By Laura Vozzella
RICHMOND — U.S. Rep. Abigail Spanberger, a former CIA officer and swing-district Democrat who has clashed at times with her party’s leadership and left flank, announced Monday that she will not seek a fourth term next year and will instead run for Virginia governor in 2025.
With the release of a campaign video Monday morning, Spanberger, 44, became the first candidate from either party to formally jump into the contest. She is running to succeed Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R), who is barred by the state constitution from serving back-to-back terms.
“The greatest honor of my life has been to represent Virginians in the U.S. House. Today, I am proud to announce that I will be working hard to gain the support and trust of all Virginians to continue this service as the next Governor of Virginia,” Spanberger said in a written statement released by her campaign. “Virginia is where I grew up, where I am raising my own family, and where I intend to build a stronger future for the next generation of Virginians.”
Spanberger’s early-bird entry — nearly two years ahead of Election Day 2025 — gives Democrats more time to recruit candidates to run in the 7th District, competitive territory that stretches from the Washington exurbs of Prince William County nearly to Ashland in the outer reaches of Greater Richmond. Youngkin, by comparison, got into the 2021 race in January of that year and Democrat Terry McAuliffe, a former governor seeking a comeback, did so in December 2020.
Spanberger’s announcement is widely expected to prod candidates from both parties to hasten their own entries and begin chasing cash for a contest that last time cost Youngkin and McAuliffe a combined $137 million, a record-smashing amount for Virginia.
Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney, a Democrat, has let it be known for months that he is considering a bid for his party’s nomination. Politico reported last week that Stoney has assembled a team and plans to announce before the end of the year. On the Republican side, Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears and Attorney General Jason S. Miyares are widely expected to seek the GOP’s nod.
Reelected to a third term last year, Spanberger drew national attention in 2018, when she unseated Republican and tea party favorite Dave Brat in the 7th District, then a longtime GOP stronghold in a suburban-rural swath of central Virginia. She fought off challenges in the next two cycles, including last year after redistricting shifted the district north of the Richmond suburbs where she lives.
Born in New Jersey to a nurse and a police officer, Spanberger moved to the Richmond suburbs after her father moved from policing to federal law enforcement for the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, where Spanberger herself later worked.
Interested in foreign languages from the time she was a little girl with a babysitter from Ecuador, Spanberger mastered French, Spanish, German and Italian well enough to recruit spies overseas for the CIA, which she served from 2006 to 2014. She was the rare working mom in the ranks of CIA operatives, which she said worked to her advantage.
“I would say the pregnant lady waddling through foreign cities is easily overlooked,” she told The Washington Post in an interview during her 2018 race.
She and her husband have three school-age daughters.
Spanberger has used her past work in federal law enforcement and the CIA to appeal to independents and moderate Republicans in her swing district while energizing the Democratic base with her background as an organizer with the gun-control group Moms Demand Action.
In the House, she has sought to strike a similar balance, aligning with liberals on abortion rights, for instance, while pushing back on the “defund the police” rhetoric that some Democrats voiced in the 2020 cycle. Nonpartisan groups such as the Common Ground Committee have consistently ranked her one of the country’s most bipartisan lawmakers.
Spanberger never backed Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) for House speaker and went further last year by rebuking Pelosi’s handling of legislation that would ban members of Congress from trading stock, accusing her of putting forward legislation that was “designed to fail.”
Spanberger was critical of her party’s messaging and negotiating tactics related to President Biden’s original Build Back Better agenda, telling the New York Times in November 2021 that “nobody elected him to be FDR; they elected him to be normal and stop the chaos.”
That earned her a ribbing from Biden, who called without advance notice, greeting the congresswoman with, “Hello, Abigail, it’s President Roosevelt.”
In an announcement video titled “What Matters Most,” Spanberger pitches herself as a public servant who gets things done even in a highly polarized Washington.
“I committed to a life of service for our country and the people of Virginia,” she says, “first in law enforcement, then at CIA working to keep our country safe, and today in Congress, where, despite dangerous polarization, I have found ways to bring people together and focus on what really matters.”
She portrays herself in the video as attentive to kitchen-table issues — supporting veterans and small businesses, fighting addiction — while also presenting herself as a bulwark against conservative culture wars, including bans on books and abortion.
“When we rise above the chaos and division, we can focus on what matters most to Virginians: lowering prescription drug prices, growing the middle class, lowering costs and easing inflation,” she says. “No more using teachers and our kids as political pawns — it’s about focusing on recruiting and retaining teachers, so all of our kids can succeed. And stopping extremists from shredding women’s reproductive rights. Even in this moment of deep division, we can seize the opportunity.”