Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D-VA) has the worst approval rating of any Virginia governor in decades only two months in office. This comes as several illegal immigrants have been charged with murder and other crimes, her party is proposing a number of tax hikes, and Spanberger has thrown her support behind a Democrat-friendly redistricting effort that would effectively deny representation in Congress to GOP voters in rural Virginia.
Spanberger has only a 47% approval for her performance, according to a Washington Post–Schar School poll published last week. This is 13 points below the previous Virginia governor, Republican Glenn Youngkin.
“Regular Virginians are really having voter’s remorse, because even though she won by significant numbers in the election, she’s fallen out of vogue with the majority of independents and moderates,” Stephanie Lundquist-Arora, the Fairfax, Virginia chapter leader of the Independent Women’s Network, told the Washington Examiner. “It’s completely because of the radical steps she’s taken to push Virginia into what looks like the sister of California.”
Out-of-control illegal immigration and crime
On Day One in office, Spanberger ended immigration enforcement efforts and agreements between Virginia law enforcement and federal immigration authorities.
“From the very first day, she was signaling to Virginians that she is not interested in, basically, justice,” Lundquist-Arora said. “We’re seeing that really play out in Fairfax County.”
On Friday, Israel Flores Ortiz, an illegal immigrant from El Salvador, was found guilty of nine counts of assault and battery. Ortiz, a 19-year-old attending Fairfax County High School, was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement for groping the genitals of multiple female students.
Three out of four people facing murder trials in Fairfax County so far this year are illegal immigrants, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
On March 31, Fairfax County police arrested Anibal Armando Chavarria Muy, an illegal immigrant from Guatemala, accused of stabbing a man to death in his home.
A day later, Misael Lopez Gomez, also in the country illegally from Guatemala, allegedly murdered his 3-month-old daughter.
In February, Abdul Jalloh, who came to America illegally from Sierra Leone, allegedly fatally stabbed Stephanie Minter in the neck at a bus stop. DHS revealed the 32-year-old illegal immigrant has more than 30 prior arrests.
When asked by WJLA reporter Nick Minock about her response to the Virginians killed, Spanberger smiled, saying, “ICE did not deport them.”
Critics blame Spanberger’s so-called sanctuary policies.
“It’s completely because of the radical steps she’s taken to push Virginia into what looks like the sister of California in terms of illegal immigration,” Lundquist-Arora said.
Seventy percent of ICE arrests are of illegal immigrants who have already been charged with or convicted of a crime in the United States, according to ICE’s website.
‘Eye for an eye’ gerrymandering
Spanberger responded to her low approval ratings by saying, “If everybody hated me, why is everybody putting my face on their mailers for the referendum?” She was referring to mailers sent by Justice for Democracy PAC, a political action committee opposing the referendum on whether Virginia should redraw its congressional maps to tilt more seats toward Democrats. The mailers show a picture of Spanberger with a quote from 2019 in which she criticized gerrymandering.
“Gerrymandering is detrimental to our democracy and it weakens the individual voices that form our electorates,” Spanberger wrote on X in 2019. “Opposing gerrymandering should be a bipartisan priority.”
Republicans say Spanberger’s flip-flop is noteworthy.
“If it was detrimental to democracy in 2019, it certainly still is detrimental to democracy,” Arlington County Republican Committee Chairman Matthew Hurtt told the Washington Examiner. “This is a naked quest for power, and Abigail Spanberger is going to do what [Senate Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY)] tells her to do.”
Spanberger is now starring in a multi-million dollar statewide ad campaign encouraging Virginians to vote “Yes” on the state’s redistricting referendum to redraw the congressional map to benefit Democrats in the November midterm elections.
“I’m voting ‘yes’ on Virginia’s redistricting amendment,” Spanberger said in the advertisement. “It’s directly in response to what other states decided to do and a president who says that he’s ‘entitled’ to more Republican seats before this year’s midterms.”
While running for governor in August 2025, Spanberger told local news station ABC7, “I have no plans to redistrict Virginia.”
Dr. Stephen Farnsworth, professor of political science at the University of Mary Washington, told the Washington Examiner that Virginia Democrats believe this is a necessary response to maps redrawn by Republicans in states such as Texas and Missouri, where Republicans have picked up seats.
“What you have here, of course, is a situation where it’s sort of an eye for an eye in politics, and this is not the way that anyone should be looking at redistricting,” Farnsworth said. “Ideally, we would have a national system where individual states can’t create environments that cause other states to respond in kind.”
