Virginia Governor-elect Abigail Spanberger (Democrat) celebrating her election night victory in Richmond. Photo / Matt McClain, The Washington Post
In 2014, Abigail Spanberger had a decision to make. Her young family was living in Los Angeles, where she was a CIA officer working on drug cartel cases, and the time had come to put in for her next assignment.
She and her husband, Adam, handed a toy globe to their 5-year-old daughter, Claire, and described endless possibilities for adventure. “Where should we go?” they asked. England? Costa Rica? Kenya?
Claire had another idea: Virginia.
“No!” Spanberger retorted. “It’s Mummy’s job. We’re not going to go to Virginia.”
“Why wouldn’t we go to Virginia?” Claire said. “Everyone we love lives in Virginia.”
A wrenching choice began what Spanberger thought would be a temporary detour off the track of a dream career.
They would move to the Richmond suburbs so her three girls could spend a few years surrounded by grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles.
Then she could return to globe-trotting espionage, or maybe a job at CIA headquarters in Langley.
Fate had other plans. Barely a decade later, Spanberger on Wednesday was elected governor of the commonwealth of Virginia by a double-digit margin.
Come January, she will be the first woman to step into a line of men going back to Governor Patrick Henry in 1776.
While making history, Spanberger will also be looked to as a blueprint for resurrecting a party suffering historically low public approval and shut out of power in Washington.
Democrats are desperate for a formula to regain control of Congress and the White House. The elections, though bringing welcome victories, also sent a mixed signal.
Centrists picked up wins for governor in Virginia and New Jersey, which elected Representative Mikie Sherrill.
Sherrill, a former Navy helicopter pilot, is a close friend of Spanberger; when they were in Congress, they spent four years as weeknight roommates in a spartan Capitol Hill apartment.
Both elected in 2018, they were part of a tight-knit cadre of women lawmakers with national security credentials who dubbed themselves “the badasses”.
However, in the New York mayor’s race, voters overwhelmingly chose 34-year-old phenom Zohran Mamdani, a self-declared democratic socialist, marking a hard turn to the left.
Spanberger’s triumph on the ballot is only a beginning, she said in an interview aboard her campaign bus a week before the election.
“My goal is for people to say, ‘Oh, my goodness, look at this. We can win and we will win.’ And then to demonstrate, what does that actually look like, and what does good governance look like?” she said.
Hers has been a dazzling political trajectory.
Spanberger came to Congress on an anti-Trump wave in which more than 100 women won House seats - a record.
As a 39-year-old novice candidate touting pragmatism and promising to protect the Affordable Care Act, she flipped a Richmond-area congressional district that had been in Republican hands for nearly half a century.
Yet Spanberger found the House frustratingly bound by procedure, ideology, and rigid partisanship - a culture at odds with the values and concerns of her 7th Congressional District constituents.
When Democrats unexpectedly lost House seats despite Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential victory, she admonished her congressional colleagues: “We need to not ever use the word ‘socialist’ or ‘socialism’ ever again”. She felt the same about trendy progressive slogans such as “defund the police”.
In November 2023, Spanberger announced that she would not run for a fourth term and instead would seek Virginia’s highest office.
She has campaigned for two years with a lightness rare for a Democrat in these political times, especially after Donald Trump’s re-election.
Spanberger’s hands fly as she speaks. On the rope line, she is a compulsive hugger. She rarely mentions the US President by name, dwelling instead on what his Administration’s policies are doing to a state with hundreds of thousands of federal employees.
She invariably brings up her ranking as the most bipartisan member of Virginia’s congressional delegation.
Having enjoyed a comfortable lead in the polls from the start, there was little doubt that her moderate brand would prevail against the dogmatic conservatism of Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earle Sears (R).
After four years of Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin - another name she rarely brings up - Spanberger said she will show “how much things can change [from] governor to governor. The way that you can really meaningfully impact people’s lives quickly is, I think, really impressive and exciting.”
Among her first acts, she has said, will be scrapping Youngkin’s order directing local law enforcement to assist in Trump’s federal immigration crackdown.
