Spanberger, the Phantom Left, and the Fugitive Left
Spanberger is running a tried-and-true statewide campaign strategy in Virginia: contrast yourself with a phantom left.
In Thursday’s Washington Post, journalist Laura Vozzella penned an article framing Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-VA07) as a moderate, “swing-district Democrat” navigating some tough “soul searching” in response to “attacks from the left.” On Sunday, the Richmond Times-Dispatch published a column by George Mason University dean and professor Mark Rozell in which he claims that Spanberger’s “outspokenness also earned her some formidable adversaries on her party’s left.”
Neither Vozzella nor Rozell actually name any person or group on Virginia’s political left who’s criticizing Spanberger - though both note that Rep. Robert “Bobby” Scott (D-VA03) hasn’t ruled out running against her in the primary. That’s hardly an “attack” or worthy of “adversary” status, and as Lowell Feld noted in Blue Virginia in response to the Vozzella article, Scott’s not exactly a politician of the left in the first place.
But none of that really matters, because Spanberger is running a tried-and-true statewide campaign strategy in Virginia: contrast yourself with a largely imaginary, phantom left.
I asked Paul Goldman, who managed former lieutenant governor Henry Howell, Jr.’s (D-Norfolk) and former governor L. Douglas Wilder’s (D-Richmond) statewide campaigns, about the framing of these articles. Goldman reminded me that historically in Virginia political campaigns, “it’s often what you’re not, not what you are.” And being someone who’s not the left - better yet, who’s being attacked by the left - is the optimal position, if you’re committed to running the conventional establishment playbook of previous Democratic governors Chuck Robb, Gerald Baliles, Mark Warner, and Tim Kaine.
Based on the past couple months of reporting, including these recent pieces, it’s clear that Spanberger continues to frame herself (and allow herself to be framed) as not of the left, as not an “AOC-type person,” in Rep. Don Beyer’s (D-VA08) words. This despite, according to my own delegate spreadsheets and emails from the time, Spanberger serving as a state delegate for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) at the 2016 state convention in Richmond.
Elite Pacification vs. Coalition Building
Vozzella mentions State Sen. L. Louise Lucas (D-Portsmouth), whose criticisms of Spanberger Vozzella outlined in an earlier piece this month. But there’s no suggestion or reason to think Lucas has a critique of Spanberger from the left. Indeed, Richmond Times-Dispatch columnist Jeff Schapiro (cited by Vozzella) speculates that Lucas is actually trying to exact a deal to secure Spanberger’s future signature on legislation to legalize electronic gambling machines.
Setting aside Schapiro’s theory (which Goldman told me represents ”an insult to Lucas’s intelligence and a misunderstanding of the power of the Senate Finance Committee chair”), we should also consider the context. Relative to Lucas - or to Scott - Spanberger is new to public service, new to Virginia politics, and certainly not entitled to automatic deference or support. There’s an element of respect here, a requirement of a little humility on the part of a presumptive nominee. Particularly when you’re dealing with a state Democratic Party that remains, in ways, de facto segregated at various levels of its official and unofficial operations.
Spanberger should not, however, presume that gaining support from elected officials and power brokers will translate into popular support. While the leadership of various non-profits, congregations, advocacy groups, and other organizations aligned with the Democratic Party may take their cues from elected officials, the 2021 general election should have taught Virginia Democrats that volunteers, organizers, and voters may not.
Coalition building, for Spanberger, might therefore be easier with the open support of leaders like Lucas who haven’t blindly assented to her nomination. But without a focus on everyday people doing political work on the ground, on people who may not have fancy titles, her campaign risks confusing elite pacification with substantial coalition building that will earn her support amongst key sets of volunteers and voters.
Virginia’s Fugitive Left
It’s never quite clear what commentators mean when they discuss the left, and in the context of Virginia political campaigns, their left is often the imaginary, phantom left that politicians like Spanberger and journalists conjure up.
But there has been a left in Virginia political history that plays in electoral politics, a left defined in the broadest terms as groups and individuals committed to expanding freedom/rights, democratizing institutions, opposing big business/corporate power, supporting workers/labor unions, and doing so through electoral politics and voting.
