Only months in, Spanberger and Democrats are losing their shine |
Only months in, Spanberger and Democrats are losing their shine
In a mere matter of months, a Democratic rising star appears to be falling. A recent poll shows Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D) dropping dramatically. It could not come at a worse time, as she is also the face of a highly partisan redistricting attempt by Democrats in the state.
In November, Spanberger flipped Virginia’s governorship from red to blue with an impressive 58 percent of the vote to Republican Winsome Earle-Sears’s 42 percent. That was Virginia’s largest gubernatorial margin since 2009. So brightly had Spanberger’s star shone in her party that she was tapped to give the Democrats’ rebuttal to President Trump’s State of the Union speech in February.
Now, less than two months after her nationwide speech, this Democratic rising star is not shining so brightly. A Washington Post-Schar School poll conducted at the end of March, roughly six months after her election and less than three months after she was sworn into office, shows Spanberger’s approval rating is just 47 percent, 10 percentage points below her election total. Spanberger’s whopping November 15 percent-point win over her Republican opponent has been boiled down to a net plus-one approval, with her disapproval rating at 46 percent.
The Post noted that Spanberger’s approval rating is “13 percentage points lower than the average for Virginia governors in Post polling since the 1990s,” and that the “near-even split between approval and disapproval is a worse net approval rating than the early-term scores of her predecessors in previous Post polls.”
The surprise is not just how far Spanberger has fallen in this poll, but how far she has fallen from the moderate image she sought........