Abigail Spanberger, now running for Virginia’s governor, is calling herself a moderate, claiming in her first TV ad, “Too many politicians talk when they should listen, and divide instead of unite.” But that’s exactly what Spanberger herself has done—divide.
I would know. Three years ago, in 2022, I went viral for opposing Prince William County School Board’s mask mandate, which flew in the face of Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s executive order to make masking optional. As a mom, it was clear to me that masking was hurting all our children and that adult political organizations like teachers’ unions were getting in the way of student learning.
So why should I trust Spanberger to be a moderate? She has accepted $27,000 from the teachers’ unions—more than any other House member has—and sided with them over Virginia children in prolonging mandates and school closures. In Prince William County, we saw the harm firsthand: remote learning dragged on, and when schools across the country fully reopened, our children were still forced to wear masks and suffer needlessly.
While those closures seem like they are well in the past now, they caused learning loss and socialization loss that will never be recovered, especially among children from low-income families who couldn’t afford private alternatives. Of course, Spanberger doesn’t even support school-choice legislation that would allow those children to have a halfway-decent education.
And we’re still seeing the consequences. The Washington Post reported in August that Virginia students’ test scores have yet to rebound from the pandemic years. “Students in Virginia experienced some of the worst pandemic learning loss in the country, and have struggled to recover,” the article reported. “The state ranked 51st out of 50 states and D.C. in math recovery between 2019 and 2024, according to the Education Recovery Scorecard, a project from Harvard and Stanford University researchers.”
Her stance on gender ideology shows that her track record on education is not an anomaly: she is comfortable, clearly, in putting ideology over children in all aspects of governance. The residents in Loudon County lived through the nightmare of a school board covering up a sexual assault in a girls’ bathroom, solely because the perpetrator was a transgender-identifying male student. That same boy was allowed back into school and was able to assault another girl.
And what did Spanberger do? She stayed silent—maybe because she has supported gender ideology so much in the past that she’s scared of angering the progressive elites whose opinions she clearly cares about more than she does about Virginia’s voters and children.
Her record is a disaster. She voted against the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act of 2023, earning a failing score on Independent Women’s Voice’s Riley Gaines Stand with Women Scorecard.
Beyond that, she has campaigned to redefine child abuse to include parents who don’t affirm their child’s (often fleeting) gender identity. That means she thinks children should receive puberty blockers that will permanently stunt them from developing, cross-sex hormones that will permanently alter their bodies and voices, and experimental gender surgeries with high complication rates that frequently leave recipients with lifelong sexual dysfunction and medical problems. So when Spanberger says opposing this is child abuse, what she means is that a mother seeking to protect her child from lifelong medical damage is the villain and that the state knows better.
Spanberger has failed to protect children, failed to protect parents’ rights, and failed to demonstrate basic human decency. This is not someone who has Virginians’ best interests in mind.
The incredible gains made by Gov. Youngkin over his four years of leadership will be at risk if Abigail Spanberger comes anywhere near power.
We deserve better than Abigail Spanberger.
Merianne Jensen is a Prince William County, Va., mother of four and member of the Independent Women’s Network.