Thomas: Spanberger Fiddles While Virginia Burns

On the median of an intersection near the Capitol building in Richmond, a well-dressed yet disheveled beggar is seen holding a sign: “Unemployed. Will Politic for Food.”

This is the fate awaiting whoever it was that thought it would be a good idea to send Gov. Abigail Spanberger to the 90th annual Galax Old Fiddlers Convention.

I’m not a high-paid political operative, but I know how to read a room. What were they thinking?

Thousands of attendees were there to simply hear music and spend a week at the “Gateway to the Blue Ridge.” Those people are the very people whose gun rights the governor is trying to take away. Those people are the ones who would have been hardest hit by all those sales tax increases she and the Democrat leadership in the General Assembly wanted to levy. Galax’s median household income is about 45% below the Virginia state average of $74,957.

We’ve seen at least 40 different videos of the crowd at the event booing the governor loudly, and they are only just starting to be re-posted by GOP and conservative bloggers. In a political party that is driven by public perception of across-the-board popularity, this is bad.

How bad? On a scale where Terry McAuliffe’s “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach” gaffe is a 10, this is most likely a 7. It’s not fatal, but it makes her goal of being nominated for president in 2028 a long shot. Maybe she’d settle for a return to Langley as CIA director? Or director of National Intelligence? The irony would be great—but lost on everyone but us.

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Rest assured that political action committees aligned with her opponents will have digital ads flooding each state’s primary voters with that video, with the narration saying, “If they don’t like her in Virginia …” or words to that effect.

Sending Spanberger to Galax, where she received 31.7% of the vote in 2025, shows a failure of executive decision-making. She won 21.4% in Carroll County and 21.5% in Grayson County. It’s not exactly “Spanberger Country.” And that was before the gun grabs and proposed tax hikes. That’s before the electricity bills, with Appalachian Power asking the State Corporation Commission for a $61.4 million increase in base rates to cover rising system costs.

In her defense, you can say that she went there because she is the governor of all Virginians. But if you make your first seven months in office an unending succession of attempts to damage or defame the community’s way of life, after having driven out the furniture industry that it relied on, don’t expect them to invite you for barbecue. (That’s a noun, Madame Governor.)

I guess she can hold out hope that Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro gets caught not knowing what “wit’ or wit’out?” means when ordering a cheesesteak at Pat’s or Gino’s, or California Gov. Gavin Newsom brags to the black community about how low his test scores were. Oh, wait, that actually happened.

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