Abigail Spanberger
Abigail Anne Davis Spanberger is an American politician and former intelligence officer serving since 2026 as the 75th governor of Virginia. A member of the Democratic Party, she served from 2019 to 2025 as the U.S. representative for.
Spanberger was born in New Jersey and moved frequently during her childhood before her family settled in Virginia. She earned degrees from the University of Virginia and Purdue University. From 2006 to 2014, she was an officer in the Central Intelligence Agency. She was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2018, unseating incumbent Republican Dave Brat. She was reelected in 2020 and 2022 before leaving Congress to run for governor.
Spanberger was elected governor of Virginia in 2025, defeating Republican nominee Winsome Earle-Sears. She is Virginia's first female governor.
Early life and education
Spanberger was born Abigail Anne Davis in Red Bank, New Jersey, on August 7, 1979, to her father, Martin Davis, a police officer, and her mother, Eileen Davis, a nurse. She knew from a young age that she wanted to be a spy, writing her diary in code.Her family moved often when she was young, living in Maine, the New York City area, and Philadelphia, before settling in Short Pump, Virginia, when she was 13. Her father had moved from policing to federal law enforcement for the United States Postal Inspection Service. She graduated from John Randolph Tucker High School and was later a page for U.S. senator Chuck Robb.
Spanberger earned a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Virginia in 2001 and a Master of Business Administration from a joint program between the GISMA Business School in Germany and Purdue University's Krannert School of Management. She initially enrolled at the College of William and Mary before transferring to the University of Virginia. According to The Washington Post, by the time she had completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Virginia, Spanberger was conversationally fluent in English, Spanish, and "five or six more" languages.
Career
In the early 2000s, Spanberger taught English literature as a substitute teacher at the Islamic Saudi Academy in Northern Virginia. She received a conditional job offer from the Central Intelligence Agency in December 2002. While waiting for a background check to be completed, Spanberger worked as a postal inspector, as her father did, focusing on money laundering and narcotics cases.In July 2006, after Spanberger's background check had been completed, she joined the CIA as a case officer, working to find, recruit, and build relationships with foreign nationals who could have had information of value to the U.S. government. She has publicly said that she gathered intelligence about nuclear proliferation and terrorism. Her first assignment was to Brussels, according to The Washington Post. During her career, she held, at some point, five different passports, and met people undercover.
In 2014, Spanberger left the CIA and entered the private sector. She was hired by Royall & Company to do consulting work for colleges and universities. After the 2016 presidential election, she began working with Emerge America to encourage women to run for state and congressional offices. In 2017, Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe appointed her to the Virginia Fair Housing Board.
U.S. House of Representatives
Elections
2018
In July 2017, Spanberger announced her candidacy for the United States House of Representatives in in the 2018 election against incumbent Republican Dave Brat, a Tea Party movement member. She had begun to consider challenging Brat after attending a town hall meeting he hosted in Nottoway County in February 2017 and made the final decision to run in May after the House voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act, texting her husband, "I'm gonna run and I'm gonna f---ing win". On June 12, 2018, Spanberger defeated Dan Ward in the Democratic primary election with 73% of the vote, receiving more votes than any other candidate in the Virginia primaries that day.In June, after winning the primary, while waiting for a train at the Richmond Staples Mill Road Amtrak station, Spanberger met William C. Mims, a justice on the Supreme Court of Virginia, who told her he was "impressed with her message".
In August, the Congressional Leadership Fund, a super PAC closely aligned with Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan, conducted a smear campaign against Spanberger. The campaign, which attempted to tie her to terrorism, was based on an SF-86 application she completed to obtain security clearance, which was released in breach of privacy rules. In a visit to the district, former Trump adviser Steve Bannon called the race "an absolute bellwether of the entire country" and said that losing it would mean Republican loss of control of the House.
Spanberger won the November 6 general election by about 6,800 votes. Brat won eight of the district's ten counties, but Spanberger dominated the two largest counties, Henrico and Chesterfield, by a combined margin of over 30,000 votes. Her campaign outraised Brat's, with $5.8 million to his $2.1 million. After winning the election, Virginia Supreme Court Justice Mims wrote her a letter extolling the virtues of public service, leadership, and civility, alongside a copy of former Czech President Václav Havel's essay "Politics, Morality, and Civility". Spanberger has said the letter and its impact on her leadership were crucial to her development as a politician.
Spanberger was the first Democrat to win this seat since 1970, when four-term Democrat John Marsh retired and was succeeded by Republican J. Kenneth Robinson. But until 1993, the 7th stretched from the outer Washington suburbs through the Shenandoah Valley and Charlottesville to the outer Richmond suburbs; the present 7th is geographically and demographically the successor to what was the 3rd district before 1993. That district had been in Republican hands since 1981; former House majority leader Eric Cantor represented it from 2001 until Brat ousted him in the 2014 Republican primary.
