If elected, Spanberger could face pressure from new House Democrats on right-to-work

Abigail Spanberger says she does not support a “full repeal” of the state’s so-called right-to-work law, which says that if there’s a union in the workplace, nonmembers aren’t required to pay union dues.

The Democratic candidate for governor hasn’t spelled out what she’d support that might be less than a “full repeal.” (You can see the full answer she gave to this question in our Voter Guide.)

However, if she’s elected — and brings in an expanded Democratic majority in the House of Delegates with her — she could face legislative pressure for a full repeal anyway.

Here’s how I came to that conclusion (and note that this refers to private sector unions, not public sector ones. A 2018 U.S. Supreme Court ruling governs the latter.)

As soon as the Department of Elections finalized the list of who had made the ballot this fall, we at Cardinal News sent questionnaires to every House candidate across the state asking about a variety of issues, with right-to-work being one of them. We’ve published all the responses in our Voter Guide, so you can look up your locality and see who’s on your ballot and where they stand — if the candidates have responded. Not all have.

Hearing from all the candidates may not be necessary, though, because not all 100 seats are truly in play — many are in districts that are overwhelmingly Democratic or Republican. Democrats this year have formally targeted 14 districts; of those, only two are in the western part of the state. Those two districts are House District 41 in Montgomery and Roanoke counties, where Democrat Lily Franklin is challenging Republican incumbent Chris Obenshain, and House District 34 in Harrisonburg and Rockingham County, where Democrat Andrew Payton is challenging Republican incumbent Tony Wilt. (That district is a relatively new addition to the list; Democrats originally began with 13 districts targeted but are feeling bullish about that Shenandoah Valley district, which has seen a lot of demographic changes over the years with the population growth in blue-voting Harrisonburg.)

Democrats currently hold a 51-49 edge in the House and a 21-19 advantage in the state Senate, which isn’t on the ballot this year. Republicans, feeling on the defensive, have targeted just four Democratic-held seats in hopes of winning back the majority; much of their focus is on defending their incumbents in a year where many of the underlying trends appear to be going against them. (The big one is the so-called “Virginia curse,” where the state historically votes against whichever party is in the White House.) 

For the sake of our discussion today, let’s assume that Spanberger does win, and the Democratic majority in the House does expand. How would that change the dynamics in Richmond? 

A Spanberger win, and a Democratic majority of any size in the House, would, with the state Senate, give Democrats a trifecta. In theory they could pass whatever they wanted and get it signed into law. The reality is somewhat messier because neither party marches in lockstep and there are factors other than simple partisanship at play — regional differences and personality differences, for instance. Even when Ralph Northam presided over a Democratic trifecta his final two years, he still vetoed four bills. Generally speaking, though, if Democrats have a trifecta, they will be in a position to enact a lot of what they want.  

Some of those things are clear already. Democrats will want to legalize the retail sale of cannabis; the only real question there is about the details of how that will work. Democrats will want to give every county and city the power to hold referendums on whether to raise the local sales tax with the revenue going to schools. Democrats will want to raise the minimum wage and require employers to offer paid sick leave. Democrats will want to implement waiting periods for the purchase of firearms and enact other gun-related measures. Democrats will want to more closely regulate the construction of data centers. We know all this because these are all bills that the Democratic-controlled General Assembly passed this year — and that Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, vetoed.  

This year the governor vetoed 195 bills; last year he vetoed 201 — a record. By contrast, his second year in office, when there was a Republican House and a Democratic Senate, only eight bills made their way to the governor’s desk that he objected to so much that he took out his veto pen. (That’s more of a turn of phrase than an actual writing implement.) We can’t assume that a Gov. Spanberger would have signed all those bills, but we can assume she’d have signed a lot of them. 

