Abigail Spanberger is calling herself a moderate to try to win Virginia voters. “Too many politicians talk when they should listen, and divide instead of unite,” she said in her first TV ad for the governorship.
Her record suggests she is precisely the sort of divisive politician she is pretending to call out. While the typical House Democrat has a 10 percent lifetime score on the Heritage Action for America scorecard, Spanberger’s is just 5 percent.
In the ad, she also says she wants to “work to lower costs, let people keep more of their money, and make Virginia schools the best in the nation.” Again, her record suggests that she is making such promises because they are politically expedient to talk about. When it has actually come to lowering costs, letting people keep their money, and ensuring high-quality schools, Spanberger has failed.
She voted for President Biden’s disastrous spending measures, which raised costs for Virginia residents and reduced their purchasing power dramatically. That wasn’t enough: Spanberger insisted on gaslighting Americans by going on TV in 2022 and telling them that inflation was going down, despite the fact that prices remained far higher than they had been and were continuing to rise at the time.
Spanberger, who received $27,000 from teachers unions (more than any other House member), also promoted union-pushed school closures during the COVID-19 era, which hurt children in Virginia, especially those from the poorest backgrounds whose parents could not afford to put them in private school. Schools in Virginia stayed remote, and once they reopened, schoolchildren were forced to wear masks well after most other states had returned to normal.
She cared more about posturing to Democratic elites than she did about Virginia children being able to access the public education they deserved. It’s not surprising either that Spanberger, while advocating to keep kids out of public schools, was also opposing school choice at the time, and continues to oppose school choice in her gubernatorial campaign.
Additionally, she’s been soft on the border, voting against the Laken Riley Act that has gotten an MS-13 leader out of Virginia. That hasn’t stopped her from going hard on other issues: she’s been full-force on gender ideology. She voted against the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act of 2023, giving her a failed score on Independent Women’s Voice’s Riley Gaines “Stand with Women Scorecard.”
Deference to gender ideology by politicians has had real consequences for Virginians. In my county, Loudoun County, in 2021, a boy wearing a skirt entered the girls’ bathroom and sexually assaulted a girl. The school board and administration kept this a secret in order to pass a sex-neutral bathroom and locker room policy that summer. It gets worse: He was able to return to school and assaulted another girl because the school refused to take action.
As for parents who might object to their child’s likely fleeting desire to identify as the opposite sex, Virginia Democrats don’t think parents should have the right to stop their children from getting cross-sex hormones or mutilating surgeries in the name of “gender transition.” In fact, Spanberger campaigned with the Democratic delegate who spearheaded legislation to expand Virginia’s definition of child abuse and neglect to include parents who don’t affirm their child’s gender identity or sexual orientation.
This is not the future Virginians want, especially when Gov. Glenn Youngkin has been able to empower parents, secure economic freedom, and restore sanity to our commonwealth. Spanberger contributed in every way to the status quo that Americans voted against in 2024 — the status quo she is trying to distance herself from verbally, while continuing to vote in line with it, now that she sees that it’s politically inconvenient.
Spanberger’s public record shows that she is still beholden to everything she claims to oppose, and, far from being a moderate, is a radical progressive who will continue to fail us if she is elected governor.