What to expect from Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger’s State of the Union response

By Edward-Isaac Dovere, CNN

(CNN) — Abigail Spanberger is less known for her oratory than for drilling down into the work of government and bucking her party leadership.

On Tuesday night, she has one of the riskier speeches in politics to figure her way through.

The 46-year-old Virginia governor, the first female chief executive of her state, was House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’ pick to rebut a State of the Union address Tuesday that President Donald Trump warned would likely again be very long.

The onetime CIA officer doesn’t talk in slogans or catchy promises, once instead describing herself to CNN in an interview as “an optimistic, starry-eyed pragmatist.” She refused to support Nancy Pelosi for speaker and once pushed back on former President Joe Biden’s overarching economic push by saying no one had elected him to try to be a new Franklin Roosevelt.

Spanberger will deliver the speech live from Colonial Williamsburg, with an aide saying that she picked the spot – now a favorite for school groups to enjoy live re-enactments of colonial times – because it was from there in 1776 that Virginia sent its delegation to the Continental Congress to propose independence, and less than a month later, adopted the Virginia Declaration of Rights.

The aide added that Spanberger’s address will hit on themes of affordability, the “chaos” caused by the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress not standing up more to the president. She’ll also talk about how some citizens are pushing back, and, calling on her experience in the CIA, argue the administration is causing dangerous uncertainty around the world.

Between directing the response to yet another big storm and fielding calls and texts of congratulations and advice, Spanberger and top aides have been writing and rehearsing what they know will be a tricky task.

Not only will she have to immediately rebut a president who often goes off script, but she’ll be doing it as the kickoff to her party’s midterm campaign, trying to be the unified voice of a party that remains very much divided over what it stands for and what it wants to be.

In announcing her selection, Jeffries called Spanberger a “stark contrast to Donald Trump.”

Spanberger tends to talk in terms of how people in her state, which voted for Kamala Harris in 2024 but by a much slimmer margin than expected, are processing Trump’s second term.

“I have no positive feelings about him as a human, but it’s the choices he’s making. And those are choices that he’s helped along with by others who are supporting him or who aren’t standing up to him, whether they’re here in Virginia or they’re senators and Congress people from other states,” she told CNN in an interview last year on her campaign bus just before election day, where she went on to score an over 15-point win.

Democrats’ answer, she said then, shouldn’t be about continuing to ask in bewilderment how people could vote for Trump, but citing specifics of what his agenda has actually meant.

“The answer is: He lied to them. He lied to Virginia farmers. Virginia farmers are struggling and they’re watching him bail out Argentina?” she said, speaking shortly after the Trump administration offered a $20 billion lifeline to the Argentine economy. “We have small, by a lot of state standards, family cattle farms. What they need is localized processing. They need to not have more of a monopolistic meatpacking industry and they need markets for what they’re producing. And he’s going to flood the US market with Argentinian beef? It’s a slap in the face. And this is after our soybean growers have lost China as a market and mostly lost it back in 2017.

“There are so many people that it’s like, ‘Yeah, this is not what you voted for,’” she said.

Spanberger spent two years gearing up to be governor, but even so, her first month on the job has been more intense than anyone would have imagined.

Sworn in in mid-January days before the first big winter storm of the year, the Democrat was also immediately deluged by an online effort to make her out as a far-left “white witch,” in part because of the all-white suffragette-nodding outfit she wore at her inauguration, and in part because of tagging her to a variety of bills introduced by others in the state legislature.

Though Spanberger has made a point to talk about herself as a moderate who won with significant Republican support, Sean Spicer, Trump’s first White House press secretary, called Spanberger’s selection “a gift” in a post last week on X.

“There is no better example of how to destroy a state than Spanberger,” he wrote, though she has only been on the job a month. “It would have been better to pick (New York City Mayor Zohran) Mamdani.”

Aside from speech preparation, Spanberger has been putting together a tightened state budget. She’s been revamping a range of appointments and decisions left by her Republican predecessor, Glenn Youngkin. She’s also been helping steer a Democratic gerrymandering effort likely to eliminate several of the state’s currently Republican-held seats in the House of Representatives.

Spanberger has already made several hard moves, starting off with asking for the resignations of several Youngkin appointees to the boards of the University of Virginia and George Mason University and then nominating a slate of her own appointees who would then make up the majorities governing both institutions.

Most of her legislative agenda is still taking shape, but just on Friday evening, she signed a law which formally set a special election on April 21 for Virginians to vote on whether to institute newly gerrymandered maps that could give Democrats a chance at winning 10 of the state’s 11 US House districts.

The Supreme Court of Virginia is expected to eventually decide whether to let the referendum go forward after a local judge issued an injunction sought by Republicans.

But for the next few hours, Spanberger is gaming out how to achieve a national sensibility for her speech and make sure she doesn’t fall victim to the kind of criticism faced by Alabama Sen. Katie Britt, the viral grab for water by now-Secretary of State Marco Rubio, or then-Rep. Joe Kennedy’s 2018 response, when his own big address for Democrats was overshadowed by an over-application of lip balm that left him looking like he had “drool fangs.”

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.