By Molly Ball
APPOMATTOX, Va.—Abigail Spanberger is favored to take back the Virginia governor’s mansion for the Democrats this November. Her bigger test may be taking back her own party.
Sitting in a funky bookstore cafe in this speck of a town in the central part of the state on a recent afternoon, Spanberger said she hopes her election will send a message of normality to the rest of the country. “That we don’t want any more of the chaos,” she said, leaning forward in her chair. “That we want people who are focused on serving.”
But the most important message Spanberger sends, in an election that will be closely scrutinized as a bellwether of the second Trump presidency, could be to Democrats. The nomination of a democratic socialist, Zohran Mamdani, for mayor of New York City has seeded a narrative that the party’s left wing is on the march—a narrative that Republicans have eagerly embraced to paint Democrats as radical.
With polls showing her well ahead of her Republican opponent, Spanberger is heavily favored to flip the blue state’s governorship back to the Democratic column after four years of Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who cannot run for re-election. Virginia bars governors from serving consecutive terms.
As the Democratic Party wrestles with historic unpopularity and a post-2024 identity crisis, moderate Democrats point to Spanberger, a self-styled pragmatist, as a more politically viable face for the party than the likes of Mamdani.
“Spanberger is the future of the Democratic Party if we intend to reclaim the White House from MAGA and be viable again in the Senate,” said Jonathan Cowan, president of the center-left think tank Third Way. “The message that will come out of the Spanberger win is that the noise and the fireworks might be in the bluest cities, but the road map to regaining power nationally runs through Virginia.” Candidates backed by the left-wing groups Democratic Socialists of America and Justice Democrats haven’t flipped a single seat from red to blue over the past decade, he noted.
Asked about Mamdani as she nursed a coconut latte on a sweltering summer day, Spanberger demurred, saying she is focused on Virginia. But the 46-year-old mother of three and former three-term swing-district congresswoman has a history of pushing back on the left.
In the wake of the 2020 election, Spanberger castigated her colleagues in a private phone call, saying some Democrats’ embrace of socialism and defunding the police had caused the party to lose seats. In 2021, she chastised then-President Biden for his expansive agenda, telling the New York Times, “Nobody elected him to be FDR; they elected him to be normal and stop the chaos.”
Biden subsequently called her, opening the conversation with, “Hello, Abigail, it’s President Roosevelt.” Nonetheless, Republicans note that she voted in lockstep with Biden’s agenda. She also backed both of Trump’s impeachments and was a high-profile advocate for the first one.
Spanberger prided herself on working across the aisle in Congress. The Bipartisan Index, a ranking maintained by the nonpartisan Lugar Center and Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy, last year dubbed her the most bipartisan member of the Virginia delegation and 19th most bipartisan member of the House overall.
Her signature achievement, which Biden signed just before he left office, was a bipartisan bill to increase Social Security benefits for recipients of public pensions. Some fiscal conservatives criticized it for its $200 billion price tag, but it passed the House and Senate by overwhelming margins.
Former Rep. Garret Graves, a Louisiana Republican who teamed up with Spanberger on the bill, noted that members of both parties had been trying and failing to pass the legislation for decades. Graves said he and Spanberger both had to push back on their respective parties’ leadership.
“She and I did not always agree on strategy, and a few times we fought like brothers and sisters,” Graves recalled. But they agreed they wouldn’t make any decisions or promises without consulting each other. “I stuck to my word and she stuck to her word, and ultimately we achieved the goal of getting something done.”
The Virginia Police Benevolent Association, which hadn’t backed a Democrat since 2009, cited the legislation in endorsing Spanberger on Aug. 13.
Born in New Jersey, Spanberger moved to Virginia at age 13 when her father got a new position with the U.S. Postal Inspection Service. She followed in his footsteps and became a postal inspector before joining the Central Intelligence Agency in 2006.
She worked as an undercover CIA case officer, recruiting foreign assets in countries she declines to name—work she describes as giving her an ability to connect with people from wildly different backgrounds.
After eight years at the agency, however, she gave up her dream job and moved back to Virginia to raise her three daughters near family in the Richmond exurbs. She took a job with a consulting firm, volunteered for the gun-control group Moms Demand Action and led her daughter’s Girl Scout troop.
In the wake of the 2016 election, she joined the first wave of the so-called “resistance,” as scores of highly credentialed women ran for office in reaction to Trump’s first election. In 2018, she defeated then-Rep. Dave Brat to flip a district Trump had carried by six points.
Spanberger has focused her gubernatorial campaign on pocketbook issues, rolling out detailed plans to reduce the costs of energy, housing and healthcare while largely avoiding hot-button issues. In interviews, she didn’t stake out clear positions on how schools should handle transgender children, which has become a major campaign issue, or to what extent the state should cooperate with federal immigration raids.
Republicans charge Spanberger would be soft on crime and illegal immigration. At a recent rally in the D.C. exurb of Vienna, Va., the Republican gubernatorial nominee, Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, sought to link Spanberger to Mamdani.
“Make no mistake about it, the ideas that my opponent has are socialist in nature, because it’s all about what government is going to do and to take your money to do it,” she said.
But Republicans are privately pessimistic about Earle-Sears, an awkward candidate who has churned through campaign staff and made few efforts to appeal to the middle of the electorate. Spanberger has raised more than twice as much money for her campaign, and has vastly outpaced Earle-Sears in airing television ads across the state. The state GOP chairman was recently compelled to publicly insist that the campaign wasn’t, in fact, a “clown car.”
Even with a more formidable ticket, Republicans would likely have an uphill battle in the state, which has gone for Democrats in the past five presidential elections. Virginia also is home to one of the nation’s largest concentrations of federal employees due to its proximity to Washington—a group that has borne the brunt of Trump’s slashing of the federal workforce.
Trump’s first term powered Virginia Democrats to their best political cycles in a generation, noted Bob Holsworth, a Richmond-based political analyst and former dean of Virginia Commonwealth University. “It’s certainly possible for a Republican to win in a circumstance that’s not driven by a negative national environment,” he said. “But they would need a different candidate.”
Spanberger, he said, is playing it safe, seeking not to disrupt a dynamic that favors her. But it’s fair to question whether her cautious, technocratic campaign is best suited to what’s manifestly an age of extremes, with demoralized Democrats enraged at party leaders they see as not putting up enough of a fight.
Spanberger said she’s focused on what matters to people. “Hire me to execute—that’s how I’ve campaigned in the past,” she said. “You don’t necessarily need to find a villain; you need to fix the problem.”
Spanberger’s events across the state have drawn robust crowds of educated liberals, anxious about an imperiled democracy and eager to go to the polls to strike a blow against Trump. But when asked if Democrats are doing enough to push back, to a person they emphatically said, “No.”
“I’m a former Republican. I believe in Spanberger because I believe in freedom and patriotism,” said Kevin Mikas, a 73-year-old State Department retiree who came to see Spanberger in Charlottesville. “We’ve got to be more than just against Trump.”