The Virginia playbook: run as a moderate, govern as a radical
Spanberger’s very first order of business was reversing Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s Executive Order 47, which had allowed for coordination between the Virginia State Police and the Department of Corrections and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. That coordination was important because it allowed the federal and state governments to cooperate to remove people in the country illegally who had committed additional crimes. That it was necessary for Spanberger to make it harder to deport criminals is a tell that her moderate campaign commercials will instead translate into a much further left administration.
Spanberger isn’t alone in moving Virginia sharply leftward. Both branches of the state legislature are now also controlled by Democrats, and they’re introducing policies that no one campaigned on. House Bill 863 would reduce minimum sentencing for rape, manslaughter and child pornography. If Spanberger ran on “let’s let rapists off easy,” the Virginia electorate somehow missed it. In fact, Spanberger’s campaign ads highlighted her law enforcement experience and that she’s a moderate who works with both sides of the political aisle.
More at the link.
Spanberger is in for four years.
Her approach makes Mamdani’s look good – at least, he campaigned on a radical platform. Maybe not as radical as the way he’ll govern, but close enough. Spanberger was more duplicitous. But voters don’t seem to learn; then again, maybe this is what the majority of Virginians really want. I doubt it, but maybe.
This author certainly perceived in advance what Spanberger was going to be doing; the following was written shortly before the election:
… [F]ew politicians, including Democrats, have been as partisan and divisive as Spanberger. The Heritage Action for America scorecard has given Spanberger half the rating of the average House Democrat, marking her as one of the most progressive Democrats in Congress and noting she has reached across the aisle far less than her Democrat colleagues. …
Under Governor Glenn Youngkin, Virginia has empowered parents, restored sanity to schools, and bolstered safety. Spanberger wants to reverse it all, returning to an extremist agenda for the state. Virginians deserve better than a governor who endangers girls and women while defending illegal gangsters and scandal-plagued allies. Her moderate mask is off—voters can see the truth.
Apparently they couldn’t see the truth. Or perhaps they did see it, and that’s what they chose.
That is indeed the playbook. But it’s not confined to Virginia.
I still have faith (I’m an incurable optimist) that the people of Virginia will be able to compare and contrast four years of Youngkin vs four years of Spanberger. Effective governors have been very effective for the Republican brand.
Spanberger is what the Virginia Democrats want. Yes Winsome Sears ran a terrible race, but the incumbent attorney General Jason Miyares had a good track record and still lost to a democrat leftist crackpot.
The most optimistic spin that occurs to me as that the DC area Democrats are government workers who saw people lose their jobs and were super motivated to vote. Turn out is everything in these midterm elections.
Tampon Tim Walz ran as what he had been in congress, a moderate Dem. But Timbo is not an executive. So he is led around by his radical staffers, who tell the moderate legislators “vote our way or no money for you.”
When you see that confused look on his face, it’s genuine.
Three factors contributed to Spanberger’s win, IMO:
1. Government employees in northern Virginia.
2. AWFLs, especially if young and/or single.
3. Northern Virginia foreign born population now at 30% and climbing.
Bob Wilson:
And MAGA types act allergic to mid-term voting. They also are notorious for staying home because of dissatisfaction, a.k.a. “I’ll show them.”
Can TPUSA draw them out?
My daughter lives in the belly of the beast, Fairfax County, where there is already a far-left prosecutor. I worry. I think Bob Wilson has a good point on federal workers in NoVA voting Dem out of fear for their jobs, or revenge for the loss of them. My daughter, who works for a government contractor, says she has to listen to left-wing talk at work all the time, while keeping her own mouth shut. But Spanberger is clearly a liar, and the loss of Jason Miyares is a disgrace to everyone who voted “D.”
Those who voted for Spanburger can plausibly claim that she fooled them. Nevertheless, they and those on the right who choose not to vote (300,000+)
are about to experience H.L. Mencken’s famous aphorism, “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”
Those who voted for Virginia’s new A. G. Jay Jones have no such excuse. They knowingly voted for a man who would welcome the murder of the children of his political opponents. May those who voted for him reap the reward they so richly deserve.
Virginia is going to learn and the rest of the country gets to see what an AWFL governor can really do.
How much ruin is in a state?
It used to be Old Dominion, now Ode Dominatrix?
What Sgt. joe Friday said. Plus she ran as law and order. One ad had her doing handgun training with cops.
I believe she’s former CIA.
Watch businesses and Republican voters leave.
It will be like the state of Washington.
“The latest Association of Washington Business quarterly survey shows bad news on the economic front, with 44% of business leaders saying they are considering moving their personal residence out of state and businesses indicating they are now more than twice as likely – 30% to 14% – to expand outside the state than within it.”
I’ve often wondered how many Ds run for office as Rs. For some reason, I don’t see that happening much the other way round.
om, thanks for making me laugh!
