Did Abigail Spanberger have her Dukakis moment?
In a 1988 presidential debate, Dukakis was asked if he’d support the death penalty if his wife Kitty were raped and murdered. His answer was considered cold, but then again the question was extremely strange coming from the moderator:
In the recent debate between the two candidates for the governorship of Virginia, Democrat Spanberger had a similarly cold reacion to a “what if?” question, this time asked by her opponent:
If fantasizing about murdering a dad and his two boys isn’t enough for Abigail to drop her endorsement of Jay Jones—what is?
Does he have to actually pull the trigger? pic.twitter.com/0UiItW4WMZ
— Winsome Earle-Sears (@winwithwinsome) October 10, 2025
Spanberger is the frontrunner.
Spanberger’s cold half-smirk may be the worst of it. Quite a moment.
I will not dignify that question with an answer.
The Dems will sacrifice their own children on the altar of political correctness.
The difficulties Sears and Miyares have been having thus far puzzle me.
“The difficulties Sears and Miyares have been having thus far puzzle me”
VA used the be a conservative state. But its politics are now dominated by the DC suburbs mostly populated by government workers who are hard core Dem apparatchiks. A little murder isn’t going to scare them off.
Remember, Youngkin was trailing McAuliffe four years ago, until the latter stepped in it. OTOH, I’m not optimistic. There are too many fed employees in VA.
I live in Virginia, so this is pretty real for me. And, I doubt she lost more than a handful of votes (if that) following her debate performance. I’m in a red part of the state, and she will lose this region, but I lived in Arlington when I worked in DC. The DC suburbs will stay solidly Democrat. It could have been her, and not Jay Jones, who said these awful things, and still she would not be punished by her Dem constituency.
Beating Spanberger will require from the VA Republicans a huge turnout, and she knows it and is betting against that happening.
The Trump decentralization of the federal workforce, and its shrinkage, might save Virginia — at the cost of many jobs, of course.
It’s a panel of journalists asking questions. Shaw’s title ‘moderator’ was merely an indicator that he speaks first.
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One feature of Dukakis common to bourgeois liberals (and modal in the Massachusetts Democratic Party) was an indifference to law enforcement. High levels of crime were taken as a given (experienced in the slums and neighborhoods adjacent, not in Brookline) and the criminal justice system was a venue to undertake social work projects run by clowns like Jerome Miller. The Bush campaign and allied groups hung it around MSD’s neck like a rubber chicken. Also hung around his neck was his intellectual class dislike of patriotic ceremonies and his affection for the ACLU. Dukakis admirers – including those like Michael Kinsley who should have known better – were incensed that he was hung out to dry for attitudes they took for granted and began hurling epithets at Bush and his operatives. (Kinsley’s supervisor Martin Peretz was personally acquainted with Dukakis and familiar with his shortcomings, but he couldn’t persuade his deputy Kinsley that it was something more than a PR problem generated by the nefarious Lee Atwater). This question provided an illustration that Dukakis’ psychology was peculiar – he was a Kennedy school faculty member whose mind could handle only abstractions.
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One curio about Dukakis was how deracinated the man was even though he had a pair of immigrant parents. His wife was Jewish, his marriage was canonically invalid, none of his children had been baptized, and his supposed memories of Greek dancing as a youngster were contradicted by his mother. (Garry Wills noted that the book Dukakis said had influenced his thinking the most was Henry Steele Commager’s The American Mind).
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He also had crummy face-to-face people skills. Garry Wills, who was covering the Jackson campaign, provides an account of the Dukakis family inviting Mr. and Mrs. Jackson over for dinner as a peace offering and then bollixing every aspect of the evening and leaving Jacqueline Jackson in an icy rage.
VA used the be a conservative state. But its politics are now dominated by the DC suburbs mostly populated by government workers who are hard core Dem apparatchiks. A little murder isn’t going to scare them off.
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About a quarter of the population lives in NoVa; about 5% did in 1950. Still, as recently as 2009 the Republican candidate for governor scored a landslide running against a Democrat nowhere near as offensive as Spanberger and Jones. The state hasn’t been suffering under Gov. Younkin’s administration, so it is curious to me his Lt. Governor has been at such a disadvantage. Ditto the incumbent Attorney-General, who is not all that controversial. (And at the time of his election notably better prepared for the position than Jones).
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About 20% of the workforce in greater Washington consists of federal employees, btw.
The Trump decentralization of the federal workforce, and its shrinkage, might save Virginia — at the cost of many jobs, of course.
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IIRC, about 85% of all federal employees are to be found outside of greater Washington. There might be too many HQ employees, but that’s a secondary issue. The real problem is agencies performing tasks which should be discontinued left to the private sector or devolved to the state governments. So doing would reduce federal employment everywhere, not just in the capital.
