Monster of the Week: Abigail Spanberger

It’s tough competition to be the country’s most hated Governor.

In just the last month, California Governor Gavin Newsom quietly killed a bill for universal healthcare (again), New York Governor Kathy Hochul attacked rail workers for going on strike and tried to crush a bill banning 24-hour shifts for homecare workers, and Indiana Governor Mike Braun announced the ominous-sounding “Iron Nation” project to give $15 million of taxpayer money to Israeli tech firms.

But Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger is giving them a run for their money.

Spanberger is a former CIA operative who was elected Governor in 2025. She is the first woman, and the first CIA spook, to hold the office. (Who said there’s no progress?)

Democrats dumped $70 million into the race to elect Spanberger in 2025. Their investment paid off. She won in a landslide, with nearly 58 percent of the vote.

For four years, Democrats had blamed Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin for all their problems. Youngkin vetoed bills to give bargaining rights to public-sector employees, to legalize marijuana, and to lower prescription drug prices.

With Spanberger as Governor, things are different: now those bills are being vetoed by a Democrat.

Just five months into her term, Spanberger has set a new record by vetoing 29 bills from her own party. On May 19, she issued 19 vetoes at once, including a bill to ban ICE from making arrests inside of courthouses or within 40 feet of a polling place, a bill to legalize the sale of marijuana, and a bill to regulate the prices of prescription drugs.

But the biggest attack was Spanberger’s veto of a bill to legalize public-sector unions.

Public-sector unions have been illegal in Virginia since 1942, when a Democratic Party-controlled legislature banned them in response to Black hospital workers unionizing at the University of Virginia. Under cover of racism, Democrats carried out a historic attack on the whole workers’ movement.

80 years later, union leaders shoveled millions of dollars to Spanberger’s election campaign, with the promise that she would reverse the ban that her own party enacted. SEIU donated $547,000. The Plumbers and Pipefitters gave her $300,000. AFSCME gave $262,000. The teachers’ unions gave a whopping $750,000.

Spanberger took the money and ran. When the bill came to her desk, she killed it. 

Even the union bureaucrats, who usually take their beatings from Democrats in silence, were forced to respond. The bus drivers’ union, ATU, said in a statement, “Governor Spanberger stabbed us in the back.” The firefighters’ union called it a “betrayal” and a “slap in the face.”

But the union leaders who spent millions on Spanberger won’t learn their lesson. They’ll keep funneling money to Democrats, and keep acting surprised when Democrats don’t deliver. Workers need to organize socialist caucuses in the unions to build new militant leadership, including a demand that not one more penny be spent on the Democratic Party. The union leaders who peddled Spanberger’s snake oil should be thrown out and replaced with socialist candidates from the rank and file.

A statewide public-sector strike in Virginia could force the Democrats to bargain, with or without a law. In 2018, West Virginia teachers organized an illegal statewide strike through Facebook groups, school visits, and evening meetings. They shut down all 55 counties in the state, and forced a Republican legislature to give them a raise. They had to fight their own union leadership to make it happen. Workers in Virginia will have to do the same.

In the meantime, Virginia joins the long list of states where Democrats have all the power and still won’t do anything for workers, immigrants, or anyone but their corporate backers.