain that her deceptive way of operating and her ideology precisely fit what the blue party wants to be. Second, it inserted Spanberger into every conversation about who might be the Democrats’ presidential nominee in 2028.
She never looked in danger during her election campaign and eventually won the governorship by 15 points. This clearly showed her ability to win. Against this, it has to be said that her challenge was not difficult. She was blessed by running against a weak Republican opponent, Winsome Earle-Sears. And although her state is often said to be a purplish-blue battleground, it is in truth increasingly dominated by its populous deep-blue north, where federal workers and contractors cling to the belly of the federal government and depend for their living upon a flow of dollars from across the Potomac River. So Spanberger was always favored to canter to victory.
It may be objected that Spanberger was running to replace Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a conservative Republican, so how can it be said that Virginia is really a blue state?
The answer stems from the particular reasons Youngkin was elected. Back in 2021, even the naturally leftish voters of northern Virginia had become enraged and alarmed about their children’s education within the public school system. This was when woke madness had reached its zenith, when pornography had made its way into children’s school libraries, and dishonest extreme leftist propagandizing on race and gender seemed ever ascendant. At this moment, at the climax of the election campaign, former Gov. Terry McAuliffe committed an existential blunder, asserting, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”
Instructing parents to butt out of their children’s business detonated like a depth charge in the campaign. It crystallized the fears of mothers and fathers that their sons and daughters were being led horribly astray. In response, voters decided it was urgent for them to put an adult back in the room or, more specifically, into the governor’s mansion in Capitol Square, in Richmond. So they chose Youngkin.
The problem is that sensible conservative government carries the seeds of its own demise. If you restore order and sanity after left-wing madness, you are likely to produce a sense of calm that may tip over into complacency. Voters look around them after a few years of orderly and sober government by leaders such as Youngkin, and they see no great cause for concern. In these circumstances of reduced worry, they are more susceptible to the blandishments of leftish politicians who promise affordability and kinder, gentler, somewhat higher-spending government. It also helps when those politicians are also in the party opposing President Donald Trump. So when voters saw a pinkish Democrat who successfully concealed her deep-blue agenda, they voted for the plausible fraudster.
Spanberger benefited from the simple fact that voters had had years to get bored with the team in power and were ready to switch to the other one. Now, Virginians are learning the high cost of choosing a governor inclined to fiscal incontinence and dangerous irresponsibility on affordability, regulation, social policy, immigration, and criminal justice.
In seeking to replace Youngkin, Spanberger talked sympathetically about voters’ problems paying their bills, blaming Trump rather than his predecessor, who, in truth, ignited the inflation from which the nation still suffers. Once she was safely installed as governor, she promptly strode leftward to make everything more expensive.
There was deception even in the setting chosen for her State of the Union rebuttal, Colonial Williamsburg. It was in Williamsburg, the now-preserved historic district, that America’s founders gathered to approve the Virginia Declaration of Rights, which helped shape the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. The venue suggested that Spanberger and modern Democrats hold fast to conventional and mainstream views, when they are actually aggressively detaching themselves from those guiding principles.
Spanberger’s address and her successful campaign are seen by Democrats as the template for the success they crave and can probably expect in the November midterm congressional elections.
Speaking to the Washington Examiner, Kollin Crompton, deputy communications director for the Republican Governors Association, summed up the new governor’s agenda, saying, “In just a few weeks as governor, Abigail Spanberger has turned Virginia into a sanctuary state, driven major businesses out of Virginia, and pushed to raise taxes on Virginia families. … Life is harder now under Spanberger than it was under Republican leadership in Virginia, and it should serve as a warning sign to every voter in the midterms.”
Her proposals supposedly to help Virginians with affordability, involve sleight of hand, said Republican strategist Brian Kirwin, who called them “nothing proposals,” and added that they amounted to “form a task force on this, do a study on this. She’s a one-term governor, limited by the Constitution, and her big agenda was to form task forces, and commissions, and studies. … It’s softball. No commission, or study, or task force has ever made life more affordable, and none of them have ever acted quickly. So it’s a whole bunch of window dressing.”
