WATCH: Spanberger’s bait-and-switch in Virginia

Video

Monday, April 13, 2026

OPINION:

Washington Times Commentary Editor Kelly Sadler sits down with Line Drive Public Affairs founder and GOP strategist Tim Murtaugh to break down how Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger is not the moderate she claimed to be, as well as the Democrats’ push for a redistricting ballot initiative heading into the April 21st vote.

[SADLER] We’re going to talk about Abigail Spanberger and her bait and switch. She campaigned as a moderate, but she’s governing as a radical progressive.

[MURTAUGH] Oh, yeah, she 100 percent is. She’s absolutely governing as a radical leftist, and she masqueraded as a moderate throughout her whole campaign. And I remember — I live in Virginia, I’m a Virginia voter — and I remember that the national press corps had paid attention to this because it’s right in their backyard outside of D.C., that race going on. And they were praising her, like, oh, she is laser-focused on this issue of affordability. It’s so wonderful.

And as soon as she becomes governor, she does two things. One, she entertains every radical piece of legislation that the crazies in Richmond can think up, including every tax increase under the sun. They want to tax your dog walking. They want to tax your gym membership. They want to tax your lawnmower. Then she threw her weight behind this voter referendum, this gerrymandering scheme, which she previously said was a threat to democracy. And she promised not to entertain or not to pursue. Well, what do you know? She’s breaking that promise, too.

She’s a radical through and through. And now she’s behind this scheme to actually steal congressional seats from Republicans and disenfranchise millions of Virginians if that thing passes on April 21st in Virginia.

[SADLER] So let’s talk about this ballot referendum. It’s a ballot initiative. Voting Election Day is April 21st. The language on the ballot, if you weren’t following this story very closely, seems like it’s to promote free and fair elections. Talk to me about the redistricting scheme that the Democrats are pushing through and the fraudulent and deceiving way they’re selling it to Virginia voters.

[MURTAUGH] Yeah, well, it’s 100% fraudulent from beginning to end. First of all, it’s illegal. Six years ago, Virginia voters approved a referendum by a two-thirds majority at the ballot box. Like, that never happened. 66% of voters approved a bipartisan commission that, every 10 years after the census, would do the redistricting to take it out of partisan hands.

Well, Democrats in Virginia got it into their minds that they don’t like the way the map is right now because we have 11 congressional seats. There are currently six Democrats and five Republicans, and they’ve got this gerrymandered map that takes that six-to-five map and turns it into a 10-to-one map. So one, it violates what voters already did. They missed all sorts of deadlines. There had to be an intervening election before this referendum even got on the ballot. There was not, because this election had already started because of early voting and all that stuff. So it’s illegal in the first place.

And it’s deceitful because it says in the ballot question and in their advertising, they talk about wanting to “restore fairness” to elections. That gives no context at all. It also implies that elections in Virginia are currently unfair somehow, which they are not. They further claim that if they do make this change, that trust us, we really mean it, in a couple of elections’ time, we’re going to go back to the old way.

Give me a break. That’s not temporary. They’re going to install four brand new Democrat members of Congress. And what? After one or two terms, those brand new members of Congress are going to say, you know what, I’ve had enough of this, let’s go back to the old map? Give me a break. So they lie about it from beginning to end.

[SADLER] And on top of it, this isn’t for Old Dominion voters, right? As you said, Virginian voters voted on this bipartisan commission to take out gerrymandering basically from the hands of politicians that would use it to punish their political opponents, just like Democrats are doing. And honestly, they could be getting away with it or not, because the polling right now looks like there was favorable GOP turnout.

It totally disenfranchises rural voters the way that they cut the map. Every map goes into Fairfax County, which is a Democratic stronghold. It’s an urban city on the outskirts of D.C. But rural Virginians aren’t getting anything from this. They’re getting their voice taken away from them, if anything.

And all of this is done nationally, for national reasons, like you just said — because Texas reconfigured their map. So nationally speaking, Democrats want more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.

[MURTAUGH] Yeah. And they talk about Texas as their excuse. And you’re like, well, the GOP started it in Texas, which — that doesn’t hold water either. One, if you look at the Texas map, it’s actually far more in line with the voting patterns of that state than the Virginia map. Take a look — every outside expert agrees that the Virginia map is the most egregious example of gerrymandering of any state in the country. They’re taking a state where Donald Trump got 47% of the vote, Kamala Harris got around 52% of the vote in the last election, and they’re going to give Kamala Harris’s party 91% of the congressional representation. That is way out of line, not even close to what they’re doing in Texas.