She has been vague when pressed about Youngkin’s restrictive policies regarding transgender children in sports and bathrooms. Instead of spelling out her own views, she has said they are questions that should be left to local communities.
Youngkin has said Spanberger “doesn’t have a moral compass”. Throughout the campaign, Republicans tried to brand her as a “fake moderate”. They pointed to her congressional votes supporting the policies of the Biden administration - a record one news release from the state Republican Party described as “extremism with a PR team”.
It did not stick. Spanberger has her own checklist of priorities: “We’re worried about affordability and housing, healthcare and energy, real challenges, and a desire to see strengthened public schools, a real desire to see a growth of our economy where people with a good idea or a dream can build up their business here in Virginia”.
At her core is what the governor-elect calls an “innate sense of urgency”.
Abigail Anne Davis knew from the start that she wanted to be a spy. As a child, she wrote her diary in code and conducted surveillance operations on her younger sisters.
In primary school, she discovered an ear for foreign languages when she began to pick up the Spanish of a playmate’s Ecuadorian grandmother. By the time she graduated from college, her sister Meredith Schatz said, Spanberger was conversational in five or six more languages.
There was something else about the family’s eldest-born, Schatz said: “I’ve never met someone who’s more aware of the things someone didn’t say or didn’t do than Abigail. You know, body language and how people choose their words. She has a very key and astute understanding of what it is they’re saying and what it is they’re not.”
A penchant for investigative work came from her father, who was a federal postal inspector.
His assignments moved the family from Red Bank, New Jersey, where Abigail was born in 1979, to Maine, the New York City area, Philadelphia and finally near Richmond, where the Davises settled when Abigail was 13.
Spanberger’s activist bent was inherited from her mother, a nurse and passionate backer of the Equal Rights Amendment who put a bumper sticker on the family car quoting Pope Paul VI: “If you want peace, work for justice”.
Her high school acquaintance with Adam Spanberger blossomed into romance when they were students at the University of Virginia - the match made easier by the fact his planned profession as an engineer would make it easier to accommodate regular changes of location.
After her 2001 graduation, Spanberger moved to Hamburg, where she taught English and enrolled in a 12-month MBA programme.
Then 9/11 happened.
“I just decided, if I want to go home and work for CIA at some point in the future, why wait?” she recalled.
In December 2002, she got a “conditional” offer from the agency. Given how busy it was with hundreds of thousands of applications amid the launch of a ‘war on terrorism’, her background check would take years to complete.
In the interim, she decided to follow her father into the Postal Inspection Service. Spanberger did “white powder” calls at a time when letters laced with deadly anthrax were showing up in the mail.
The CIA finally gave her a July 2006 start date, which was three months after she and Adam married.
She was a case officer, which meant she was charged with finding, recruiting and building relationships with foreign nationals who might have information of value to the US Government.
Spanberger is not allowed to say anything more specific than that her first overseas assignment was in “Western Europe”. Though it doesn’t take much internet sleuthing to figure out it was Brussels.
She said she held five passports and, to keep her various identities straight, would memorise birth dates and other personal information of people she knew.
It was a spycraft possible in an era before biometrics and GPS tracking by omnipresent cell towers. “I would travel in ‘true name,’ but then I would meet people not in ‘true name,’” Spanberger explained. “Like, I would go to Frankfurt, stay over in a hotel in Frankfurt, and then continue on with no digital footprint.”
Intelligence gathering honed interpersonal skills transferrable to politics. In a March 2019 TED Talk titled “How to connect with people who are different than you,” Spanberger recalled how she developed a rapport with a contact in an unnamed country who “was committing espionage on behalf of the US Government. He was risking his life to provide us with really valuable information.”
Before their meetings, Spanberger would look online for what had happened in the latest episode of a USA Network show called Covert Affairs, of which her contact was a rabid fan.
“I have no idea how he managed to watch it in his home country, but that was the commonality on which we built our relationship,” she recalled.
“That was the foundation of trust and friendship - I kid you not - that predicated my ability to ask this man so many important questions.”