Does anyone else here see the asymmetry I think I’m seeing?
It’s definitely not true in all cases, but I do think I see something of a trend.
As a generality and with many exceptions, Dems run as moderates and then govern as hard ideologues, whereas Reps run as right-leaners and then govern as moderates.
Plus, the former is becoming more and more the case, whereas the latter actually seems to have been becoming less and less the case over the past few years.
Any takers?
CIA spook. And she got elected. Murderous Attorney General got elected. The problem is the voter. No one can fix suicidal. In 4 years, Virginia will resemble California. The cities and universities will be hellholes. The rural areas will be trying to avoid attention.
Many red states have a Blue Bubble within, often a single one; Texas, for example, has Austin, Georgia has Atlanta, Illinois has Chicago, and so on. In Virgina six jurisdictions run the state: Fairfax, Arlington, Loudon and Prince William counties around D.C. and the City of Alexandria, are bastions of federal employees, as is the area around the City of Norfolk because of the federal presence at the Norfolk naval base. The Virginia population is about 9 million people, nearly 1.2 million of whom live in Fairfax County alone; add in Arlington, Prince William and Loudon counties and it’s a large tail with which the dog gets wagged.
Not every resident of those counties works for the fed dot gov, but almost every one of them receives some benefit from the secondary cash flow that emanates from it. No dry cleaner, grocer or carpenter is going to favor reducing the possibility, or potential, of that subsidiary monetization, adding to the WIIFM – “what’s in it for me?” – voting bloc that doesn’t so much lean Left as lean toward favoring the protection of that Golden Goose. Today, that “protection” is a feature of Democrats, and with Democrats come a lot of other, less desirable, even destructive, positions and actions because Left is their establishment brand.
Virginia used to be a conservative state, and of course the switch is almost entirely due to the northern part of the state becoming a bedroom community for USG workers. It points up one of the biggest problems with big government – the government workers are pro-big government because it means more jobs for them, and that means Democrat.
JackWayne: “Murderous Attorney General got elected.”
I can’t get over that one. So outrageous and discouraging, it makes you wonder if there is any hope for the country.
Voters seem to fall for it, but they don’t. The Democrats are in the ” they might be an SOB but they’re my SOB” the Democrats will not like the next phase. Voters don’t forget.
I don’t know. I don’t think we had a strong candidate. Jason Miyares was okay but still lost to Jay Jones. That was a bit of a shock.
I worked for the federal government in DC and lived in NOVA. The offices were filled with democrats. It was a bit of kabuki theater. When Trump was in office, we would get Hatch Act warnings weekly and lists of people prosecuted under said Act. When democrats were in office, nada.
Never underestimate just how effective the media’s information operations are.
Like remember how much caterwauling there was over project 2025 and all the stuff Trump was “planning” to do? Where was any equivalent for Spanberger?
The media has really mastered that their power isn’t in what they cover, it’s in what they ignore.
Be interesting to see how, if, VA gets out from under this. I’d also like to know how many who thought they were voting for a moderate dislike what they actually got. Maybe “moderate” is as far left as can survive an election, irrespective of the baggage and plans being leftleftleft. But then the latter comes out and the “moderate” voters approve?
“Jason Miyares was ok”
How good a candidate do you have to be to beat a psychopath?
I lived in northern VA during the six years I worked in DC. It was a very nice experience. It was quite brazen for the new REGIME to pass all that leftist legislation in such short order. But I am not at all surprised. It is about conquest and imposing their will on the serfs.
— Sgt. Joe Friday
— rbj1
That’s part of why they picked her in particular to run as a pretend-moderate. They backed Joe Biden over the other Democratic contenders in 2020 for the precise same reason, he could at least cosplay as a moderate Democrat.
There’s a fundamental problem the GOP has that has haunted it for decades. It’s why these ‘faux moderates’ Dems keep winning, election after election, in the 90s, the 2000s, the 2010s, and now.
J.D. Vance put his finger on it when he observed that ‘most Republicans are former Democrats’. (Not a perfect quote, but close.)
There are a lot of GOP voters who came over because the Dems became too radical for them. A big bunch crossed under Carter. Another bunch under Obama, yet another bunch under Biden. These crossovers turned the GOP from a permanent-minority party (which it was from 1932 to 1994) into a real contender for national power.
The problem is that these voters never really changed much, the Democratic Party was what changed. Deep down, a lot of them still long desperately for an ‘old Democrat’, pro-labor, nationalist, socially conservative, pro-law and order. Given their choice for President, or Governor, or Mayor, what they really truly want is a genuinely moderate, pre-1972 Democrat.
This makes them suckers for a lefty Dem who convincingly pretends to be a moderate Dem, because they want to believe it and have never been entirely comfortable with the GOP elites or their preferred policies.
