The Democratic Party Becomes Its Fringe

By Jim Geraghty

Thursday, March 19, 2026

 

Last year in the Northern Virginia suburbs, Democratic gubernatorial nominee Abigail Spanberger seemed omnipresent on television screens during commercial breaks. Her appearances reminded viewers that — with stints at the Central Intelligence Agency and in “law enforcement” at the U.S. Postal Inspection Service — she would make a good protagonist for a knockoff Tom Clancy novel or CBS prime-time drama.

 

One ubiquitous commercial featured Spanberger’s father, Martin Davis. “You dream that your kids follow in your footsteps,” he gushed. “And for me, that dream happened. My daughter Abigail went into law enforcement just like me. She worked drug cases and helped take child predators off the street. Then she joined the CIA to keep our country safe.” In another ad, U.S. marshals and police chiefs called Spanberger “one of our own” and the child of “a military and law enforcement family.”

 

Biographical ads are a fact of life in modern politics, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with candidates for higher office assuring the public that their fathers are proud of them. But the Spanberger campaign was particularly soft-focus.

 

It wasn’t that she completely ignored issues. The congresswoman, who had been in the U.S. House of Representatives since 2019, effectively hung the still-high cost of living around the neck of President Donald Trump, then less than a year into his second term. One of her ads contended that “the Trump budget raises health-care costs, raises mortgages, raises the price of electricity and gas.” It also attacked her Republican rival, Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earle-Sears, whom Democratic groups deluged with negative ads. Combined with Trump’s unpopularity, the strategy worked: Spanberger romped to victory with 57.5 percent of the vote, and Democrats won a 64–36 majority in the Virginia House of Delegates — their largest in decades.

 

But once Spanberger was in office, her moderate mask began to slip. After she ran on affordability and a traditional biography, Spanberger has served up pure culture-war fodder and let her party’s left wing run wild during her first months in office. Let that be a warning to other states tempted by a Democrat who insists he’s nothing like the fringe of his party.

 

As of this writing, Spanberger has signed four bills into law that will each be subject to a referendum. One would enshrine a right to abortion in the state constitution, another would enshrine same-sex marriage,  and a third would automatically restore voting rights to an estimated 260,000 convicted felons upon their release. All three will be on the ballot in November.

 

A fourth referendum, scheduled for April 21, concerns a proposed state constitutional amendment that would allow Democrats to implement a new congressional map featuring ten Democratic-leaning seats and only one Republican-leaning seat.

 

This is a reversal of Spanberger’s stance on the campaign trail.

 

“Virginia by constitutional amendment has a new redistricting effort that was put in place and first utilized in the 2021 redistricting,” Spanberger told the Washington, D.C., ABC affiliate last August. “I’ve been watching with interest what other states are doing, but I have no plans to redistrict Virginia.” On March 5, Spanberger declared from her official governor’s account on X: “I’m voting YES on Virginia’s redistricting amendment.”

 

Spanberger ran on the high cost of living, but she is likely to sign tax increases into law this year. Since she took office, Virginia Democrats have introduced more than 50 new tax bills. They include: (1) a new top income tax bracket of 10 percent for millionaires, which would give Virginia the fifth-highest top income tax rate in the country; (2) a new tax on retail deliveries in Northern Virginia from companies such as Amazon, FedEx, UPS, and DoorDash; (3) a new 11 percent sales tax on the gross receipts from the retail sale of any firearm or ammunition; (4) a 10 percent tax on revenue earned by the operators of fantasy sports; (5) an extension of the state’s sales tax to digital property such as Netflix subscriptions and cloud storage, and an extension of the state’s retail sales tax to services such as dry cleaning and laundry services, companion animal care, and residential home repair or maintenance; and (6) an extension of the state’s personal property tax to electric-powered landscaping equipment, including lawn mowers, edgers, trimmers, leaf blowers, and chainsaws.

 

Here we see the difference between Argentina and Virginia: Down in Buenos Aires, President Javier Milei wielded a chainsaw at political rallies to demonstrate how he wanted to dramatically chop state spending, bureaucracy, and taxes. In Virginia, Democrats want you to pay an annual tax on the chainsaw — forever.

 

Taxpayers in Virginia pay a “personal property tax” on vehicles, in addition to the sales tax paid at the time of purchase. For most people, that means their car — generally taxed at $3–$5 per $100 of assessed value. In fiscal year 2025, Fairfax County found that a “typical” household paid $1,266 and change in personal property taxes.

 

Spanberger campaigned on eliminating Virginia’s personal property car tax; she called it the “most hated tax in all of Virginia.” But Democrats in the state assembly blocked a proposed budget amendment to eliminate it. If Spanberger objected, she was silent about it.

 

Mind you, Virginia is not facing a budget crisis like the one Mayor Zohran Mamdani is using to justify steep tax hikes and delays to his campaign promises in New York City. Virginia ended the 2025 fiscal year with a surplus of more than $570 million and — according to Glenn Youngkin, Spanberger’s predecessor — more than $900 million in rainy-day funds. Youngkin also claimed that the state enjoyed $10 billion in surplus revenue during the last four years.

