Gov. Abigail Spanberger smiles after being sworn in on Saturday, Jan. 17.
Rarely is history made right before our eyes.
It’s a sentiment that typically arises in religious contexts, but in Abigail Spanberger, who became the first woman elected to the governorship in Virginia on Saturday, it carries a different kind of resonance.
On a cold, overcast afternoon with the wind whipping and the rain sputtering, against a national political backdrop that produces historic flashpoints almost daily, Spanberger did her best to ensure the moment didn’t get lost. Surrounded by family, state lawmakers and the traditional succession of former governors — including L. Douglas Wilder, who happened to be celebrating his 95th birthday — Spanberger, draped in suffragist white, was sworn in as Virginia’s 75th governor on the steps of the Virginia Capitol.
From the state’s first governor, Patrick Henry, to the equal rights movement, to former Gov. Linwood Holton, to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., all the way to Wilder, who became the country’s first African American elected governor in 1989, the commonwealth’s pivotal moments found their way to Thomas Jefferson’s masterpiece, Spanberger told the audience of roughly 5,000 huddled in stadium-style temporary bleachers.
“In 1960, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. addressed a crowd of more than 2,500 people here in Richmond,” Spanberger said. “He implored the then-governor to comply with the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, building upon a message he had issued one year prior when he wrote: ‘Today is a day for great men, great ideas, great movements.’ And in his urgent appeals for progress, he wrote, ‘As Virginia goes, so goes the South, perhaps America, and the world.’”
Don’t tell you-know-who, of course. For Spanberger, a center-left moderate who recoils at extremism from both sides of the aisle, “pragmatism over politics” seems to preclude her from joining in today’s petulant politics. During her campaign for governor, she rarely evoked the name of the current president and she shied away from direct confrontations, often to the dismay of her Democratic base.
On Saturday, she seemed to find her equilibrium.
“I know many of you are worried about the recklessness coming out of Washington,” Spanberger said. “You are worried about policies that are hurting our communities, cutting health care access, imperiling rural hospitals and driving up costs. You are worried about Washington policies that are closing off markets, hurting innovation and private industry, and attacking those who have devoted their lives to public service. You are worried about an administration that is gilding buildings while schools crumble, breaking the social safety net and sowing fear across our communities, betraying the values of who we are as Americans, the very values that we celebrate here on these steps.”
Virginia Military Institute cadets march during the inaugural parade on Saturday.
Her weekend of inaugural festivities, including a diverse “Made in Virginia Market” featuring artisans from across the state at the 17th Street Market in Shockoe Bottom (did you see her introduce Virginia Beach’s Pusha T on Friday night?), also highlighted the state’s impressive diversity in a subtle, but powerful, homage to homegrown DEI.
The inaugural parade featured the Virginia Military Institute cadets, the state teachers union, the All-Star Step Team at Virginia State University, the Hasang Korean School Dance Team, the Cultural Center of India Bollywood Dancers, Girl Scouts, The Crooked Road Heritage Music Trail fiddlers, the all-Muslim youth choir ADAMS BEAT, Diversity Richmond and Virginia Pride, among others. The lineup was befitting of the diversity of her ticket mates, as well, as both Lt. Gov. Ghazala Hashmi, the first Muslim woman elected statewide, and Attorney General Jay Jones, the first Black man elected to the office, took their oaths.
Shortly after, Spanberger’s first order of business was to rattle off a series of executive orders, many relating to her “affordability” agenda — directing gubernatorial secretaries and agencies, for example, to submit reports within 90 days that provide actionable steps to reduce costs for Virginians — and others focused on improving public education, coordinating a statewide response to “federal workforce reductions, funding cuts, tariffs and immigration impacts” along with orders to review the appointment process for university board members, delegating authority during emergencies, establishing a comprehensive “nondiscrimination policy” and rescinding Youngkin’s executive order directing local law enforcement “to divert their limited resources for use in enforcing federal civil immigration laws.” A little later, she issued her university board appointments for George Mason University, University of Virginia and Virginia Military Institute.
It’s an exhaustive, challenging agenda that could prove difficult to execute in a state facing economic headwinds and declining state revenues. Spanberger’s “affordability” focus could ultimately backfire, says Mark J. Rozell, dean of the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University.
“Affordability — it’s a great campaign issue; it’s an impossible governing issue,” he said on Friday. “The governor has very little to no control over markets, interest rates, what the federal administration does regarding taxes, spending, tariffs. I find it puzzling that she would start her administration with an issue that a governor simply has very little control over at all.”
With Democrats now controlling both houses of the General Assembly and the governor’s mansion, Rozell says it’s going to be difficult to skirt responsibility down the road.