Spanberger, with her left-wing Democratic legislature, passed 16 “Affordable Virginia Agenda” bills in her first month, and not one of them will lower the cost of anything. Most will raise prices.
One, for example, mandates that utilities spend more on energy efficiency programs for low-income housing, which means they’ll be subsidized by higher bills for everyone else. Another energy bill forces utilities to spend a certain amount on battery storage, but if this were efficient, the utility companies would already be doing it; it will merely raise utility costs.
Another Spanberger bill makes it easier for cities and counties to block new housing construction, and yet another blocks landlords who want to evict delinquent tenants. Both will push rents upward. Another bill regulates healthcare premiums for smokers, so their higher costs will be shifted to nonsmokers.
Worst of all, Spanberger is forcing her government into collective bargaining with unions, a practice that was banned until 2021, then became optional, and soon will be obligatory. When Fairfax County opted in, it immediately posted its first budget deficit in years. Up went taxes. So much for affordability. What has put Fairfax in the red, the new governor now intends to impose on the whole state. Pandering to labor unions, largely because they run and pay for Democrats’ election campaigns, raises the costs of government services and is the polar opposite of dealing with affordability.
In another Spanberger con, she told voters last summer, while seeking their support, that she did not support gerrymandering Virginia’s congressional map to give Democrats extra seats in Congress.
But now she has signed a redistricting initiative that will be put to voters in April that is designed to increase the Democrats’ advantage on Capitol Hill from a 6-5 distribution of seats to a 10-1 distribution. Thus, Republican votes, which account for about 47% of all votes cast in Virginia, would get 9% of the caucus in Congress, and Democrats would get 92% of the caucus while accounting for only 53% of the votes. And the whole antidemocratic project is veiled by a deceptive ballot question, approved by Spanberger, in which voters are asked blandly to approve redistricting because it would “restore fairness.”
Rep. Ben Cline (R-VA), whose seat will be vaporized by Spanberger’s bait-and-switch gerrymander, told the Washington Examiner, “She’s a model for how two-faced Democrats need their candidates to be. If she told the truth on the campaign trail, she would never have been elected, so she concealed her true leftist agenda, as well as her plans to gerrymander Virginia’s congressional map, until after she had taken office.”
Perhaps the most enraging left-wingery of Spanberger is her declaration on Day 1 of her administration that official state bodies would refuse to cooperate with federal law enforcement and, in particular, would not hand over illegal immigrants to Immigration and Customs Enforcement even when they had committed violent crimes. The inevitable happened. A criminal illegal immigrant was released in Virginia rather than being handed over for deportation, and he allegedly went on to stab a Virginian to death.
Abdul Jalloh, from Sierra Leone in West Africa, is charged with the cold-blooded murder of Stephanie Minter, a 41-year-old mother from Fairfax County. He entered the United States illegally in 2012 and had been arrested 30 times for assault, drug possession, firing a weapon, identity theft, larceny, rape, and other crimes. He had even been convicted of a previous stabbing.
Minter would now be alive if Virginia were not run by a leftist Democrat. And that leftist Democrat was chosen to run Virginia because she lied consistently and deliberately to the people of her state about who she is.
There is a real difference between Spanberger and New York’s new mayor, Zohran Mandami. But it is a difference of presentation, not substance. Both have glossy exteriors. He is extreme, a socialist who does not believe in America and who is happy to see it undermined, and to contribute to its undermining in whatever way he can. Spanberger, similarly, is extreme, like most of the rest of her party, and willingly participates in the undermining of her state and country.
Mamdani says frankly what he will do, while Spanberger conceals it. Pick your poison. If you vote Left, you might get someone who governs destructively after saying they will do precisely that. Or you may get someone who will govern destructively after saying they won’t. But they are on the same team. And they call themselves Democrats.
Hugo Gurdon is the editorial director of the Washington Examiner.
