The Honeymoon’s Over: How Virginia Voters Fell Out of Love With New Governor

Stephanie Minter of Fredericksburg, Virginia was 41 years old when she stepped off a bus at Richmond Highway and Arlington Drive in Fairfax County on the night of February 23 and was stabbed to death. Surveillance footage placed Sierra Leone national Abdul Jalloh, 32, as the last person seen exiting the bus with her. He was arrested the following afternoon when an employee at a nearby business recognized him and called police. Mr. Jalloh was later charged with second-degree murder, but the damage — months, years in the making — was done.Mr. Jalloh had more than 30 prior arrests and had entered the United States illegally. ICE had previously lodged a detainer against him, and an immigration judge had granted a final order of removal. Yet he continued to walk free anyway, through a Fairfax County system built to ensure exactly that outcome. Now his case has become the human face of a political crisis engulfing Virginia’s new governor before she has finished her first hundred days in office.How did a man with more than 30 arrests, a deportation order, and a paper trail of police warnings end up free to kill — and what does it say about the new governor who has so far doubled-down that Virginia is a sanctuary state? Polling Free FallGovernor Abigail Spanberger, a former CIA operations officer who spent eight years recruiting foreign intelligence sources on matters ranging from nuclear nonproliferation to counterterrorism, ran last year as a moderate Democrat. Since her election, however, she has governed as a left-wing progressive, and has now amassed the worst favorability rating of any Virginia governor of the 21st century at this same point in their term — 80 days.A Washington Post-Schar School poll found only 47 percent approved of her performance, with 46 percent disapproving — a split that subsequent State Navigate polling confirmed, finding approval and disapproval tied at 47 percent each, with intensity skewing sharply negative: 41 percent strongly disapproving versus 31 percent strongly approving. Her immediate predecessor, Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin, sat at +15 at this same point in his term.Political scientist Larry Sabato called the drop “stunning,” telling ABC 7 News that it “should be greatly disturbing to the governor and the governor’s staff if it’s repeated in other surveys.” Republican strategist Karl Rove was characteristically blunt on Fox News’s America’s Newsroom. “It is the highest disapproval rating — at this point — since this poll began in 1994. No Virginia governor has been in as bad a shape so quickly as Spanberger,” he said.The woman who once built networks of foreign informants now finds herself unable to hold her own political coalition together.Founding Dean of George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government Mark Rozell, a cosponsor of the poll, tells the New York Sun the situation is unprecedented.“She campaigned as a centrist in a purple state, won a landslide, and the perception is that she is leading from the left,” Mr. Rozell explains.He identified three factors behind the collapse: the redistricting referendum, in which she reversed her campaign position and went “all-in”; Democratic tax proposals Republicans successfully pinned on the party writ large; and hardened partisan polarization. “Affordability is a great campaign theme, but almost an impossible governing one given the limited tools that a governor has to affect prices,” Mr. Rozell notes.Voters ultimately approved the referendum by three points on April 21 — a narrow win for Spanberger that nonetheless came at a political cost, with the “No” campaign running ads featuring her name alongside guns and “welfare for illegal aliens” in the final days. Other political scientists are struck by the state administration’s failure to pass a budget despite holding a House majority.“Early in an administration, you want a success, so why isn’t there one yet? The budget is the biggest opportunity,” University of Virginia Professor of Politics David Leblang tells the Sun. “It’s kind of a ‘tragedy of riches,’ you’ve got the entire House, but they’re trying to be less incremental and more structural in what they’re proposing.”He also noted that political messaging had filled the vacuum.“Republicans saying she hasn’t signed anything, there’s a lot of buildup and concern, but not much actual legislative output yet,” Mr. Leblang continues.The Unmasking: Spanberger’s Executive OrdersThe gap between candidate Spanberger and Governor Spanberger opened on her first day in office. Within hours of taking the oath on January 17, 2026, Ms. Spanberger signed 10 executive orders and repealed Executive Order 47, ending mandatory cooperation between Virginia police and ICE. On February 4, she went further, directing Virginia State Police and other agencies to terminate all existing 287(g) agreements with ICE, requiring a judicial warrant before any cooperation.Ms. Spanberger pushed back hard on the characterization that followed, speaking to reporters outside the executive mansion in Richmond on April 8.“Virginia is not a sanctuary state. Full stop,” she said. “There’s a lot of misinformation out there.”Ms. Spanberger maintained that her orders barred state troopers from operating under ICE supervision, not from cooperating with federal authorities altogether.“It was only the 287(g) agreements that I said state agencies cannot enter into,” she added. “Task forces work together. All of that continues to be the case.”Critics were unconvinced, stressing that the Minter case showed exactly what the policies cost on the ground. Fairfax County Commonwealth’s Attorney Steve Descano’s office dropped nearly every charge involving Mr. Jalloh, even as county police warned the prosecutor’s office in writing three separate times about how dangerous he was, one officer stating it was not a question of if but when Mr. Jalloh would kill again.Republican former Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares stood with the Minter family at a Richmond vigil and accused Spanberger of governing with a “criminal first, victim last mindset.”