“They can blame a Republican administration only so much,” he said. “I think prudence would dictate that the governor would do more to educate the public about how complicated this issue is in reality and that government actions can only have — in the short term — a marginal impact.”
Gov. Abigail Spanberger delivers her inaugural address on the steps of the Virginia Capitol on Saturday.
Bob Holsworth, a longtime political analyst and former dean of the VCU College of Humanities and Sciences, said in an interview Thursday that he’s been impressed with the creativity of Spanberger’s cost-cutting proposals so far, but agrees there are limits: “I think the challenge is, can they reduce [costs] in a way that many people actually feel?”
There are encouraging signs, however. The new governor has surrounded herself with a group of experienced, and in many cases bipartisan, state agency heads and cabinet members.
She’s appointed veteran state lawmakers to key positions — Fairfax Del. Mark Sickles as secretary of finance, for example, and Prince William Del. Candi Mundon King as secretary of the commonwealth — and even hired a former Virginia superintendent, Jeffrey Smith, as secretary of education and a well-liked former police chief from Chesterfield County, Jeffrey Katz, as the new superintendent for Virginia State Police.
“She has put together quite an impressive group of individuals who have a lot of experience in Virginia, so they should be able to get off to a good start,” Holsworth said. “They won’t have that much of a learning curve.”
Spanberger’s biggest challenge might be corralling her own party. With the Democrats picking up 13 seats in the House of Delegates last November, there will be rising pressure to push ahead on more progressive legislation and priorities, such as repealing right to work, which Spanberger has said she opposes, and congressional redistricting.
The most volatile topic likely to land Virginia directly in the crosshairs of the Trump administration, mid-decade redistricting of congressional seats via voter referendum, passed both houses of the General Assembly last week and is expected to be put to voters in a special election in April or May. Spanberger hasn’t directly spoken against redistricting, but she’s made it clear it’s not a priority. Her timidity could doom the effort, especially if the maps are redrawn to produce a 10-1 Democrat-to-Republican congressional majority.
“I think one of the things that we’ll be seeing in this session is disagreements within the party rather than disagreements across party lines,” explains Stephen Farnsworth, professor of political science and director of the Center for Leadership and Media Studies at the University of Mary Washington.
One key advantage for Spanberger, Farnsworth says, is that House Speaker Don Scott has also expressed the need for “restraint.” With Democrats holding more than 60 seats in the House, Democratic leaders may also find it easier to pass legislation without catering to the extreme factions within the party.
“Speaker Scott has also talked about not governing too far to the left, and the speaker has great power to keep from the governor’s desk those issues the governor doesn’t want to see on the desk,” Farnsworth said during an interview last week. “When you’ve got 60-plus seats, you really don’t need to worry about the most extreme three or four members of your caucus.”
Gov. Abigail Spanberger shakes hands with a Native American dancer after the “Blessing of the Ground” performance on Saturday.
There will be lots of other worries, no doubt. One need only look to Minnesota. States with blue governors tend to illicit more attention from this administration, particularly as it relates to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.
“It’s hard to imagine that Virginia won’t come under more pressure from Trump,” Holsworth said. “And the reason for that may simply be that she’s a Democratic governor who’s going to get a lot of airtime. … If [Democrats] move to a 9-2 or 10-1 map on redistricting, that is, you know, antithetical to Trump’s aims.”
The type of pressure is anyone’s guess, but ramping up ICE raids and deportations would likely be the “most problematic,” Holsworth says.
Spanberger doesn’t show her teeth often, but she has considerable credibility on the law-and-order front. The former CIA officer was the first Democratic gubernatorial candidate in 15 years to wrest an endorsement from the Virginia Police Benevolent Association. And she doesn’t just eschew progressive ideology when it comes to policing.
Barely two years into her first term, Spanberger methodically ripped her Democratic caucus in a private meeting over the messaging of more progressive members, railing against terms like “defund the police” and “socialism,” which she said cost the Democrats seats during the 2020 elections: “If we are classifying Tuesday as a success from a congressional standpoint, we will get [expletive] torn apart in 2022,” she said at the time.
At Saturday’s inauguration, under a heavy police presence, Spanberger’s bona fides when it comes to law and order were hardly in question.
“We can handle it,” said Nancy McPherson, 76, a retired Coast Guard yeoman who recently moved to Henrico County. McPherson was sitting in a row of chairs in front of the bleachers on Saturday morning: “Between us and New Jersey, we will help lead the way for other states to follow,” she said.
A few seats over, 76-year-old Richard Sumner, from Caroline County, responded in kind: “She’s got some steel in her. She’s law enforcement.”
