Is Abigail Spanberger Officially in Trouble?

A month out, the D.C. Democrat Establishment favorite is flailing

Oct 06, 2025

My latest is in today’s New York Post:

The off-year governor’s election in purple Virginia is almost always a win for the party that doesn’t hold the White House, but this year the race is showing how much Democrats have refused to learn their lessons from their massive culture-war losses of 2024.

The battle in the Old Dominion has all the hallmarks of Democrats’ White House defeat in November.

An uninspiring political-insider candidate, hand-picked by the party establishment, is running a campaign that relies on hype from friendly media.

She’s dodging questions about hot-button cultural issues — including trans athletes in school sports and men in girls’ dressing rooms — and betting she can coast to victory on resistance-fueled backlash to President Donald Trump.

A month ago, Democrat and ex-CIA spy Abigail Spanberger’s lackluster basement campaign was chugging along, spending big money on a plethora of ads slamming her opponent, Republican Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, as too conservative for the state.

Earle-Sears, a Marine Corps veteran, rode strong support from the Republican grassroots to become Virginia’s first female lieutenant governor and first woman of color elected statewide.

Thanks in part to a massive spending gap, Spanberger built up a double-digit polling lead over the summer; many in the GOP wrote off the race as lost.

But in recent weeks she’s stumbled badly over the case of Richard Cox, a biological man claiming transgender status who’s exploited local “bathroom laws” to repeatedly expose himself to women and children in Northern Virginia locker rooms.

Fairfax County police say they have no intention of charging Cox with any crime, despite public outrage — and even though his phone reportedly contained both child porn and a schedule tracking children’s swim classes.

This should be easy for a politician with any common sense to condemn. Instead, Spanberger has dodged.

When local reporter Nick Minock asked her a yes-or-no question on the topic — “Do you support biological males who say they are women using women’s locker rooms and bathrooms and competing in women’s sports?” — the candidate looked like a deer in headlights.

In Minock’s now-viral video of the exchange, Spanberger gave a meandering non-answer blaming Trump for attacking Title IX, and blew off follow-up questions.

“Uh, this is bad,” a top state Democrat groaned to the online magazine Puck. “And she’s considered one of our best candidates.”

A week later, another reporter gave Spanberger a second chance.

Whatever script she was supposed to stick to was lost in another mess of word salad, as she tried and failed to disguise that she favors a rollback of Trump’s executive order and would once again allow biological males to compete in girls’ sports in Virginia.

Known for her carefully prepared lines on the trail, Spanberger — touted as a moderate and considered a potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidate — is finding that on this issue, her talking points just aren’t connecting.

Sensing weakness on an issue of significant importance to suburban parents, Earle-Sears’ latest ads are making the most of Spanberger’s now-obvious leftist preferences.

Echoing a charge that even Kamala Harris has admitted hurt her in 2024, the spot calls Spanberger’s policies “insane.”

“Spanberger is for they/them,” it concludes. “Not for us.”

Worse yet, the issue provoked an overheated and racist response from some Spanberger supporters.

When Earle-Sears came before the school board in deep-blue Arlington to argue against its bathroom policies, she was greeted by a Democrat protester holding up a handwritten sign: “Hey Winsome, if trans can’t share your bathroom, then blacks can’t share my water fountain.”

Now Spanberger has a new headache: Jay Jones, the Democrats’ state attorney general candidate.

On Friday, National Review revealed that Jones had sent violent text messages wishing death on the family of a prominent Virginia Republican, asserting that the GOP member was “breeding little fascists.”

Spanberger condemned Jones’ language — but coming from a candidate who has repeatedly told her supporters to “let your rage fuel you,” her comments didn’t ring true.

For undecided independent voters, a significant swing bloc in Virginia, the ugly incident undermined Democrats’ claims that Earle-Sears is the extremist in this race.

So Spanberger is trying to change the subject. Rather than lay out what she actually believes, her latest ads claim she wants to “take politics out of schools.”

And she’s bringing on campaign help from Bill and Hillary Clinton, along with their buddy Terry McAuliffe — who lost the last gubernatorial race to Republican Glenn Youngkin over similar hot-button issues four years ago.

McAuliffe, too, failed to answer concerns about woke Northern Virginia school-board policies, pronouncing the controversies a distraction and proclaiming, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”

Republican insiders, mindful of Virginia’s history as a purple state with two entrenched Democratic senators, were wary of wading into the culture war.

Youngkin leaned into that fight — and won handily.

The odds are still against Earle-Sears pulling off what would be a shocking political upset. But on Thursday, a new poll from the Trafalgar Group had Spanberger’s lead cut down to five points, 47-42.

Spanberger’s woes show that even after their 2024 drubbing, Democrats haven’t learned how to deal with questions that seem so obvious to the vast majority of Americans. And that Democrats’ fake centrists are still just trying to hide what they really believe.