This left has not been static across time and has never achieved sufficient power to become institutionalized. For that reason, I consider it “fugitive” in the sense that political theorist Sheldon Wolin considers democracy not as a form of government, but as itself fugitive: temporary, rebellious, episodic, and creative. So while we may be able to identify moments in Virginia history in which an electoral left emerged statewide, they remain just that: fleeting moments that bucked the status quo of the times.
There are ample historical reasons why Virginia has never developed an organized electoral left capable of winning and institutionalizing itself. As Brent Tarter chronicles in The Grandees of Government: The Origins and Persistence of Undemocratic Politics in Virginia, political power in Virginia has been anti-democratic from the start, our institutions anti-democratic by design, reinforcing oligarchy and disempowering everyday people at every turn. And while Virginia did have some progressive eruptions in the late 19th century via the Readjuster Party’s short-lived control of state government, the Readjusters certainly didn’t represent the left of so-called “fusion” parties of the time.
Virginia politics in the 20th century was marked by racist, anti-democratic efforts and an increasing deference to corporate interests - see, respectively, the lifework of former Sen. Harry F. Byrd, Sr. (D-VA) and Associate Justice Lewis Powell Jr (who later swore in Wilder as governor). As one-party rule collapsed with the Byrd Machine, Virginia entered a moment of party realignment. Henry Howell emerged as a progressive populist at the statewide level (elected lieutenant governor as an independent), supported repealing Virginia’s “right to work” law, took on utility giants, and was perhaps the closest the contemporary left has come to achieving significant statewide electoral power.
But he lost both bids for governor.
Since Howell, the closest this left has come to a statewide champion was former Rep. Tom Perriello (D-VA05) in the 2017 Democratic primary for governor. Despite endorsements from Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Perriello was too unknown and too weak to defeat then-incumbent lieutenant governor Ralph Northam (D-Accomack) who admitted he voted twice for Republican President George W. Bush then campaigned as a “progressive.”
Perriello secured 239,285 votes to Northam’s 303,531. For historical context, in the 1977 Democratic primary for governor, Howell secured 253,373 votes to former AG Andrew Pickens Miller’s (D-Fairfax) 239,735. In the 2016 Virginia Democratic primary for president, Sanders secured 276,387 votes, and in the 2020 primary he secured 306,388 votes.
From 2017 until now - indeed, in the past as well - at both the local level and in the General Assembly, there’ve been politicians and groups of the left who’ve achieved political power here and there. But as the 2021 Democratic primaries made clear, such politicians weren’t able to break through at the statewide level.
Many of these politicians, including Perriello and 2021 candidates in the Democratic primary for governor, State Sen. Jennifer Carroll Foy (D-Prince William) and Rep. Jennifer McClellan (D-VA04), depended on Charlottesville oligarchs Sonjia Smith and Michael Bills, as well as his outfit Clean Virginia, for campaign funding.
Clean Virginia is currently all-in for Spanberger, raising the question of how any politician near the contemporary left would fund a campaign against her without depending on corporate contributions that could themselves shatter a left anti-Spanberger primary coalition.
We know the phantom left, a classic campaign foil for establishment Virginia Democrats, is already playing a central role in the 2025 campaign for governor.
What we don’t yet know is if Spanberger, by continuing to insist she’s not of the (largely imaginary) phantom left, will catalyze the emergence of a fugitive left that’s all too real.
For more on anti-democratic efforts in Virginia, check out:
Brent Tarter. The Grandees of Government: The Origins and Persistence of Undemocratic Politics in Virginia. University of Virginia Press, 2013.
Jeff Thomas. Virginia Politics & Government in a New Century: The Price of Power. The History Press, 2016.
Jeff Thomas. The Virginia Way: Democracy and Power after 2016. The History Press, 2019.
For more on the Readjuster Party, check out:
Carl N. Degler. The Other South: Southern Dissenters in the Nineteenth Century. Harper & Row, 1974.
Brent Tarter. A Saga of the New South: Race, Law, and Public Debt in Virginia. University of Virginia Press, 2016.
Jane Dailey. Before Jim Crow: The Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia. University of North Carolina Press, 2020.