Will Democrats take back Virginia’s governorship this year?

Virginia is one of only two states electing governors and legislatures this year. Democrats in Virginia and New Jersey want those contests to serve as referenda on President Trump.

Former congresswoman Abigail Spanberger, now the Democrat standard-bearer in Virginia, hopes — with Ghazala Hashmi for lieutenant governor and Jay Jones for attorney general — to end Republican control of the commonwealth’s executive branch. GOP lieutenant governor Winsome Earle-Sears is running for governor, and Jason Miyares seeks re-election as attorney general. (The state constitution bars incumbent governor Glenn Youngkin from another term.)

So far, “Smilin’ Spanberger” has campaigned in a blur of platitudes: “standing up for Virginia,” “cutting costs,” “strengthening education.” She avoids any issue that might divide voters. Her pitch recalls New Jersey Democrat Mikie Sherrill’s promise to “lower energy prices” despite decades of single-party rule in Trenton.

Everyone favors “lower costs,” but cuts to the federal workforce — popular nationwide — would jar northern Virginia’s affluent, government-dependent suburbs. Spanberger also treads carefully on education. She touts her status as a “mom of three daughters” and vows to make public education the nation’s best — emphasizing the adjective with a knowing wink — but offers no specifics.

That vagueness is convenient. Two scandals have broken out in the northern Virginia blue wall’s schools. Fairfax County — one of the affluent counties bordering Washington — has been accused of facilitating minors’ abortions without parental knowledge or consent, which is (currently) illegal in Virginia. The “progressive” Fairfax County prosecutor has so far done nothing about the scandal. Meanwhile, Arlington, Fairfax, Loudoun, and Prince William counties, along with the City of Alexandria, have been cited by the Trump administration for violating Title IX by admitting men into women’s locker rooms and bathrooms. Arlington has allowed a registered sex offender into women’s changing rooms of public pools located in its public schools (with the avid defense of an Arlington school board member). Loudoun County this year suspended two boys as “sexual harassers” because they objected to having a girl changing in their locker room space. It’s the same county that had a father prosecuted (subsequently pardoned by Governor Youngkin) for protesting at a county school board meeting about a boy in a dress who sexually assaulted his daughter in a “unisex” school bathroom in 2021. Several of those northern Virginia jurisdictions are suing the Trump administration for cutting off their federal funds over their “trans” policies.

Spanberger has sidestepped the Fairfax abortion controversy, likely hoping Democrat victories will advance a state constitutional amendment that legalizes abortion on demand through birth in the Commonwealth and strikes down parental notification and consent laws. After having avoided addressing the “trans” bathroom and locker policies in northern Virginia, Spanberger has now cautiously floated her new line.

The new Spanberger spin is that what Title IX requires is in dispute; the Trump administration is acting unilaterally rather than seeking congressional clarification; and, therefore, the northern Virginia school boards suing Trump to keep their federal dollars and “trans” policies just have a different legal take (which Virginia’s tradition of “local school control” means we should respect). Spanberger never says she disagrees with those boards (as Youngkin has) — only that the requirements of Title IX are in dispute.

Bunk.

Democrats want to play a shell game with “sex” and “gender.” The same 92nd Congress that enacted Title IX passed the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). Both acts speak about “sex” and “sex” discrimination. In 1972, nobody in Congress suggested there are any other sexes than men and women, nor that the distinction is fungible. Title IX was explicitly enacted to protect “women’s” sports and — in contrast to DIE Supreme Court hire Ketanji Brown-Jackson, who needs a biologist’s consultation — nobody in 1972 seemed confused about “what is a woman.”

The Biden administration swapped “gender” for “sex,” pretending that a law designed to enhance women’s access to sports actually entitles men to subvert them and take them over, an interpretation the Trump administration rescinded. Northern Virginia’s very cosseted and very blue educational establishment does not want to abandon that interpretation, just as Virginia Democrats pretend they consummated “ratification” of the ERA at least 38 years after the last statutory deadline for its approval passed. But they know that writing ERA into the Constitution provides the gender ideologues a hook to give their agenda a constitutional patina.

Spanberger is now cautiously signaling to those who will read between the lines that she thinks the “trans” school issue is a legal question tied to Trumpian overreach while declining to say explicitly (wink, wink, nod, nod) whether she supports boys in girls’ spaces. But the message is clear: Riffing on Luke 8:8, “let those with ears to hear, hear” (and hopefully not the deplorables who might react adversely).

Spanberger desperately wants to avoid being “McAuliffed.” Terry McAuliffe, Democratic candidate for Virginia governor in 2021, also anticipated an easy glide path to Richmond. Glenn Youngkin’s upset victory in that race came from his ability to make parents’ rights — specifically, schools using names and pronouns for kids behind parents’ backs — into a campaign issue. McAuliffe tried to blow it off by aligning with teachers against parents.

Not wanting to repeat 2021, Spanberger hopes to tamp down any discussion of these issues. Democrats believe that abortion is an indisputable “right” and so hesitate less to campaign openly for it (while dancing around the Fairfax schools scandal), but “trans” bathroom, shower, and locker room policies still mobilize visceral parental pushback, a force Virginia Democrats hope not to reckon with before November.

It’s high time Virginia parents put it on the front burner and turned the heat up.

Image: Abigail Spanberger. Credit: Ezra Deutsch-Feldman via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.