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(Candidates for dissolution, sale, or radical budget surgery would include the Food and Nutrition Service (USDA), the rural development division of the USDA, the National Institute on Food and Agriculture, the entire Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Health Resources and Services Administration (HHS), the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration (HHS), most of the components of the Administration for Children and Families (HHS), the Administration on Aging (HHS); every component of the Department of Education bar the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the statistical collection units, and the consumer protection function; the Postal Service, the Small Business Administration, the National Science Foundation, USAID and other foreign aid agencies, the telecom subsidies distributed by the Federal Communication Commission, the entire grants and loans operation of the Department of Energy, the bulk of the grant distribution function of the Federal Highway Administration and other components of the Department of Transportation, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the grant distribution function of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Export-Import Bank, the Farm Credit System, the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, the Elections Assistance Commission, AmTrak, the Corporation for National and Community Service, and miscellanous grant programs).
The people of NE Virginia do not expect the consequences of their political choice to inconvenience them personally.
Can there be any deeper irreconcilable difference… than between those who in effect, condone the murder of little children and those who see it as the greatest of evils?
For the “abortion uber alles” crowd, killing the already upright and walking around is a feature not a bug.
If given a chance, Spanberger would shoot Sears without batting an eye.
The RNC should pour money into this race. It’s winnable.
It is a “gotcha” question. However Spanberger could have given an articulate and principled answer along the lines of “I understand there would be a natural desire to want someone to die for having committed such a horrific crime. However even for such horrific crimes or worse I oppose the death penalty for the following reasons”.
There’s a subtle or not-so-subtle emotional component of such gotcha questions. “This is how we *feel* and we should decide the penalty on that basis”. Whether people believe in the death penalty or not its use or non-use should be based more on principles of law, justice, and yes morality.
Rick67,
The question has nothing to do with the death penalty. The issue is that the guy running for the Democrats for Attorney General – Jay Jones – sent a text fantasizing about killing another politician and apparently his children – and the Democrat candidate for Governor refused to demand he drops out of the race.
For starters, the Department of Agriculture should be in Sioux Falls or Fargo. Interior: Anchorage.
For starters, the Department of Agriculture should be in Sioux Falls or Fargo. Interior: Anchorage.
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Again, about 85% of federal employees are field employees. That aside, most of the Interior departments inventory by value is in the lower 48, so why would you want it in Anchorage?
“. . .why would you want it in Anchorage?”
Because Guam is not one of the 50 states?
As for moving Agriculture to Sioux Falls or Fargo — what do you have against those cities, Gordon?
@ Art Deco > “Candidates for dissolution, sale, or radical budget surgery would include …”
For he has a little list … and they’ll none of them be missed.
The Dukakis question was a ‘gotcha’, to be sure. It was lose/lose, if he said he didn’t support the death penalty he sounded like an uncaring mate, if he said he did he sounded hypocritical.
The best answer he could have given, if he’d been a more natural politician, would be something like:
“Of course I would be furious and full of rage, naturally! But that is why we don’t settle crimes by letting the victims take revenge, but instead we have a court and a judge and a jury who can look at it with their emotions out of the way.”
Not a perfect response, but it would have been better than what he said.
Both sides get ‘gotcha’ questions regularly. Obama was once faced with a question of whether he would deport a close illegal relative, either answer was problematic.
All implemented by the Easter Bunny.
This kind of thinking is in the same category as the fantasy of solving our of our political issues with a Constitutional Convention. In practice, even if we could do the above (which we cannot), a lot of it would promptly grow back after the electorate utterly annihilated the GOP in the next subsequent election.
Some of that stuff is popular. Some of it serves useful purposes. Some of it is gross waste of money. Some of it is a mix.
The GOP has tried to run on ‘small government’ for decades, and that approach has a track record of failure. Without the cultural and national security aspects of the agenda, the small government agenda would be a permanent electoral loser, because the electorate doesn’t believe in it. The median voter is happy to cut someone else’s spending, generally speaking.
In practice, there might be a viable ‘medium-sized government’ agenda that could work. But actually cutting the size of government is necessarily going to require a case by case examination of the spending, always with one eye on politics.
For ex, a lot of strongly MAGA rural areas are heavily dependent on various government employees and spending to hold up the local economy and sustain local services. Slash those and those districts are suddenly not MAGA anymore. Just a fact of political life.
OTOH, moving the headquarters complexes out of the DC area makes a lot of sense on multiple levels. The heart of the problem in the Deep State is that tremendous concentration of power and influence in a few Virginia and Maryland counties. Spread that out, break up that concentration of power, and you serve several good ends at once, and it’s mostly either politically neutral or upside.