At the time of America's founding, the Commonwealth of Virginia stood as a shining beacon for liberty, the birthplace of our greatest president and the authors of our founding documents. Thomas Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence, and James Madison the US Constitution. George Washington was the indispensable man who, to this day, towers above all who followed him in the White House. That preeminent triumvirate would undoubtedly be shocked and saddened by the state of their beloved Commonwealth 250 years later.
The Long, Complicated History of Virginia
The history of the Commonwealth is something of a rollercoaster. Seventy-five years after the founding, it became the home base for Robert E. Lee’s Confederate government and army. Following the Civil War, the state essentially replaced slavery with segregation and Jim Crow laws, becoming one of seven southern states subjected to strict federal oversight in the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But two decades later, much had changed, and the 1988 election of Doug Wilder as the first black governor in modern American history signaled a new era. As the DC suburbs of northern Virginia expanded rapidly and became a high-tech hub, the population became far more diverse. The state had begun to blush a shade of purple.
Now, the once deeply conservative state has become just as reliably, and overwhelmingly, liberal. Indeed, the left has successfully transformed Virginia into a progressive oasis, the mirror image of Ohio and Florida, long-time swing states that are now dependably red.
Virginia had already been steadily turning from purple to blue, buffered only by the effective four-year term of Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin that ended in January. Democrats had won every Senate election in Virginia from 1887 to 1973, but that was when the party was defined largely by its segregationist ways. Both of the state’s current Senators, Tim Kaine and Mark Warner, are the opposite, liberal Democrats who have also served as governors and have been in the upper chamber for a combined 30 years. The only realm in which the GOP has remained competitive on a statewide basis has been in the US House, where it holds five of the state’s 11 seats.
But what happened to the Commonwealth in 2025 was nothing less than a shock to the system. In a state that has never taken to Donald Trump – he lost there three times by an average of seven points – the Democrats picked up a whopping 14 new seats in the state’s House of Delegates to jump to an overwhelming California-like 64-36 advantage. And they swept the top three statewide positions, with Abigail Spanberger elected governor in a 15-point landslide.
Spanberger has now become the latest in a long line of Democrats to run as a common-sense centrist and then tack sharply left once the election is over. She has devoted most of her attention to progressive causes and gerrymandering. In response to the Texas mid-decade redistricting plan designed to add as many as five new Republican seats in the House, Gov. Spanberger has reversed field on a campaign promise and called for a statewide referendum on a redistricting plan that could potentially inflate Virginia Democrats’ advantage in the House from 5-4 to 9-1. Those four added seats, along with new seats in California’s gerrymandering plan, could well swing the midterm elections.
Bait and Switch?
During her 2025 gubernatorial campaign against a weak Republican opponent, former Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earle-Sears, Spanberger promised to focus on the economic concerns of Virginia’s middle class. Sounding every bit the sensible Democrat who would discard most of her party’s toxic progressive policies in favor of centrism, her landslide victory was impressive enough to land her the honor of delivering the Democrats’ response to Trump’s State of the Union Address.
These are still early days, but it seems she has taken that big victory as a license to swing to the left. It is entirely reminiscent of Joe Biden, who ran for president in 2020 as a moderate who would unite the nation but governed as a progressive who divided it. In the Washington Examiner, author Hugo Gurdon described Spanberger as a bait-and-switch Democrat, a leftist wolf dressed as a smart centrist sheep running a confidence scheme:
“The gulf between her presentation and reality is the measure of her cynical approach to elections, treating them as confidence tricks in which winning is all and honor is nothing. Her modus operandi dispenses with the notion of democratic accountability. It is all about conning citizens rather than persuading them. In this approach, you do not show voters what you are or what you believe, then convince them that such attributes and policies are what is best for their future. Instead, you pretend you are not what you are and hope the dupes will be fools enough to fall for it.”
Kollin Crompton, deputy communications director for the Republican Governors Association, summed up the new governor’s agenda: “In just a few weeks as governor, Abigail Spanberger has turned Virginia into a sanctuary state, driven major businesses out of Virginia, and pushed to raise taxes on Virginia families.”
Even the governor’s so-called “Affordable Virginia Agenda” shows little promise for lowering the cost of living. One bill mandates that public utilities spend more on energy efficiency for low-income housing, which will drive up costs for the middle class. Other bills will make it easier for cities and counties in the state to block construction of new housing, make it harder for landlords to evict delinquent tenants, and regulate healthcare premiums for smokers. Spanberger has also compelled collective bargaining with unions, most of which provide vital funding for leftists. The practice was outlawed in the state, then became optional, and will now be compulsory. These initiatives will not decrease, but rather increase the cost of living.
Then there is the matter of gun-grabbing. As Liberty Nation News’ James Fite has reported, “a dozen gun control bills – some of which had been vetoed by the previous governor – have been passed through the legislature and are either sitting on her desk or on the way … it will transform [Virginia] into a gun grabber’s dream, having more gun control in common with California, New York, and its other neighbor, Maryland.”
It is a sad state of affairs for so many who have called Virginia home. The fact that the Commonwealth was the linchpin for America’s founding has never seemed such a distant memory.
