It’s hard to find a more risk-averse politician than Virginia Democrat Abigail Spanberger. From the University of Virginia to a master’s degree, followed by the CIA and then a high-end consulting firm, Spanberger’s adult life was custom-made for her 2025 gubernatorial bid.
But it’s hard to play it safe when you’re a member of a party that lets a male sex offender into the high school girls’ locker room in the name of civil rights.
Republican gubernatorial nominee Winsome Earle-Sears has surged in recent weeks by highlighting how Democrats’ woke ideology is harming Virginia school children, especially those in the wealthy blue counties right outside of Washington, D.C.
This late-summer surge is promising, and it also provides a lesson for Republicans: Elected Democrats are staked to extreme and unpopular views on gender and race, and these issues are especially salient in schools, where even moderate Democratic parents understand that this ideology endangers their children and disrupts education.
Earle-Sears should press these issues as hard as she can, forcing Spanberger to either abandon her base and past positions or win moderate voters.
The best distillation of the Democrats’ problem came in a protest sign held by a Spanberger supporter:
“Hey Winsome, if trans can’t share your bathroom, then blacks can’t share my water fountain,” read the sign, held aloft by a white Democrat protesting Earle-Sears in Arlington.
The message was that black people lose their legal equality if they deviate from progressive orthodoxy. This is a common sentiment from the Left, even if it’s rarely expressed so coarsely.
The message is even more deranged when you consider the transgender bathroom issue in Arlington and nearby.
Richard Cox, a repeat sex offender, was allowed by Arlington and Fairfax counties regularly into women’s locker rooms at public pools. He exposed himself to women and girls. Why did the pools let him in? Why didn’t Fairfax County prosecute him for it?
You can guess why. Cox claims to be a woman. Under the Democrats’ official ideology, that means Cox is a woman. “Trans can share your bathroom” means “your girls need to be exposed to pervert Richard Cox.”
More recently, Loudoun County Public Schools suspended two boys because they objected to a girl, who identified as a boy, being in the boys’ locker room.
Every sane person agrees that, speaking honestly, the boys were blameless and right. Every decent person believes Cox doesn’t belong in girls’ locker rooms and that Fairfax and Arlington counties should prosecute him. But Democratic dogma doesn’t allow this, because the party holds that “trans women are women,” meaning Cox is a woman simply because he says he is.
This is Spanberger’s dilemma. Does she reverse her embrace of Democratic dogma, or does she dramatically change her position to align with sanity?
Politics may force her to switch if Earle-Sears continues to bang this drum.
Arlington and Fairfax schools have been failing their students. Republicans won every statewide office in the 2021 elections largely because school parents saw that woke ideology was undermining education. For the last three school years, the percentage of Fairfax and Arlington students passing the state Standards of Learning tests in all subjects has remained 5%-10% lower than a decade ago.
Moderate parents in costly Washington suburbs might tolerate some wokeism, but not at the expense of their children and the education they pay for so dearly with their property taxes and high home prices.
IF VIRGINIA DEMOCRATS WANT TO LEGALIZE BROTHELS, THEY SHOULD ADMIT IT
Northern Virginia’s shift to the Democrats is the reason Democrats have won most statewide elections for the past decade — they hold both Senate seats and have won the state’s electoral votes handily in the last five elections.
This is Spanberger’s home turf. She knows she has to win here by a big margin if she is to win statewide. If Earle-Sears keeps pressing the issue of ideology-over-education, she can win the governor’s mansion or force Spanberger to back down from the Democrats’ destructive dogma.
