Jim Geraghty of National Review Online highlights early reaction to Virginia’s new governor.
I wrote about Virginia’s new Democratic governor, Abigail Spanberger, and concluded, “‘campaign as a centrist, govern as a progressive’ is the oldest trick in the book, and it might as well be the unofficial motto of the modern Democratic Party. Considering how Richmond is changing, we may want to nickname that bait-and-switch maneuver ‘pulling a Spanberger.’”
This morning, the Washington Post unveiled the results of its first major poll of Virginians in the Spanberger era. Unsurprisingly, roughly half the state is perturbed to find that the Democrat who ran as a sensible centrist has triggered “Progressives Gone Wild” in Richmond.
“The approval mark for Spanberger is 13 percentage points lower than the average for Virginia governors in Post polling since the 1990s. Her near-even split between approval and disapproval is a worse net approval rating than the early-term scores of her predecessors in previous Post polls. It is also slightly weaker than ratings of her immediate predecessor, Glenn Youngkin (R), in a Post-Schar School poll last fall, showing he ended his term with 50 percent approval and 46 percent disapproval.”
So much for a new governor’s honeymoon period.
Virginia has never been a pro-Trump state, but as Glenn Youngkin demonstrated, it’s a purplish-blue state where a Republican can win when the political environment is right, or the Democratic nominee is particularly bad. Virginia’s political culture is not comparable to that of California or Hawaii or Vermont, and the state’s Democratic state legislators are foolish to pretend that it is.
Virginia’s governors are barred from running for consecutive terms, so it’s not like Spanberger must worry about her reelection bid. … There’s still a lot of road between now and when the Democratic presidential nominee will have to make his or her decision, but at the moment, it’s very hard to see what Spanberger would bring to the table that other running-mate options would not.