 

Virginia used to rank in the middle of the pack on state tax burdens, but it’s starting to slide down the list. The Tax Foundation ranked Virginia 30th in this year’s State Tax Competitiveness Index, concluding that “many states have implemented significant income tax reforms in recent years, leaving Virginia behind.” Moreover, “the state’s progressive income tax has a top marginal rate higher than several of its neighbors, including Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee, and West Virginia.”

 

In addition to the proposed tax increases, Spanberger has announced that Virginia will rejoin the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. The RGGI sells a limited number of carbon allowances to energy producers, and the pool of allowances shrinks each year. This is supposed to spur energy producers to move to more carbon-friendly fuels. In reality, however, Dominion Energy, Virginia’s largest electric utility, simply covers the costs of its allowances through bill riders — additional costs tacked onto customer bills and approved by state regulators. One study from the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy estimates that rejoining the RGGI means Virginians will pay about $500 million more per year for electricity.

 

Remember, Spanberger ran for governor contending that Republicans were making everything less affordable.

 

Lawmakers’ dramatic veering to the left should make Virginians eager to march to the state capitol in Richmond and hurl rotten fruit at them. Of course, state legislators may be gone by the time voters get there. Like many state legislatures, Virginia’s meets only a fraction of the year. In even-numbered years, barring an emergency session, the session is held for 60 days. In odd-numbered years, the session is held for 30 days, although it is frequently extended to 45 days. This year’s budget included a provision raising legislative salaries from $18,000 a year for senators and $17,640 for delegates to $50,000 each — not counting a $237 per diem for each day the legislature is in session and $1,250 per month to help maintain an office in their district. That’s a 178 percent salary increase for senators and a 183 percent increase for delegates.

 

Remember those U.S. marshals and police chiefs who called Spanberger “one of our own”? Immediately upon taking office, the governor terminated all Virginia State Police and Virginia Department of Corrections assistance to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

 

That decision came under fire after Abdul Jalloh, an illegal immigrant from Sierra Leone, allegedly stabbed 41-year-old Fairfax County resident Stephanie Minter to death. Jalloh had previously been arrested more than 30 times for crimes including rape, malicious wounding, assault, and drug possession. In November 2023, he was convicted of malicious wounding; he was sentenced to two years in prison but was released after seven months.

 

In 2025, a Fairfax County police major wrote in an email to the chief deputy commonwealth’s attorney that Jalloh’s behavior was “escalating and becoming more violent and explosive. . . . I am concerned that it is not a matter of if, but rather when he will maliciously wound (or worse) again.” But it’s worth noting that according to Fairfax County jail officials, ICE never lodged a detainer or came to take Jalloh into custody during the nine times he was jailed between 2020 and 2025.

 

“There is a woman who is dead because ICE did not take action, and apparently they expect local law or state enforcement to do their jobs for them,” Spanberger told the Washington, D.C., NBC affiliate in March. Maybe barring law enforcement from cooperating with ICE wasn’t such a good idea after all.

 

Then there’s Spanberger’s friendship with Democrat Ralph Northam, Virginia’s governor from 2018 to 2022. You may recall that in 2019, a photo featured on Northam’s yearbook page from his time at Eastern Virginia Medical School surfaced. The infamous photo featured two young men — one in blackface and one in a Ku Klux Klan robe and hood — and listed one of Northam’s nicknames as “Coonman,” a Jim Crow–era racial slur.

 

Northam initially admitted he was one of the two figures in the photo, without saying which one; then he retracted that admission, claiming he wasn’t in the picture at all. Still, Northam finished his term, in large part because his two prospective successors faced scandals of their own.

 

If Northam had resigned or been removed from office by the state legislature, Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax would have taken over, and he faced two serious accusations of sexual assault. (The Virginia House Democratic Caucus absurdly argued that the allegations, though “extremely serious,” should not be investigated by the state legislature.) But if Northam and Fairfax resigned, then state Attorney General Mark Herring would have become governor — and Harring had admitted to wearing blackface to a college party in 1980. And if all three had resigned, the speaker of the House, Republican Kirk Cox, would have become governor. Democrats concluded that a GOP governor was the truly unacceptable scenario.

 

In January, Spanberger appointed Northam to the board of the Virginia Military Institute. Apparently, he is sufficiently disgraced for Spanberger not to have announced the move with any fanfare, but not disgraced enough to be denied such an honor. Maybe he can consult on photo selections for the VMI yearbook.

 

For a long time, conservatives scoffed whenever the mainstream media described a prominent Democrat as a “moderate” or a “centrist.” While there have always been a few genuine articles, those terms have been promiscuously and erroneously applied to the likes of former President Barack Obama, New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, former Vice President Kamala Harris, and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. Many inattentive political journalists and correspondents label Democrats “moderates” based on personality and speaking style rather than actual policy positions.

 

Since taking office, the Virginia state government has shifted so far to the left at such speed that Virginians would be justified in showing up in neck braces and threatening to sue for whiplash.

 

“Campaign as a centrist, govern as a progressive” is the oldest trick in the book, and it might as well be the unofficial motto of the modern Democratic Party. Considering how Richmond is changing, we may want to nickname that bait-and-switch maneuver “pulling a Spanberger.”