What Saudi Arabia Bought From Dave Chappelle

My take in The Spectator:

The actual problem isn’t accepting the money. Plenty of artists and performers and businesses have done the same. The problem is signing away the whole reason your comedy became popular in the first place. Hart is one thing – he’s always been a corporate shill, Jumanji, Draft Kings, Saudis, what’s the difference? No one would be surprised at him making the hand prints in the sand ceremony.

Chappelle was different. He made a career skewering the hypocrisy and posturing of right, left, and middle for years. He made a recurring hilarious joke of going after George W. Bush. And the only real threat he ever experienced to free speech in America was when he ran afoul of the trans mob, who endeavored unsuccessfully to get him canceled from Netflix.

When Chappelle signed up for the Saudi cash, he was giving something up by agreeing to their terms and going above and beyond to criticize America along the way. He was agreeing not to keep it real, lest anything go wrong. And the Saudis knew it, and were happy to pay for it. That’s because what they were buying wasn’t comedy – it was compliance.

Democrats Struggle to Find Midterm Crime Message

The Gifford gun grabbers want to lean in. Politico:

A private polling memo that shows potential openings for the party to peel voters away from Republicans on one of their core issues is being distributed to House Democrats and their campaign committees, and was shared exclusively with POLITICO.
The battleground-district survey from Global Strategy Group — commissioned by gun-safety advocacy group Giffords and House Majority Forward, a nonprofit aligned with House Democratic leadership — offers a bleak assessment of Democrats’ starting point: 89 percent of the 1,200 likely voters surveyed want their Congress member to take steps to keep them safe, but only 38 percent trust Democrats over Republicans with that task.
Voters also reported preferring Republicans to Democrats with preventing and reducing crime and cracking down on violent crime — gaps that grew among swing voters.
But, in a hint of hope for the party looking to neutralize a weakness President Donald Trump will exploit next year, those voters swung toward Democrats in all four categories after hearing messaging acknowledging crime is a problem and showing steps the party has taken to increase safety. Specifically, pollsters cited cracking down on gun trafficking and strengthening firearm background checks. The persuasion effort included criticisms of GOP cuts to gun-violence prevention funding, the Trump administration’s attempts to roll back firearm regulations and Republicans’ ties to pro-gun groups.

The Mainstreaming of Leftist Violence

Douglas Murray in The Spectator:

At this stage, Democrats have a predictable retort: to point to acts of violence against Democrats. One of the most-cited examples is the violence carried out against the Governor of Pennsylvania. As a talking point, this is suitably vague and untrue. The reference is to the firebomb attack on Josh Shapiro’s official residence in April. The Molotov cocktail attack was indeed an appalling act. But it was carried out not by a MAGA Republican, but by a crazed man in his thirties who claimed to be acting in the name of a “Free Palestine.”
You would have thought that an attack on a Jewish Democrat’s home in the name of Palestine might itself give off a certain “fascist” vibe. But if so, it is one that the Democratic media and politicians have chosen to gloss over. Indeed, many have hoped to turn into an example of equal violence on the political sides.
Again, it shouldn’t need saying that political violence can come from any and all political sides. But it clearly does need saying that if one side flirts with political violence or excuses political violence or believes that “saying nothing” is, in fact, a good response to political violence, then it should be incumbent on people of all sides to (adopting the left’s loathsome vernacular) call it out.
Some Democrats thought that they had a fine moment of “both sides-ism” when a gunman targeted Democratic lawmakers in Minnesota in June. That attack included the murder of state representative Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark in their home in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota. And the (thankfully non-fatal) shooting of Senator John Hoffman and his wife at their home. Although some, including Walz, put this down as an act of political violence, one reason why the heinous attack has already receded in the collective memory is that firstly, no prominent figure on the American right failed to condemn the attack; and secondly, that the suspected gunman, one Vance Luther Boelter, turned out to have been a two-time Walz political appointee.
It presently feels inevitable that America will continue to see acts of political violence, either orchestrated against federal agents or in attacks like that carried out by the reprehensible and radicalized young man who chose to take the life of Charlie Kirk. There are questions as to how to mitigate the risk to prominent individuals. After all, an attempt on the life of Trump-appointed Supreme Court Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh was successfully stopped (albeit a little late for comfort) in June 2022. But it is hard to imagine any world in which every politician, pundit and public figure in American life could be protected from violence at all times.
The question then, is whether or not Democrats and Republicans can hold one very basic line. A line which it has been perfectly possible for people on both sides of the aisle to stick to for years. Not just to condemn violence in the pursuit of political goals, whatever those goals, but to agree that on this matter – above all others – silence is not, in fact, an option.

Happy to contribute to Pirate Wires on a related topic today:

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The Transom

Is Abigail Spanberger Officially in Trouble?

A month out, the D.C. Democrat Establishment favorite is flailing

What Saudi Arabia Bought From Dave Chappelle

Democrats Struggle to Find Midterm Crime Message

The Mainstreaming of Leftist Violence