Spanberger's week was even worse than you thought
How is this person not just a Republican?
I have rock-bottom expectations of Democrats and Virginia Democrats in particular, but Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger’s last week has been shockingly bad even by those abysmal standards:
Last Friday, she vetoed a bill that would have expanded and protected collective bargaining rights for state public sector workers.
On Tuesday, she vetoed legislation that would have protected voters from illegitimate purges from voter rolls.
Also: on Tuesday, she vetoed two bills that would have provided an affirmative defense and strengthened protections for defendants afflicted with mental illness.
Oh yeah: she also vetoed a law that would have established Virginia’s first statute allowing for class-action lawsuits.
Also: a veto on a law capping the use of private funds by election officials.
And: she vetoed a law that would have shielded universities from speech restrictions imposed by their boards similar to those pushed for by Trump.
On Wednesday, she vetoed a bill that would have outlawed ICE arrests at courthouses, polls, schools, and hospitals.
That same day, she also vetoed a bill that would have legalized the sale of marijuana in Virginia.
Also: on Wednesday, she vetoed legislation that would have lowered prescription drug prices in Virginia.
Spanberger, of course, expressed vague sympathies about the aims of most of these bills while making various pedantic / procedural / lawyerly complaints about how they could be improved. I don’t buy most of them, but that is also beside the point. Virginia is a blue state at the national level, but the governorship and control of the legislature remains up for grabs by both parties. Democrats have had a few very good elections here in recent years and now control both chambers, but it would be absurd to proceed as if we’ve consolidated permanent control of state politics. It’s entirely likely that Republicans are due for some wins in 2027, and that means that Democrats in Virginia only have a short window of time to move get stuff like this through. The obvious thing to do is for them to embrace the right’s “move fast and break stuff” mindset, making big changes as quickly as possible and then going back and patching any real problems if there’s an opportunity.
Spanberger’s veto of the election finance bill illustrates this point perfectly. The bill would establish a $1000 cap on private funding for election administration, creating a barrier against corruption that would likely prove its worth sooner than later. The governor’s stated pretext for vetoing the bill is that it doesn’t specify the term for which this cap applies — is it $1000 an hour, a day, a week, a decade, or a century? — but this is just a case of invented ambiguity, taking advantage of the fact that a bill can literally always be more specific. The only reason private funding is allowed at all was to accomodate cases where (say) some friendly old lady brings a poll worker a coffee or where someone needs to pay-out-of-pocket when they run out of pens. $1000 is just a fringe-case per-cycle exception and the courts would obviously understand this, but even if they didn’t the thing to do would be to pass the bill and then clean it up with an amendment if anyone were actually worried about this.
Virginia’s first CIA governor obviously isn’t worried about any of this. She’s a textbook example of the kind of right-leaning Gen-X Democrat who absolutely would have been a Republican if she had been born a decade earlier or a hundred miles to the south. And if she were a Republican, Democrats would predictably be decrying all of these veteos as an executive’s hyper-partisan obstruction of a fairly moderate legislative majority.
How is this pragmatic?
Instead, however, right-wing Democrats like Neera Tanden and Ethan Wolf have declared Spanberger “the future of the Democratic Party.” Centrists like Virginia Democratic operative Matt Royer have spent the last several months running victory laps over her 15-point win in November, and this has become the centerpiece of their case that her politics are a more pragmatic recipe for success than politicians like Zohran Mamdani, who won by narrower margins.
One problem with this comparison is that while Spanberger’s margins may seem impressive in a vaccuum, they are far less impressive in context:
Virginia’s shift blue in recent years may not guarantee victory at the state level, but it has given Democrats a growing advantage. Over the last decade, Democratic identification among likely voters in the state has grown by 5 points. But by that measure alone Spanberger underperformed: her margin was only 3.7 points wider than Ralph Northam’s was a decade ago (against a much stronger opponent, by the way).
Virginia’s politics have always been unmistakably thermostatic, predictably reacting to whoever the last governor was and the current president is; the latter trend, I suspect, is only amplified by the fact that Virginia is one of only a few states to elect its governor in the year immediately after presidential elections. This is why Democratic gubernatorial candidates perform 14.3 points better when a Republican is in office than when a Democrat is in office. That fact alone means that Spanberger only improved on what one might have expected after McAuliffe’s 2021 defeat by 2.9 points.
Perhaps most revealing: as Josh Mound points out, Spanberger’s vote share was identical to what the Virginia House of Delegates won.
Place in context, all of these comparisons point in the same direction: Spanberger mostly just won because she had a (D) next to her name. This is particularly embarrassing given Trump’s enormous unpopularity, especially in Northern Virginia where his federal layoffs have impacted a disproportionate number of well-off and politically active voters. Between Trump, the thermostatic advantages of following a Republican governor, Virginia’s expanding Democratic population, and her fortune in sailing through Democratic primary season unopposed, Spanberger should have been pulling in Saddam Hussein numbers. Instead, she only won by 15.
That said, Spanberger’s very bad week should remind us of a point I made immediately after her November win — one that completely undercuts all of this celebration of her margins. How exactly are those 15 points helping us right now? Imagine that you are a teacher who wants to unionize because your wages are too low, or a voter whose registration has just been illegitimately purged, or a man with severe autism who has just been sentenced to life in prison, or a mother who was just kidnapped by ICE while she was picking up her child from school, or an epileptic who can’t afford his anticonvulsant medication. What was the advantage of winning with the votes of 263,636 disaffected Republicans instead of with the vote of one more guy from Charlottesville DSA? Both get the Democrat in office, but only of these strategies gets you good political outcomes.
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