Abigail Spanberger talks for nearly three minutes without saying the name Donald Trump.
That’s an eternity in Democratic politics these days. The president lives to draw attention to himself, and his cuts to the federal workforce and federal spending are doing significant damage to the state of Virginia, where Spanberger is the Democratic gubernatorial nominee.
Yet one reason she is the early front-runner in the race is that Spanberger is so far refusing to allow rage about Trump to dominate the discussion. So when I ask where fighting back against the president ranks among her campaign priorities, Spanberger first talks about the new administration’s negative impact on everything from Virginia research universities to suburban Washington convenience stores to tattoo shops in coastal Hampton Roads. “I am focused on standing up for Virginians, and that means standing up to the Trump administration when their actions are hurting Virginia, Virginia’s economy, our workforce, our people, because that is the job of the governor of Virginia,” she tells me. “My favorite thing is when the pollsters come back and they’re like, ‘Wow, people are really talking about the economy.’ I’m like, No shit. Thank you for validating what I’m hearing on the ground.”
Spanberger’s campaign—in a purplish state that has an incumbent Republican governor but went for Kamala Harris last November—is an intriguing test case for a Democratic Party that’s being roiled by arguments over how to rebound. The strongest energy has been on the populist left, with Vermont senator Bernie Sanders and New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez drawing huge crowds for their “Fighting Oligarchy” rallies. I tell Spanberger I am not asking her to proclaim a solution for the party as a whole. “Everyone else does!” she says, both brightly and sarcastically. “We should just take a second and listen to people,” she continues. “We’re a broad-tent party, and I think we should celebrate that rather than trying to figure out, Okay, who was the most recently successful Democrat? Now everybody do the same thing.”
Spanberger, 45, is tough, funny, and passionately pragmatic, a profile forged by her eclectic background. The daughter of a cop and a nurse, she was born near the Jersey Shore (her mother and aunt went to high school with Bruce Springsteen). As a teenager, she moved to suburban Richmond with her family, eventually graduating from the University of Virginia. Spanberger, a mother of three daughters, later became a CIA case officer, specializing in terrorism and nuclear proliferation.
She owes her political career, in a sense, to Trump. In 2018, Spanberger was a member of a group of Democratic women who ran for Congress for the first time in reaction to Trump’s original White House win. She served three terms in the House of Representatives, compiling a bipartisan legislative record, twice declining to vote for Nancy Pelosi as Speaker, and occasionally criticizing President Joe Biden.
In November 2023, Spanberger announced she would leave Congress at the end of her term to run for governor in 2025. Mark Rozell, the dean of the school of policy and government at George Mason University, initially expected Spanberger to face a progressive primary challenger looking to “vanquish the opposition.” But no one emerged. “In statewide elections, Virginia can lurch from one party to the other, so it’s not really clear that running a more firebrand progressive would yield a good result for the Democrats in this state,” Rozell says. Stephanie Taylor, cofounder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee (and a native Virginian), cautions against extrapolating from Spanberger’s middle-of-the-road approach to the national Democratic debate. “She is working to include progressives and progressive values into her coalition,” Taylor says. “But I would be careful about reading too much into the race.”
The Republican nominee is the state’s current lieutenant governor, Winsome Earle-Sears. She is already trying to lash Spanberger to Biden, pointing to the Democrat’s congressional votes on pandemic-era federal spending bills as being responsible for boosted inflation. Spanberger parries that Earle-Sears and her Virginia Republican colleagues were happy to take credit for spending all that infrastructure money. But then Spanberger does something more interesting than throwing partisan punches: She comes close to admitting that mistakes were made. “The choices we made in an exigent circumstance are choices that, at that moment in time, I stand by,” she says. “Now, hindsight being 20/20, we should all be learning from what we did or didn’t do. And in the event, God forbid, we are ever in that sort of crisis mode again, we will make better choices.”
Spanberger is also making a choice when it comes to Trump and her campaign—hardly ignoring the president, but focusing on the wreckage rather than on resistance rhetoric. “While standing up to Trump, or the discussion of what Trump is doing, isn’t necessarily the thing that I lead with, it is the foundation on which there’s urgency to all of these types of things,” she says. Spanberger believes her part on the Democratic road to recovery is delivering on everyday needs, from broadband access to housing prices to teacher training, while defending core civil rights, including legal access to abortion. “Even talking about teacher residency programs—there’s a strong measure of success in those programs, and now the federal government has cut dollars.”
That framework makes sense given the job she’s seeking. One risk, though, is that Spanberger’s centrist approach might not meet the polarized moment and motivate enough Democratic voters in November. Spanberger scoffs at my suggestion. “Come to my events. They’re quite crowded and energized,” she says. “If you’re working 80 hours a week to pay the rent and put food on the table and, oh my God, hopefully your kid doesn’t get sick—they don’t want to be excited. They want somebody to fix it. They want to know that somebody cares and is decisively focused on the issues that matter to people. That is actually compelling. Whether it’s exciting, I don’t know. I’ll let people determine their own emotions.”
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