Any time a Democrat comes along who dares to fight back, the Republican outrage machine goes to work. Political toughness becomes “divisiveness” and governing is made scandalous. That’s exactly what is happening right now to Abigail Spanberger.
A former CIA officer who flipped a swing House district in northern Virginia twice, Spanberger has now been governor of the commonwealth for roughly four months. She is the first woman to hold that office after winning in November with 57% of the vote, the highest share for any Democratic gubernatorial candidate in Virginia since Albertis Harrison in 1961. She gave the Democratic Party’s response to Donald Trump’s State of the Union address in February. And now the spin machine has kicked into overdrive.
Led by Fox News, which published 11 stories critical of Spanberger in the past week, the right has unleashed its full media arsenal on the Democrat. The central charge is that the governor, after campaigning as a moderate, has quickly revealed herself to be a tax-and-spend liberal and a radical ideologue. “She campaigned as a moderate and lied through her teeth,” Fox News’ Mark Levin wrote on X, claiming that Spanberger is “moving at high speed to permanently radicalize and change the state.” Conservative media personality Meghan McCain, who welcomed Spanberger to office by sharing an edited picture of her wearing an emergency escape hood during the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, when she was a congresswoman, recently posted: “Abigail Spanberger is a radical, communist, psychopath cosplaying as a normal person.”
The same machinery was deployed against Joe Biden: take a Democrat who campaigns as pragmatic and broadly appealing, then repeatedly insist they are secretly a Trojan horse for the “radical left.”
Spanberger has taken the blame for virtually everything that General Assembly Democrats have done, even if she hasn’t signed their legislation into law. A new ad released by a group founded by Fox News contributor and former Trump White House economist Steve Moore slammed the governor over her affordability promises as Virginia Democrats propose new taxes on dry cleaning, gym memberships, pet grooming, digital services, food and beverages. “Spanberger promised to be a pro-business moderate Democrat,” Moore complained to Fox News. “Maybe she should be known as ‘Scam-Berger.’” Over the weekend, Trump warned in a Truth Social post that her policies are triggering a tax base exodus similar to those of New York and California. “She is adding so many Taxes, a Food and Beverage Tax, Digital Services Tax, Utilities Tax, and more,” Trump wrote. “It has lost its Energy, Vitality, and Strength. People are leaving that would never have even thought of doing so!”
It’s a compelling narrative — if only it were real.
But, as Spanberger’s office said in response to Fox News, she did not sign those tax bills into law “because the General Assembly never passed them, and the bills never reached her desk.” In a post on X, the governor put it plainly: “The president and his allies are talking about taxes that our state legislature never even voted on and I certainly didn’t sign.”
In the modern conservative media ecosystem, however, the distinction between talking points and reality is often beside the point. The goal is to “flood the zone,” as Spanberger herself put it, and create so much noise that the truth struggles to break through.
In the modern conservative media ecosystem, however, the distinction between talking points and reality is often beside the point. The goal is to “flood the zone,” as Spanberger herself put it, and create so much noise that the truth struggles to break through. So people don’t hear about the bills she actually did sign — legislation to lower energy costs, strengthen schools, make housing more affordable and attract billions in business investment to the commonwealth. She signed legislation to bring Avio, a rocket manufacturer, and Hitachi’s transformer operations to Virginia. She rejoined the multi-state Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative — the cap-and-invest program that her Republican predecessor, Glenn Youngkin, had pulled the state out of. Instead, the right-wing media ecosystem generates its own weather system of false consensus.
After Spanberger signed a series of gun control bills on Friday, including legislation regulating firearm manufacturers’ liability, ghost guns and partners of individuals charged with misdemeanor domestic violence, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who previously compared the governor to a “Bond villain” sent her a letter warning that the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division was looking to file a lawsuit. Dhillon, a rumored favorite to replace former Attorney General Pam Bondi, told right-wing podcaster Dana Loesch that Spanberger is “a leftist and she doesn’t like guns or gun rights. You know, former CIA operative, and so she’s all about big government. And so she’ll sign that and then we’ll end up challenging it.”
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Virginia is a complex state — politically, culturally and economically. Like Pennsylvania, it’s effectively two states in one: densely populated, with highly-educated urban and suburban regions alongside vast rural areas that lean heavily conservative. Governing such a state requires balancing competing interests, navigating entrenched divisions and, yes, making decisions that will inevitably anger one side or the other.
Traditionally, governors are given a 100-day grace period before their performance is judged in earnest. In Spanberger’s case, critics barely waited 60 days. A Washington Post-Schar School poll conducted unusually early showed a nearly even split in the governor’s approval and disapproval ratings. With 47% approving of her job in office, her support has dropped by double digits since her election. Predictably, that result has been seized upon as evidence of a collapsing governorship.
But context matters. Compared with Virginia governors from both parties since 1994, Spanberger has the highest disapproval rating at this point in her term. But hers is only one percentage point lower than the early-term rating for the commonwealth’s last Democratic governor, Ralph Northam.
One criticism of Spanberger, though, deserves a fair hearing because it is grounded in something real, even if the conservative framing of it is dishonest.
One criticism of Spanberger, though, deserves a fair hearing because it is grounded in something real, even if the conservative framing of it is dishonest. In February Virginia’s Democratic-controlled General Assembly moved aggressively on a redistricting plan, which requires a constitutional amendment approved by voters. If passed in the April 21 referendum, the plan could knock out four of the state’s five Republican members of Congress. Spanberger had initially suggested the plan went too far. Then she went along with it. This was a genuinely awkward moment for a governor who had pitched herself as a pragmatic centrist, and she paid for it in the headlines.
But let’s be honest about what we’re talking about: Republicans complaining about partisan redistricting while enthusiastically endorsing Trump-directed gerrymanders in red states across the country is selective outrage deployed as a weapon. Democrats were not invited to be partners in the previous decade of GOP map-drawing. The right’s sudden passion for bipartisan redistricting is purely situational. After all, Republicans recently circulated a mailer suggesting that voting rights for Black Virginians would be stripped unless residents voted against redistricting.
The right also wants to make hay out of Spanberger’s support for the National Popular Vote Compact, which she signed into law on Monday. The agreement among states to circumvent the Electoral College and award their presidential electoral votes to the nationwide popular vote winner takes effect when states representing a majority of electoral votes — 270 of 538 — pass the legislation. With Virginia, the compact now has 222 electors, 48 short of activation. This is worth watching closely because it represents a genuine challenge to the Electoral College architecture that has repeatedly given Republicans the presidency despite losing the popular vote. The bill has been introduced in Wisconsin, Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Nevada. With Virginia’s support, it now stands a chance of taking effect before the 2028 presidential election.
The best thing Abigail Spanberger can do now is exactly what she has been doing: tell the truth about what she signed, sign things worth defending and confront the attacks head-on..
“The President lied about me today on social media,” Spanberger forcefully responded to Trump on X. “While he tries to distract from the soaring gas prices and economic worry he has caused.” And as her office made clear in a statement to Fox News: “The volume of misinformation — spread across social media and repeated in press coverage — made a clarification necessary. The facts are straightforward.”
One of Biden’s biggest vulnerabilities was that for long stretches, especially at the beginning of his presidency, his absence allowed the media to narrate his agenda. Right-wing media branded the Covid-19 relief legislation he signed into law as “socialism.” Spanberger is in that exact window right now. The “bait-and-switch moderate” narrative is being constructed in real time. If she doesn’t aggressively and repeatedly define her governorship, that vacuum will continue to be filled by Fox News.
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media analysis by Sophia Tesfaye
