Abigail Spanberger talks for nearly three minutes without saying the name Donald Trump.
That’s an eternity in Democratic politics these days. The president lives to draw attention to himself, and his cuts to the federal workforce and federal spending are doing significant damage to the state of Virginia, where Spanberger is the Democratic gubernatorial nominee.
Yet one reason she is the early front-runner in the race is that Spanberger is so far refusing to allow rage about Trump to dominate the discussion. So when I ask where fighting back against the president ranks among her campaign priorities, Spanberger first talks about the new administration’s negative impact on everything from Virginia research universities to suburban Washington convenience stores to tattoo shops in coastal Hampton Roads. “I am focused on standing up for Virginians, and that means standing up to the Trump administration when their actions are hurting Virginia, Virginia’s economy, our workforce, our people, because that is the job of the governor of Virginia,” she tells me. “My favorite thing is when the pollsters come back and they’re like, ‘Wow, people are really talking about the economy.’ I’m like, No shit. Thank you for validating what I’m hearing on the ground.”
Spanberger’s campaign—in a purplish state that has an incumbent Republican governor but went for Kamala Harris last November—is an intriguing test case for a Democratic Party that’s being roiled by arguments over how to rebound. The strongest energy has been on the populist left, with Vermont senator Bernie Sanders and New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez drawing huge crowds for their “Fighting Oligarchy” rallies. I tell Spanberger I am not asking her to proclaim a solution for the party as a whole. “Everyone else does!” she says, both brightly and sarcastically. “We should just take a second and listen to people,” she continues. “We’re a broad-tent party, and I think we should celebrate that rather than trying to figure out, Okay, who was the most recently successful Democrat? Now everybody do the same thing.”
Spanberger, 45, is tough, funny, and passionately pragmatic, a profile forged by her eclectic background. The daughter of a cop and a nurse, she was born near the Jersey Shore (her mother and aunt went to high school with Bruce Springsteen). As a teenager, she moved to suburban Richmond with her family, eventually graduating from the University of Virginia. Spanberger, a mother of three daughters, later became a CIA case officer, specializing in terrorism and nuclear proliferation.
She owes her political career, in a sense, to Trump. In 2018, Spanberger was a member of a group of Democratic women who ran for Congress for the first time in reaction to Trump’s original White House win. She served three terms in the House of Representatives, compiling a bipartisan legislative record, twice declining to vote for Nancy Pelosi as Speaker, and occasionally criticizing President Joe Biden.
In November 2023, Spanberger announced she would leave Congress at the end of her term to run for governor in 2025. Mark Rozell, the dean of the school of policy and government at George Mason University, initially expected Spanberger to face a progressive primary challenger looking to “vanquish the opposition.” But no one emerged. “In statewide elections, Virginia can lurch from one party to the other, so it’s not really clear that running a more firebrand progressive would yield a good result for the Democrats in this state,” Rozell says. Stephanie Taylor, cofounder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee (and a native Virginian), cautions against extrapolating from Spanberger’s middle-of-the-road approach to the national Democratic debate. “She is working to include progressives and progressive values into her coalition,” Taylor says. “But I would be careful about reading too much into the race.”