Spanberger and her colleagues Elissa Slotkin and Mikie Sherrill were described as the "mod squad", a moderate alternative to the progressive "squad". Spanberger and Sherrill shared a Capitol Hill apartment for four years while they served in Congress together.
2020
Spanberger faced a close reelection contest against Virginia delegate Nick Freitas, who represented much of the congressional district's northern portion. She won with 51% of the vote to Freitas's 49%. Freitas carried eight of the district's ten counties, as Brat had done two years earlier, but Spanberger prevailed by winning the district's shares of Henrico and Chesterfield counties by a combined 43,400 votes, five times her overall margin of 8,400 votes. She was also boosted by Joe Biden narrowly carrying the district; Biden was the first Democrat to win what is now the 7th Congressional District since 1948.On November 5, days after winning reelection by a margin of 1.8%, Spanberger criticized the Democratic Party's strategy for the 2020 elections in a phone call with other Democratic caucus members that was subsequently leaked. Calling the elections "a failure" from a congressional standpoint, she singled out Republican attack ads decrying "socialism" and the movement to "defund the police" as prime reasons the Democratic Party lost seats in swing districts. Spanberger argued that Democrats should watch Republican ads before deciding how to talk about issues and never "use the word 'socialist' or 'socialism' ever again".
After the 2020 elections, Spanberger criticized Democratic messaging, arguing that progressive slogans such as "defund the police" and "socialism" had hurt candidates in swing districts and nearly cost her reelection. CNN political editor Chris Cillizza described her comments as "some hard truth" for the Democratic Party, adding that for Democrats to succeed in the 2022 and 2024 elections, they should "listen to the likes of Spanberger" rather than push for "the boldest possible progressive legislation".
But Spanberger's remarks were disputed by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who noted that Democrats had retained control of the House, and by Representative Rashida Tlaib, who said the party should "study the results" before dismissing progressives who represent their districts. The Washington Post digital editor James Downie also criticized Spanberger's remarks, arguing that campaign failures were due more to ineffective messaging against Republicans than to progressive policy. He cited Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who pointed out that no swing-district Democrat who co-sponsored Medicare for All lost reelection and that "not a single member of Congress that I'm aware of campaigned on socialism or defunding the police in this general election".
2022
For her first two terms, Spanberger represented a district that stretched from the Richmond suburbs to the fringes of the Shenandoah Valley. After the 2020 United States redistricting cycle, Spanberger's district was radically redrawn, and no longer included her home in Henrico County. She considered not running for reelection in the new district before deciding to do so. Spanberger was seen as one of the most vulnerable incumbents of the 2022 election cycle, with pre-election polls projecting a close race with Republican Prince William County supervisor Yesli Vega, a law enforcement officer endorsed by Governor Glenn Youngkin and former president Donald Trump. Spanberger defeated Vega, 52% to 48%, the largest margin at the time in any election Spanberger had run in.Tenure
Trump administration
According to FiveThirtyEights congressional vote tracker, Spanberger voted with President Trump 8.7% of the time. In the 2016 presidential election, Trump won 50% of the vote to Hillary Clinton's 44% in Spanberger's future congressional district.On September 23, 2019, Spanberger joined six other freshman House Democrats with national security backgrounds in calling for an impeachment inquiry into Trump. They co-wrote a Washington Post opinion piece explaining their support for an impeachment inquiry, writing: "Congress must determine whether the president was indeed willing to use his power and withhold security assistance funds to persuade a foreign country to assist him in an upcoming election." They wrote that, if the allegations were true, they amounted to a "flagrant disregard for the law" and a "threat to all we have sworn to protect". Spanberger later announced that she would vote in favor of impeachment, saying, "The President's actions violate his oath of office, endanger our national security, and betray the public trust".
On June 1, 2020, Spanberger tweeted criticism of Trump's reaction to the George Floyd protests, a series of protests against police brutality that began in Minneapolis on May 26. On June 2, The Washington Post and The New York Times quoted Spanberger and several other high-profile former CIA analysts' interpretations of Trump's reaction to the protests as reminiscent of the reaction of totalitarian dictators on the brink of losing control of their dictatorships. "As a former CIA officer, I know this playbook, and I know the president's actions are betraying the very foundation of the rule of law he purports to support, the U.S. Constitution", she said. Spanberger criticized Trump after police used tear gas and rubber bullets on peaceful protestors and a priest during the George Floyd protests to clear a path so that he could have a photo op in front of St. John's Episcopal Church.
Spanberger opposed Democrats' attempts to amend the Insurrection Act of 1807, saying that amending the rarely used law would not accomplish what Democrats intended.