Abigail Spanberger Is No Moderate

Virginia gubernatorial candidate Abigail Spanberger is busy trying to portray herself as a moderate, but her policy record proves she’s far from that. 

With a 5% lifetime score on the Heritage Action for America scorecard, Spanberger spent six years in Congress voting for policies like restricting economic freedom, weakening U.S. border security, and blocking voter ID bills. She also voted against religious freedom by rejecting a reasonable religious exemption in a pregnancy accommodations bill.

Spanberger voted in lock step with President Joe Biden’s spending blowout, recklessly pouring money to political allies for “green energy” boondoggles and feeding the inflation that has left so many families struggling today. 

Her congressional record score was so anti-freedom, it was half the 10% score of the average House Democrat. 

Spanberger also voted to ensure that illegal immigrants are counted in the U.S. census, which would favor Democrats if legislative boundaries were ever redrawn.

She is also raking in donations from leftist bigwigs like tech mogul Reid Hoffman, and she’s a darling of teachers unions—the biggest foes of school choice programs that offer a lifeline to children trapped in failing schools (who are disproportionately non-white, despite Spanberger’s party claiming to care for racial minorities). 

Virginia parents can’t forget that during the COVID-19 era, she pushed to keep schools shuttered until all staffers got vaccinated, despite the fact that vaccinated people can still spread COVID-19. Virginia schools stayed remote, and then children were forced to wear masks long after the rest of the country had moved on, in part thanks to intransigent Democrat leaders like Spanberger, who prioritized special interest groups and political posturing over children’s clear interests. Poor and disadvantaged children are still struggling the most to recover from COVID-19-connected learning loss due to prolonged school closures.

While still in Congress, Spanberger also voted against the Laken Riley Act, which enabled the Trump administration to take an MS-13 gang leader off the streets of Virginia. She capped off Women’s History Month by happily celebrating “Trans Visibility Day” and also voted against the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act of 2023, landing her a failed score on  Independent Women’s Voice’s Riley Gaines “Stand with Women Scorecard.” 

Spanberger’s vote against keeping men out of women’s sports rejects biology, common sense, the Constitution, and overwhelming public opinion. Her position is problematic and undermines the Constitution, as case law under the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause recognizes inherent differences between men and women. Legal precedents recognize that to ensure equal protection under the law, men and women sometimes must be treated distinctly. 

In my city of Arlington, Virginia, Washington and Liberty High School finally removed an individual with a sex crime history who claimed to be female and was repeatedly exposing himself to minors in the girls’ locker room while accessing the high school’s community pool that was open to the general public. 

In Loudoun County, also in my home state of Virginia, a boy wearing a skirt exploited his school’s pro-transgender policies and sexually assaulted a girl in the bathroom. Tragically, due to lax school policies, he assaulted a second one.

Why does Spanberger support these terrible policies? Why does she refuse to support women and instead favor misogyny in women’s prisons, shelters, bathrooms, and sports? 

The good news is President Donald Trump this year preserved the Constitution through his executive orders recognizing only two sexes and keeping males out of female sports. 

Our current governor, Glenn Youngkin, has brought unprecedented prosperity and stability to our commonwealth. Spanberger would bring just the opposite.

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.

Carrie Sheffield is a senior policy analyst at Independent Women’s Voice and a resident of Arlington, Virginia. 

The post Abigail Spanberger Is No Moderate appeared first on The Daily Signal.