“I am still waiting for the moderate Abigail Spanberger that ran as a candidate to actually make an appearance here in Capitol Square,” said Mr. Miyares, who lost his reelection bid to a Democrat last November. “So far, she is MIA.”The Minter case was not a one-off. Five weeks later, ICE lodged a detainer on Anibal Armando Chavarria Muy, 38, a Guatemalan national arrested on second-degree murder charges after allegedly stabbing a man to death with a machete inside a Bailey’s Crossroads home. The Department of Homeland Security called it “another preventable tragedy” and noted the grim pattern.George Mason University Law Professor Ilya Somin pushed back on that framing, telling the Sun that sanctuary policies “do not increase public safety risk, and may well actually reduce it by concentrating law enforcement resources on violent and property crime, as opposed to trying to deport undocumented migrants, who actually have lower crime rates than native-born citizens do.” Mr. Somin also cautioned against assuming the polling drop was immigration-driven, noting that “it is often a mistake to assume swing voters care about or even know about the issues that exercise pundits and committed activists.”Gun Bans, Redistricting PlansImmigration is only one front in the war Ms. Spanberger is fighting. She also signed six gun-control bills and amended four others, including legislation banning sales of so-called “assault weapons” after June 30. “As a former federal law enforcement officer and someone who comes from a law enforcement family, public safety is personal to me,” Ms. Spanberger said. “We are taking concrete steps to make sure Virginia’s law enforcement has the support they need to keep our communities safe.”NRA-ILA Executive Director John Commerford was not appeased, calling the last-minute amendments “nothing more than a desperate ploy to prop up her radical redistricting referendum by delaying action until after voting was underway. The Trump Justice Department also warned it will sue, with Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon stating in a formal letter that the Civil Rights Division “will commence litigation in the event the Commonwealth of Virginia enacts certain bills that unconstitutionally limit law-abiding Americans’ individual right to bear arms.”On redistricting, Democrats pushed a constitutional amendment that would shift Virginia’s congressional map from six Democratic districts and five Republican ones to ten Democratic and one Republican, well ahead of the 2030 census.Voters approved the referendum on April 21 by a margin of roughly three points, but the victory proved short-lived. The day after the vote, a Tazewell County circuit judge ruled the amendment void from the beginning, enjoining the State Board of Elections from certifying the results. On April 28, the Virginia Supreme Court declined to stay that ruling.On May 8, the Virginia Supreme Court struck it down entirely in a 4-3 ruling, finding that Democratic lawmakers had violated the constitutional requirements for placing the amendment on the ballot. The court held that Virginia’s “general election” encompasses the early voting period — not just Election Day — meaning the Legislature had advanced the amendment after voting in the 2025 House of Delegates elections had already begun. That procedural violation, the majority wrote, “irreparably undermines the integrity of the resulting referendum vote and renders it null and void.” The existing congressional map, which leaves Democrats a 1-seat edge, will remain in place for the November midterms.House Speaker Don Scott and Attorney General Jay Jones have since filed an emergency appeal to the United States Supreme Court, though legal observers say the odds are long given the court’s proximity to its summer recess and its traditional reluctance to intervene in state constitutional interpretation.The defeat has sent Democrats into open crisis. A private call on Saturday reportedly involving Virginia House members and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries included discussion of a gambit to lower Virginia’s mandatory judicial retirement age from 75 to 54, the age of the court’s youngest sitting justice, effectively forcing out the entire Supreme Court and replacing its members with Democratic appointees. The General Assembly, where Democrats hold majorities in both chambers, would make those appointments. The maneuver drew mixed reactions even among those on the call. Former Representative James Moran, a Virginia Democrat, called it “just a bridge too far,” warning his party: “We do have to keep our credibility. We have to do things that pass the legitimacy test.” Ms. Spanberger has not been briefed on the proposal, and her office declined to comment. Any legislative action to salvage a new map for this year’s midterms would need to move within days: Virginia’s elections commissioner has warned that map changes after May 12 risk compromising preparation for the August 4 primary.Virginia has become the most contested theater in the national redistricting war, and for Spanberger, the political cost of the fight may outlast the legal one.Independent voters, a group Ms. Spanberger won decisively in November, have soured sharply. State Navigate found true independents backing the Republican position on redistricting by 24 points, a 33-point swing from where they stood in November. Mr. Leblang flagged one more fault line: data center tax policy. With the state Senate pushing to eliminate a $1.6 billion industry tax exemption, the stakes are high.“Data centers require labor to build, but not to operate,” Mr. Leblang points out. “So they generate tax revenue but not much employment. And without employment, you don’t get the secondary economic benefits — restaurants, services, and so on.”The Minter family, meanwhile, is not waiting on poll numbers to drive accountability. At the Richmond vigil, victim rights advocates called on Ms. Spanberger directly to reverse her executive orders on ICE cooperation.Stephanie Minter’s mother, Cheryl, told reporters she is working with organizations to launch a recall campaign against the Commonwealth’s Attorney, Mr. Descano.“He’s as dangerous as the criminals themselves,” she said. “He’s releasing the criminals back on the street. He needs to be put out of office.”A federal accountability push extends beyond the recall. The House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement has scheduled a hearing for May 14, with both Sheriff Kincaid and Mr. Descano confirmed to testify. Mr. Descano’s office said he was “looking forward to the opportunity to discuss Fairfax’s record as one of the safest large jurisdictions in the country.”

The Honeymoon’s Over: How Virginia Voters Fell Out of Love With New Governor

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