There were few women in her line of work, fewer who were married, and fewer still who had children. One was Charlotte McWilliams, whom Spanberger got to know when they were at “The Farm”, as the CIA’s primary training facility is known.
Both gave birth shortly before heading out for their first overseas assignments. Though separated by thousands of kilometres, “we kind of burned up that communication line between Western Europe and East Africa in terms of supporting each other”, McWilliams said.
That brought a professional and personal evolution for both. “Abby and I had done the period where we were kind of like a guy’s gal and would go out and shoot or do whatever,” McWilliams said, but “we had kind of matured into a place where, like, okay, we think we can have it all”.
But as Spanberger realised the day a 5-year-old put down an ultimatum, there would also be times when family would have to come first.
Settling back in Virginia “was a tremendous adjustment, but we really loved it”, Spanberger said. She found a private-sector job consulting with colleges and universities, started a Girl Scout troop, and volunteered with Mums Demand Action, a gun-control group.
After the political earthquake that was the 2016 election, Spanberger at her mother’s urging applied for and got a spot with the Virginia operation of Emerge, an organisation that has trained and recruited thousands of women to run for office.
“At the time, a lot of women in my class were talking about maybe running for the House of Delegates”, something that didn’t fit her background, Spanberger said. “But as I started being in the class, watching these women who were running for things, I started thinking about what it would be like to run, and what would I run for.”
What was a notion started becoming more specific in February 2017, when she attended a fiery town hall with her local congressman, Republican Dave Brat.
Brat - who had earlier drawn national attention with a complaint that “the women are in my grill no matter where I go” - held the session in remote Nottoway County, an hour south of where most people in his district lived. Hundreds of women showed up anyway.
Amid heckling, he declared that “Obamacare has collapsed” and shrugged off what Spanberger thought were “earnest and sincere questions” about how to protect people with pre-existing health conditions.
On May 4, House Republicans voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act. That day, Spanberger texted her husband and told him, as she recalled it: “I’m gonna run and I’m gonna f***ing win.”
It would be no small challenge. Brat was a giant-slayer - a former college professor and tea partyer who had knocked off House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in the 2014 Republican primary. He cruised to re-election two years later on a 15-point victory margin.
So arrived another professional turning point.
The political tide - along with grassroots women’s groups - were with her, and Spanberger pulled out a two-point win.
Her re-election over Republican state Delegate Nick Freitas in 2020 would be even narrower, and in 2022 came another hurdle: A new map - drawn by special masters following the decennial census under orders by the state Supreme Court - moved her congressional district 80km from where she lived.
“Seventy-five percent of my voters were new, and I was like, maybe, is it time to pass the torch?” she said.
“All the work that I had put in all these communities and all these counties that I love, I was no longer going to represent.”
Spanberger decided to give it a go. She won by her biggest margin yet.
It was then-Governor Ralph Northam (D) who first suggested to Spanberger that she should be setting her sights higher. They were meeting in his office around the time of the coronavirus outbreak, when Northam pointed at his desk. He told Spanberger she should be sitting there some day.
“She’s a good person, and she’s a good listener. And I think that’s really at the top of the list of what we need right now,” Northam said in an interview. “In this day and age, we need people who will govern, rather than rule.”
In the rented apartment that she shared with Sherrill on Capitol Hill, the two were also taking stock of the fact that it was governors, not members of Congress, who were on the front lines of delivering what citizens most needed in a time of crisis.
“Congress is such an extraordinarily important place, and I have been really proud of the work that I’ve done here, but I want to have impact on some of the things that have really risen to the top in terms of problems that can be solved,” Spanberger said in an interview in September 2024.
A governor can also mount the front line of resistance to what the federal government is trying to do to the states, she told supporters at a campaign appearance in Winchester seven days before the election.
“The reality is, the governor of Virginia cannot stop every bad policy coming out of this White House or coming out of this Congress,” she said.
“But the governor of Virginia can start by naming and numbering the impact on people, on communities, on our economy, and force others to stand up as well.”
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