Commentary: Early poll Is Sobering for Spanberger, But It’s a Wake-Up Call, Not An Epitaph

The first report card on Gov. Abigail Spanberger’s still brand-new term is in, and she can’t be happy with it. I’m hearing she’s decidedly unhappy.

A new survey by the Washington Post and George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government showed an even split on her job approval less than three months into the job.

Forty-seven percent of the 1,101 registered Virginia voters surveyed at the end of March approved of her performance and 46% disapproved. Because the poll’s margin of sampling error was plus or minus 3.4 percentage points, that’s a dead heat.

It’s a low mark among governors in the poll that dates to the George Allen administration, but Spanberger is the only governor whose performance the poll measured less than three months into a term.

But it’s safe to say that Spanberger — Virginia’s first woman governor — has had no appreciable honeymoon in this chaotic political environment despite winning with 58% of the vote last fall, the highest Democratic share in a governor’s race since 1961.

According to the poll, a slight plurality (45%) felt that Spanberger swung too far left since she took office with a towering inaugural address in January. Forty-five percent felt she was just about right and 7% said she was too conservative.

Historically noted: Gov. Spanberger’s shining moment

But how much of that accrues to Spanberger and how much owes to legislative Democrats, particularly the newly enlarged and emboldened Democratic House of Delegates majority who opened the floodgates for progressive policy initiatives?

If she is to be faulted, it should be for remaining largely invisible and ceding the spotlight to the Speaker Don Scott and Senate President Pro Tem Louise Lucas. Effective, successful governors can’t be wallflowers, especially in today’s fragmented media environment.

Spanberger was elected as a centrist on a pledge to make Virginia more affordable. That’s not what Virginians saw coming out of Capitol Square.

Democrats wholly own Virginia’s policymaking machinery. If they overshoot their mandate or get mired in internecine squabbles like the House-Senate impasse over extending data center tax breaks that has stalemated a new state budget, they’re wholly to blame. Fair or not, blame usually adheres to the party’s most visible figure: the governor, especially when the administration has not communicated its intentions and actions clearly and broadly.

“Democratic legislators’ various tax proposals played into the hands of GOP opponents who were quick to declare that the Democrats are the tax-and-spend party. That rubbed off somewhat on a Democratic governor, even when she had not supported those proposals,” said Mark Rozell, dean of GMU’s Schar School.

Nor should Spanberger imagine that fellow Democrats in the Legislature share her discomfort. Lucas gloated over it, trolling Spanberger in a social media post Wednesday by noting, “my numbers are doing just fine.”

If legislative Democrats considered Spanberger a pushover, some of her amendments and vetoes to the more than 1,200 bills passed in 2026 may give them pause.

She slammed the door on Democratic bills that would have fast-tracked a casino in Tysons Corner (sponsored by the Senate majority leader, no less) and another that would have legalized electronic so-called games of skill. On the issue of immigration, she removed a provision that would have allowed the state attorney general to sue on behalf of persons detained by ICE agents in schools, courthouses, polling places and hospitals.

Some of Spanberger’s perceived leftward lurch owes to her backing for this month’s constitutional amendment referendum to allow for extraordinary partisan redistricting that could leave Republicans with just one of Virginia’s 11 congressional districts.

She knew as a candidate that the mid-decade redistricting fight would demand much of her political capital from the outset. The Post/GMU poll showed that 52% of likely voters (53% of registered voters) favored the measure compared to 47% of likely voters (44% of registered voters) who opposed it.

“The governor, in effect, inherited a highly divisive issue (the referendum) and she had little choice other than to support it. She would look weak and offend her party’s base had she stood down on the issue,” Rozell said. “It was inevitable that it played a big role in Republicans framing her as just another liberal partisan pretending to be a centrist.”

In a titanic and unprecedented springtime statewide general election campaign, nonprofits that don’t disclose their donors have spent tens of millions of untraceable dollars electioneering for the referendum’s passage or defeat. Relentless attacks on Spanberger have exacted their toll.

There’s a disconnect between Spanberger’s tepid popularity and popular initiatives she and her party have championed. A majority in the poll approved of requiring utilities to make homes of low-income families more energy efficient. Solid pluralities favored boosting the minimum wage to $15 an hour, cutting red tape on small solar energy systems, incentivizing mixed-income housing construction and barring pharmacy benefit managers from dictating which drug stores patients must use.

The poll is an early wakeup call for the governor. It needn’t be an epitaph.

Spanberger is transitioning from being one of 435 U.S. House members to the one in charge. In that executive capacity, she’s learning to distinguish friends from enemies and see which is more treacherous. She’s reasserting herself as the centrist once famously wary of — even confrontational toward — her own party’s sinistral fringe.

New governors must learn the game and master it on the fly, say former top aides to two successful governors.

Republican George Allen inherited a deal brokered by his predecessor to locate a Disney theme park in Prince William County. Allen’s chief of staff, Jay Timmons, recalled how the project drained much of the new administration’s bandwidth as it worked to launch the ambitious agenda that powered Allen’s landslide win, including parole abolition.

“The Disney legislation disrupted – but did not upend – our planning. We played a lot of catch up to respond to the priorities of others, instead of (or in addition to) the priorities of the governor.  As a result, approval fell a bit early on,” said Timmons, now the executive director of the National Association of Manufacturers.

Spanberger has been harmed by her own party, Timmons said. She was wrongly blamed for Democratic-sponsored tax increases that she never supported and that never passed, he noted.

“Social media was brutal and the charges went viral,” Timmons said of bills that never reached her desk. “The electorate seems to have decided she took her eye off the ball that they hired her to carry.”

“I always found that once the whirlwind of the legislature abated and the governor could actually do the job of being the governor, public opinion settled and began to rebound,” he said.

Bill Leighty was chief of staff to another governor whose moderation sometimes dismayed fellow Democrats as the House’s GOP majority taunted him.

His boss, Mark Warner, played nice with Republican leaders for two years before he used his bully pulpit to win over public support, outflank the GOP and pass budget-balancing fiscal reforms that raised some taxes. Warner’s 80% job approval mark in late 2005 is the highest score for any outgoing governor in the Post/GMU poll.

To Leighty, this script looks familiar. He suspects Spanberger, like Warner, will be OK.

“The Ds (Democrats) don’t think she is aggressive enough, and the Rs (Republicans) think she is too aggressive,” Leighty said. “Ergo, she’s right where she has always been comfort-wise.”

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