After Abigail Spanberger won the Virginia governor’s race going away in November, the consensus among the political chattering class was that it’s a foregone conclusion the Republicans will lose in next year’s midterms. The experts said this was a referendum on President Donald Trump, and an early sign that his America First movement is cracking. 

The same experts pointed to “key Democrat wins” in the New Jersey governor’s race and the New York City mayoral election as further indicators of a coming blue wave. 

To be so smug in their predictions, the experts had to ignore the fact that the races were in two blue states and a deep blue city without Trump on the ballot. The polls even indicated that without Northern Virginia and its huge number of federal employees, Spanberger would have lost her race. In short, you can’t apply these outcomes to congressional and senate races across the country that simply. 

But there is one other thing the experts ignored – with Spanberger taking office close to a year before the midterms, midterm voters will have had the chance to see exactly how voting blue worked out in Virginia and elsewhere. If the Republicans are smart, they will turn every midterm race into a referendum on Spanberger and the larger tax-and-spend Democrat approach to governing everywhere. 

Enter Exhibit A. This news report is the ad that every Republican candidate needs to use to win his or her race in the midterms. 

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Less than one month in office, and Spanberger and the Democrats are already instituting aggressive leftist policies that hurt the very people who voted for them. And you’re already starting to see some organic buyer’s remorse. 

So, how much damage has Spanberger done in a month? According to WJLA-V News in Arlington, here’s a list of the proposed taxes Spanberger and the Democrats have already introduced:   

The station reached out to Spanberger’s office for two days in a row and never got a response. That’s an obvious sign the Democrats simply don’t have a defense for this. These are “kitchen table issues” that impact voters in their wallets. Keep in mind, Spanberger, like Zohran Mamdani in New York City, ran on the issue of “affordability.” 

Democrats now hold the governorship, a majority in the House of Delegates, and the state Senate, and they wasted no time pursuing their leftist agenda beyond higher taxes. They're seeking an extremely aggressive, leftward overhaul of the state’s constitution. There may be four “major” constitutional amendments on the ballot for Virginians in November. 

The Virginia Mercury reported that the four amendments “would protect abortion access, enshrine same-sex marriage, automatically restore voting rights to felons who have completed their sentences and allow a rare mid-decade redistricting ahead of the 2026 congressional elections.” 

Stephen Farnsworth, a political scientist at the University of Mary Washington, told the Mercury, “This is not a normal opening act for a legislative session. Spanberger is setting the stage for an aggressive year one.” 

There's a reason this is unusual. Getting too aggressive in the run-up to the midterms can backfire. And Spanberger is not a one-off. As I reported yesterday, Zohran Mamdani, the candidate who most famously ran on the issue of affordability, is now pointing to a dire fiscal crisis and already calling for major tax increases. Do you see a pattern here? 

That’s the key for Republicans, not only in Virginia, but across the country. In 2026, Virginia promises to serve as a disastrous case study on Democrat policies. Since it’s so fresh in voters’ minds, Republicans can easily point to the empty promises of affordability that Democrats like Spanberger and Mamdani made just last year, how those policies have failed, and how the Democrats never intended to keep them anyway. 

Republicans across the country need to frame their opponents as Spanberger 2.0. They need to put Spanberger on their ballot and run against her and all that she represents: higher taxes and extreme leftist policies. 

Republican strategists have a way of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, so nothing is a given in 2026. But if voters everywhere from Texas to Ohio don’t know what a disaster Spanberger was in her first year, the GOP will have missed a golden opportunity. 

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