New VCU Commonwealth Poll finds the Governor upside-down at 44-47, half of independents disapproving, and 47% of Virginians saying the Commonwealth is on the wrong track. The reason isn’t complicated: she governed for her party and penalized your paycheck.
There is a thing that happens to new governors, and it is called a honeymoon. Voters give you the benefit of the doubt. They want you to succeed. They haven’t yet decided who you are.
Abigail Spanberger didn’t get one. She spent it.
The Summer 2026 Commonwealth Poll from VCU’s Wilder School — roughly 800 Virginians surveyed between June 22 and July 6 — finds the Governor underwater six months into her first term: 44% approve, 47% disapprove. Half of independents disapprove. And 47% of Virginians say the Commonwealth is headed in the wrong direction, including 56% of independents and 80% of Republicans.
Let that sit for a second. Not “after a rough patch.” Not “following a tough legislative session.” Six months. That is not a slump. That is a first impression.
The same poll asked Virginians to name the most important issue facing the Commonwealth. The answer was overwhelming and it was boring and it was exactly what everyone in Virginia already knew:
That’s roughly half the electorate pointing at the same thing — the cost of living here has outrun the ability of normal people to pay it. Meanwhile “political extremism and threats to democracy” — the issue that consumed the Governor’s spring — came in at 12%.
Virginians asked for a grocery bill they could survive. They got a constitutional amendment.
In April, Virginia held a statewide special election on a constitutional amendment to let the legislature redraw the Commonwealth’s congressional map — a map that could have produced a 10-1 Democratic delegation in a state that just voted 6-5. The Governor cheered it on.
Then the Supreme Court of Virginia ruled the process violated the state constitution’s requirements, and the whole exercise collapsed. Virginia will vote in November on the same map it had before the fight started.
So: a statewide special election, months of oxygen, millions of dollars including out-of-state money, a bruising court battle — and the map didn’t move an inch. Nothing about that fight put a dollar back in anyone’s pocket. It was never intended to. It was intended to add seats to a party’s column in Washington, and Virginians were asked to pick up the tab and the aggravation.
That is the definition of governing for someone other than your constituents.
Here is the single most damaging number in this poll, and it has nothing to do with Republicans.
72% of Virginians oppose the sales tax exemption for data centers. Forty-nine percent oppose it strongly. And this isn’t a partisan split — it’s a consensus: 73% of Democrats oppose it. 69% of Republicans. 61% of independents. Meanwhile 81% support making data centers pay fees that offset what they cost the rest of us.
Virginians have looked at the server farms metastasizing across this Commonwealth, looked at their own rising electric bills, and reached a near-unanimous conclusion: these guys can pay their own way.
And where was the Governor? Defending the exemption. She amended the General Assembly’s data center bills to strip out the cost-shift mechanism and soften the language. On April 22, the legislature — her own party’s legislature — rejected most of her amendments and sent the bills right back at her. The fight got ugly enough that it nearly triggered a state government shutdown, and one of her fellow Democrats summarized the caucus’s view of her position in five words: “Read the damn room.”
She eventually signed a budget containing a data center electricity consumption tax. But she didn’t lead there. She got dragged there.
Think about what that means politically. A Democratic governor, with Democratic majorities, managed to end up crosswise with 73% of Democratic voters — in defense of a tax break for some of the wealthiest corporations on the planet. When your own base has to roll you to get you to the popular position, “affordability champion” stops being a description and starts being a slogan.
On July 1, Virginia formally rejoined the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative — a cap-and-trade program whose costs power companies pass to ratepayers, running about $13 a month on the average residential bill. The budget includes a credit intended to offset it. The Governor says bills might even go down a few dollars.
Virginians have heard that arithmetic before. A new charge appears on the bill immediately and permanently; the offset is a line item in a budget, subject to the next budget. Ask anyone in Northern Virginia who has watched a “temporary” fee become furniture.
Add the dozens of tax-increase bills Democratic legislators filed this session — new top income brackets, expanded sales taxes on services and digital goods, retail delivery fees — and a $207 billion budget, and the picture Virginians see is not a government tightening its belt alongside them. It’s a government expanding while telling them to hang on.
Because she was never really governing Virginia. She was auditioning.
Every one of these fights makes sense the moment you assume the audience isn’t Virginians. The redistricting war was a gift to the national party, delivered on Virginia’s dime and Virginia’s ballot. The data center defense was a gift to a donor class and a business lobby that a future national candidate cannot afford to alienate. The RGGI re-entry was a gift to the environmental left, whose endorsement matters in a primary in a way it never matters at a kitchen table in Chantilly.
Affordability was the campaign. Coalition management became the governorship.
And there’s a second thing, which Republicans will recognize immediately because we watched it for four years at the federal level: some politicians simply do not believe that cost of living is a thing government does to you. They believe it’s weather. It happens. You manage the optics, you announce a credit, you convene a working group. What they cannot do is the one thing that actually works — spend less, tax less, permit more, get out of the way — because that would require telling their own coalition no.
Abigail Spanberger has told Republicans no. She’s told data center critics in her own party no. She has not, in six months, told a single spending interest no.
Virginians noticed. Forty-seven percent of them, on the record, in July.
Here is what this poll actually tells Fairfax County Republicans, and it is not “she’s unpopular, we win.”
It tells us that on the substance, Virginians are already with us. They want data centers to pay their own freight. They think taxes and spending are a top-tier problem. They think the Commonwealth is on the wrong track. Half of independents — the voters who decide every election in this county — disapprove of the Governor’s performance.
That is not a mood. That’s an opening. Our job between now and November is to be the people who talk about the grocery bill, the power bill, the property assessment, and the mortgage — every single day, without getting dragged into anyone else’s fight.
She spent her honeymoon on maps, donors, and a carbon auction.
Let’s spend ours on the voters she forgot.
Source: VCU L. Douglas Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs, Summer 2026 Commonwealth Poll, fielded June 22–July 6, 2026; margin of error approximately ±4.6 percentage points.