Currently, the map stands at five Republican and six Democratic representatives. If the referendum is passed, Democrats could land a 10-1 advantage in Virginia’s U.S. House delegation.
“Congressman Don Beyer said in another report that this gerrymandering effort was unfair to Virginia, but it was good for the whole country,” Hurtt noted. “I think it’s unfair for Virginia, and it’s unfair for our representation.”
But some analysts say the reality of the national battle for control of Congress makes the redistricting battles more complicated.
“There’s an old saying that two wrongs don’t make a right,” Farnsworth said. “But there are people in Virginia right now saying that one wrong not matched with another wrong is unilateral disarmament.”
‘Affordability’ means a ‘mixed bag’ of tax proposals
Spanberger ran on making life more affordable in Virginia, but now she is working with Democratic lawmakers in the General Assembly to introduce more than 50 new proposed tax hikes. Critics say that represents a betrayal of her campaign promises.
“Those costs are going up for everybody in Virginia,” Lundquist-Arora said. “If you run on affordability, it’s kind of ironic that all the services that everyone uses will be going up.”
Lundquist-Arora, who is a mother of three boys in Fairfax County Public Schools, says the proposed policies she is most concerned about include the 4% increase in meal tax, which will make going out to restaurants and buying prepared foods more expensive; Spanberger’s rejoining of the Greenhouse Gas Initiative (Youngkin had pulled Virginia from the initiative), which she believes will make electricity more expensive; and the $15 minimum wage Spanberger recently signed into law, which Lundquist-Arora believes will hurt small businesses.
“Everybody wants affordable wages for employees, people don’t argue that,” Lundquist-Arora said. “The thing is, if you’re forcing up unemployment, and you’re making small businesses leave the state, that’s not actually improving the economy.”
More than half of business owners believe these taxes will hamper their company’s ability to grow. Twenty-seven percent cited concern over the repeal of right-to-work regulations, which would boost unions. Eighteen percent cited as a concern the proposed creation of a new tax bracket for high-earning individuals, branded as the “millionaire’s tax.”
Democrats have defended the proposed hikes, branding them as measures to make the rich “pay their fair share” of taxes.
“I would caution against the idea that, well, these people can afford it, therefore we can just tax them,” Clayton Medford, NVC’s Senior Vice President of Government Relations, told the Washington Examiner. “The people that can afford to pay a little bit more, can also afford to change. They can afford to pick up and move.”
This sentiment has led to concerns that Virginia could soon see an exodus of high-earning individuals and businesses, as California did when it implemented similar taxes.
“We need only to look at California to see what’s going to happen,” Lundquist-Arora said. “Honestly, Virginians are not Californians, so I think that we’ll see even a more significant exodus.”
Farnsworth acknowledged that any tax increase is a red flag for business owners.
“When you think about tax increases, that’s a potential problem that may stymie or limit the potential growth,” Farnsworth said. “If you create an environment that increases taxes to a significant degree, businesses reconsider what they’re doing.”
Spanberger’s carefully cultivated centrist image
“Gov. Spanberger won this election by posing as a moderate,” Lundquist-Arora said. “I think most of us who had been paying attention to her record knew that she was a wolf in sheep’s clothing.”
Farnsworth noted that most of these decisions are coming from a Democratic majority in the House of Delegates, and Virginians still do not know where Spanberger stands on some of the most contentious proposals.
Spanberger spent much of the campaign running from reporters’ questions on transgenderism and is now running from questions on illegal immigration. Farsworth says the real test will be which bills she actually signs.
“I think the question of how liberal the Spanberger governorship is going to be is still an open question,” Farnsworth said. “At this point, we’re going to know a lot more… when some of those more partisan measures are either approved, or vetoed, or amended by the governor.”
DOJ FIRES WARNING SHOT AS SPANBERGER SIGNS GUN LEGISLATION
If Spanberger does not sign or veto the bills by 11:59 p.m. on April 13, she is effectively letting the legislation pass automatically. Lundquist-Arora believes this is the governor’s way of allowing the bills to pass while avoiding political ownership of them.
“Choosing to not sign them when they’ll likely be passed anyways, it might be a tactic, but you’re also showing your hand,” Lundquist-Arora said. “It means that you’re kind of complacent in the passage of these bills. If she was actually a moderate, she would veto some of these insane bills.”
Emily Hallas and Barnini Chakraborty contributed to this report.