In Virginia gov race, Spanberger exposes Dems’ woke weaknesses

The off-year governor’s election in purple Virginia is almost always a win for the party that doesn’t hold the White House, but this year the race is showing how much Democrats have refused to learn their lessons from their massive culture-war losses of 2024.

The battle in the Old Dominion has all the hallmarks of Democrats’ White House defeat in November.

An uninspiring political-insider candidate, hand-picked by the party establishment, is running a campaign that relies on hype from friendly media.

She’s dodging questions about hot-button cultural issues — including trans athletes in school sports and men in girls’ dressing rooms — and betting she can coast to victory on resistance-fueled backlash to President Donald Trump.

A month ago, Democrat and ex-CIA spy Abigail Spanberger’s lackluster basement campaign was chugging along, spending big money on a plethora of ads slamming her opponent, Republican Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, as too conservative for the state.

Earle-Sears, a Marine Corps veteran, rode strong support from the Republican grassroots to become Virginia’s first female lieutenant governor and first woman of color elected statewide.

Thanks in part to a massive spending gap, Spanberger built up a double-digit polling lead over the summer; many in the GOP wrote off the race as lost.

But in recent weeks she’s stumbled badly over the case of Richard Cox, a biological man claiming transgender status who’s exploited local “bathroom laws” to repeatedly expose himself to women and children in Northern Virginia locker rooms.

Fairfax County police say they have no intention of charging Cox with any crime, despite public outrage — and even though his phone reportedly contained both child porn and a schedule tracking children’s swim classes.

This should be easy for a politician with any common sense to condemn.

Instead, Spanberger has dodged.

When local reporter Nick Minock asked her a yes-or-no question on the topic — “Do you support biological males who say they are women using women’s locker rooms and bathrooms and competing in women’s sports?” — the candidate looked like a deer in headlights.

In Minock’s now-viral video of the exchange, Spanberger gave a meandering non-answer blaming Trump for attacking Title IX, and blew off follow-up questions.

“Uh, this is bad,” a top state Democrat groaned to the online magazine Puck. “And she’s considered one of our best candidates.”

A week later, another reporter gave Spanberger a second chance.

Whatever script she was supposed to stick to was lost in another mess of word salad, as she tried and failed to disguise that she favors a rollback of Trump’s executive order and would once again allow biological males to compete in girls’ sports in Virginia.

Known for her carefully prepared lines on the trail, Spanberger —  touted as a moderate and considered a potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidate — is finding that on this issue, her talking points just aren’t connecting.

Sensing weakness on an issue of significant importance to suburban parents, Earle-Sears’ latest ads are making the most of Spanberger’s now-obvious leftist preferences.

Echoing a charge that even Kamala Harris has admitted hurt her in 2024, the spot calls Spanberger’s policies “insane.”

“Spanberger is for they/them,” it concludes. “Not for us.”

Worse yet, the issue provoked an overheated and racist response from some Spanberger supporters.

When Earle-Sears came before the school board in deep-blue Arlington to argue against its bathroom policies, she was greeted by a Democrat protester holding up a handwritten sign: “Hey Winsome, if trans can’t share your bathroom, then blacks can’t share my water fountain.”

Now Spanberger has a new headache: Jay Jones, the Democrats’ state attorney general candidate.

On Friday, National Review revealed that Jones had sent violent text messages wishing death on the family of a prominent Virginia Republican, asserting that the GOP member was “breeding little fascists.” 

Spanberger condemned Jones’ language — but coming from a candidate who has repeatedly told her supporters to “let your rage fuel you,” her comments didn’t ring true.

For undecided independent voters, a significant swing bloc in Virginia, the ugly incident undermined Democrats’ claims that Earle-Sears is the extremist in this race.

So Spanberger is trying to change the subject.

Rather than lay out what she actually believes, her latest ads claim she wants to “take politics out of schools.”

And she’s bringing on campaign help from Bill and Hillary Clinton, along with their buddy Terry McAuliffe — who lost the last gubernatorial race to Republican Glenn Youngkin over similar hot-button issues four years ago.

McAuliffe, too, failed to answer concerns about woke Northern Virginia school-board policies, pronouncing the controversies a distraction and proclaiming, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”

Republican insiders, mindful of Virginia’s history as a purple state with two entrenched Democratic senators, were wary of wading into the culture war.

Youngkin leaned into that fight — and won handily.

The odds are still against Earle-Sears pulling off what would be a shocking political upset.

But on Thursday, a new poll from the Trafalgar Group had Spanberger’s lead cut down to five points, 47-42.

Spanberger’s woes show that even after their 2024 drubbing, Democrats haven’t learned how to deal with questions that seem so obvious to the vast majority of Americans.

And that Democrats’ fake centrists are still just trying to hide what they really believe.

Ben Domenech is editor at large of The Spectator and a Fox News contributor.