Richard Nixon won a landslide victory against George McGovern on the fact that the Dems under McGovern were getting weird (that was when the weirdness really got going in the Democrats). A few years later they came home to Carter, because Carter compaigned as a moderate, sensible ‘southern Democrat’, and he had some track record to back it up.
Of course once in power, he governed as a McGovernite liberal, exactly what the returning Dems thought he was supposed to be the antidote for. So once again a wave of Democrats was driven out to vote for Reagan in 1980 and 1984.
They returned for Bill Clinton, who ran as, yes, a moderate southern Democrat. Once in power, Hillary ran the show, the McGovernites took the wheel…and voters were driven over to the GOP in 1994. The Dems lost the House of Representatives for the first time in decades that year.
This cycle repeats itself over and over, because the GOP requires the support of a group of voters who are ‘old Dems’ at heart to be competitive.
That group has been shrinking steadily as it has become ever more obvious that there just aren’t any ‘old Dem politicians’ left in reality. But there are still a few of that group of voter. A few Trump voters from 2016 went back to the Dems for Biden because he had a false reputation as ‘a moderate’. ‘Lunch pail Joe’. Etc. It wasn’t a lot…but Trump did not lose by a lot, either (assuming he really lost at all).
I strongly suspect that along with other factors, there were some people who voted for Youngkin because the Dems had gotten too weird for them (esp. after McAuliffe’s infamous comment about parents and schools), but who breathed a sigh of relief when Spanberger appeared.
“Finally, a normal sensible Democrat again!”
There’s a reason why so many former Dems long to return, too.
Back in the days of total Democratic dominance (1932 to 1994), the parties had the reputations of Dems being the party of the working man, and the GOP the party of the rich. That was nonsense on its face, of course, both parties then and now were dominated by wealthy people. But it reflected something real. It was much more valid if you express it as: The Dems are the party of the employees and the GOP are the party of the employer. There was a lot of truth in that latter form.
The GOP used to be the internationalist party, the Dems the nationalist. The GOP wanted cheap labor, the Dems wanted protection for workers. Their policies really did reflect the interests of their supporting factions. The Dems were not much for foreign intervention but usually supported a strong defense. They had their dreamy lefty fringe, but also figures like Scoop Jackson. The head of the United Auto Workers used to actively work to screen out Communists from his ranks. It was a different world back then.
That conflict of economic interests made the Dems the absolutely dominant party for decades. The Democratic Party was captured by upper class liberals and became what it is now, but the GOP was much slower to change,
As Andrew Codevilla has observed, the Republican Party is dichotomous. At street level it looks like Ronald Reagan. At the top it looks like Nelson Rockefeller. Which is why so many former Dems can not get comfortable with the GOP. What the GOP elites really want is anathema to them, and vice versa. The ‘business agenda’ is electoral poison.
Which leaves the GOP ever-vulnerable to fake-moderate Dem candidates.
— M J R
It’s not your imagination.
Between 1968 and 1972, the former dominant elite of the Democratic Party, the one that had come in with FDR, began to be displaced by a new class of activists and wealthy or upper middle class professional types with radically different interests and agendas. As they gained dominance, the former total dominance of the Democratic Party began to fracture because what they wanted was out of step with the rank and file.
The GOP, on the other hand, was much slower to change. The GOP elites tolerated Ronald Reagan from necessity, but they privately detested him and what he stood for. GWHB was more to their taste, but under him the former success of the GOP began to fall apart again because the same former Dems who hated the McGovernite agenda still hated the GOP business agenda, too.
In fact, the elite class of both parties, by the 1990s, had come into alignment on most subjects, and were increasingly out of step with the general electorate. NAFTA was unpopular, but it passed. Chinese membership in the WTO was unpopular, but it passed. The Dem social agenda was very unpopular, but it was steadily enacted and the GOP would not oppose it (except in words). Open borders immigration amnesty was very unpopular, but the bipartisan elite class tried desperately and repeatedly to pass it.
The uniparty elite has dealt with it by pretending. Dems know their social agenda is unpopular, so they pretend to be moderate pro-worker law and order types. The GOP know their business/corporate agenda is unpopular, so they pretend by cultural warriors and nationalist patriots. Then both parties pursue variations on the same common agenda in power.
Yeah, the GOP is finally changing, under Trump, out of sheer necessity. But the elite class is doing it kicking and screaming.
it’s arguable how legitimate the election was, with spanberger, the balance of the state, is overwhelmed by adjuncts of dc like lowden county, this is how she ‘won back her seat in ’24, with a box of newly arrived ballots, add other shenanigans and well you have a state tipping deep azure, early voting largely had a large role,
of course her company affiliation, is not as her important as her part in the management of the islamic saudi academy, a very tony madrassa in northern virginia, which was a font of islamism
jay jones is a fish of a different color, a pure marxist with nihilistic traits
in so far he is reflecting of the larger democratic electorate, he is deeply troubling,