Opinion – Only months in, Spanberger and Democrats are losing their shine
Opinion
Opinion – Only months in, Spanberger and Democrats are losing their shine
In a mere matter of months, a Democratic rising star appears to be falling. A recent poll shows Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D) dropping dramatically. It could not come at a worse time, as she is also the face of a highly partisan redistricting attempt by Democrats in the state.
In November, Spanberger flipped Virginia’s governorship from red to blue with an impressive 58 percent of the vote to Republican Winsome Earle-Sears’s 42 percent. That was Virginia’s largest gubernatorial margin since 2009. So brightly had Spanberger’s star shone in her party that she was tapped to give the Democrats’ rebuttal to President Trump’s State of the Union speech in February.
Now, less than two months after her nationwide speech, this Democratic rising star is not shining so brightly. A Washington Post-Schar School poll conducted at the end of March, roughly six months after her election and less than three months after she was sworn into office, shows Spanberger’s approval rating is just 47 percent, 10 percentage points below her election total. Spanberger’s whopping November 15 percent-point win over her Republican opponent has been boiled down to a net plus-one approval, with her disapproval rating at 46 percent.
The Post noted that Spanberger’s approval rating is “13 percentage points lower than the average for Virginia governors in Post polling since the 1990s,” and that the “near-even split between approval and disapproval is a worse net approval rating than the early-term scores of her predecessors in previous Post polls.”
The surprise is not just how far Spanberger has fallen in this poll, but how far she has fallen from the moderate image she sought to showcase when giving the State of the Union response earlier this year. A Bloomberg piece, which called her 2025 win “an affirmation of Democratic centrism” and is posted on Spanberger’s website, stated: “A former member of the “mod squad” in Congress and former CIA officer, Spanberger, 46, also leaned into her bipartisan bona fides.”
Sixty-seven percent of the poll’s respondents expressed a “strong” opinion on Spanberger; however, those expressing strong disapproval (38 percent) easily outnumbered than those voicing strong approval (29 percent). And looking at independents, a proxy for the political center, Spanberger’s approval rating with those voters was net negative at 45 percent with 46 percent disapproval — a large drop from last November, when she won 59 percent of independents.
Democrats, having taken power in Virginia, are now proposing more than 50 tax increases in the state legislature — including taxes on dog walking, gym memberships, dry cleaning, and parcel delivery. This is doing nothing to reinforce the message of affordability that helped Spanberger and other Democrats win in 2025.
This is also not what Spanberger highlighted in February’s rebuttal — that she was “working with our state legislature to lower costs and make the Commonwealth more affordable,” she said. Higher taxes make costs go up, not down.
Even more tone-deaf has been Spanberger and the Democrats’ attempt to undo Virginia’s bipartisan redistricting plan and put in a highly partisan one. Spanberger and Democrats are seeking to put in a redistricting plan that would take Virginia’s House delegation from a 6-5 Democratic advantage to a 10-1 Democratic advantage.
Based on Democrats’ 50.8 percent popular vote in Virginia in the 2024 presidential election, Virginia Democrats are seeking to implement the most highly leveraged gerrymander in America. It would take their 2024 majority threshold, which was just 1.8 percentage points over 50 percent, and turn it into a nine-seat Democratic advantage in the U.S. House.
Not only does this have absolutely nothing to do with affordability, but it is also highly and embarrassingly partisan, off-message and out-of-bounds.
To make matters worse for Spanberger, the Democratic redistricting power grab looks like it is facing an uphill fight. Polling suggests only a very narrow lead for Democrats’ partisan redistricting proposal in a race where low turnout is likely. The measure leads by just 52 to 47 percent, according to the latest Washington Post/Schar School poll, and the highest-propensity voters lean slightly against it.
Early vote totals appear to be favoring Republicans. The Virginia Mercury reports that “Republican-leaning areas generally posting higher turnout rates so far. … Districts currently represented by Republicans are seeing stronger early turnout than those held by Democrats — an early signal of partisan intensity.”
It is one thing to attempt a power grab and succeed; it would be quite another to do so and then lose. If she does, then Spanberger will come away from this fight not only looking highly partisan, but also looking like a highly partisan loser. Spanberger risks going from being a star in the Democrats’ national machine to becoming a spanner in the works.
Virginia’s state motto is “Sic semper tyrannis,” meaning, “So always unto tyrants.” Spanberger may also want to remember another Latin phrase: “sic transit gloria mundi,” which translates, “So passes the glory of the world.”
J.T. Young is the author of the recent book, “Unprecedented Assault: How Big Government Unleashed America’s Socialist Left” from RealClear Publishing. Follow him on Substack.
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