If you can’t decide who to support for governor this year, here’s one easy way to figure things out: Look at those vetoed bills. If you agree with Youngkin that those bills shouldn’t have become law, then you should support Winsome Earle-Sears. If you disagree with the governor and think they should have been enacted, then you should back Spanberger. Or you could just look at our Voter Guide to get a quick sense of where the candidates stand, and that brings us back to right-to-work.

In not backing a “full repeal” of right-to-work, Spanberger is somewhat to the right of most of her party. That lack of support for repeal is also the reason why the AFL-CIO did not endorse her candidacy. Spanberger will be even more out-of-step with her party on that issue if there’s a big Democratic win in the House.

In six of 14 races that Democrats have targeted, the challengers did not respond to our Voter Guide questionnaire. Neither did those Republican incumbents. In eight races, however, the Democratic challengers did respond, and all eight said they would vote to repeal right-to-work. 

(This has been updated to include May Nivar, who previously was on record saying she’d study the issue but now supports “full repeal,” according to her campaign.)

Those seven: Andrew Payton in HD 36 in Harrisonburg/Rockingham County, Lily Franklin in HD 41 in Montgomery and Roanoke counties, May Nivar in HD 57 in Goochland and Henrico counties, Mark Downey in HD 69 in Gloucester County / James City County/ Newport News / York County, Jessica Anderson in HD 71 in the Williamsburg/James City County/New Kent County, Leslie Mehta in HD 73 in Chesterfield County, Lindsey Dougherty in HD 75 in Chesterfield County/Hopewell/Prince George, and Kacey Carnegie in HD 89 in Chesapeake/Suffolk.  (You can look up their specific answers by going to our Voter Guide and finding the page related to the locality they’re running in.)

If some, or all, of these candidates won, that would expand the ranks of Democrats who support repeal. Since we haven’t heard from all the Democratic incumbents, we can’t say that every one of them backs repeal, but repeal does seem to be a core tenet of the party these days. That still doesn’t mean repeal would automatically pass. Party leaders have many ways to quietly kill bills in committee that they think might prove inconvenient. It’s possible that a Gov. Spanberger might signal that she doesn’t really want to have a right-to-work repeal bill on her desk, and some political muscle behind the scenes means a bill never even comes up for a vote. No, I realize none of this was described in Schoolhouse Rock’s “I’m Just a Bill,” but I’m describing the world as it is, not how it’s officially described. Just because a bunch of candidates have said they support repeal doesn’t mean it’s a high enough priority to them that they press the issue. A repeal bill could die the way some of my houseplants do: from inattention.

That’s one scenario. Here’s another: A bunch of freshmen legislators arrive in Richmond and don’t feel they owe any allegiance to the new governor. They are restive to enact bills they believe in, and repealing right-to-work is one of those. Legislators aren’t the only actors in Richmond, either. Interest groups are, too. Labor unions will see bigger Democratic majorities, and an opportunity to achieve a long-sought policy goal. It’s not inconceivable that they quickly make Spanberger’s life difficult by forcing the issue — and we get into torturous debates about what a “full repeal” and a “partial repeal” look like. 

It’s possible that some of these Democratic challengers who say they support repeal don’t fully understand what that means. Many of them gave answers about how they support the rights of workers to unionize. That’s not really part of the law, though. Workers can unionize now. What right-to-work does is weaken the power of those unions; they can’t collect dues from workers who don’t want to join the union (but who would benefit from whatever concessions the union might get from an employer). 

It’s clear from the Voter Guide answers that some challengers understand this quite well. In her answer, Carnegie, the Democratic candidate for an open seat in Chesapeake and Suffolk now in Republican hands, said: “No one should be forced to join a union but if you benefit from the contract a union negotiates, it’s only fair to contribute to the cost of representation. Repealing right-to-work doesn’t force anyone to join a union, it simply levels the playing field.”

Earle-Sears has based much of her campaign for governor on her steadfast opposition to repealing right-to-work. She warns that without it, Virginia will become less attractive to potential employers. Democrats universally reject that school of thought. “We can be pro-worker and pro-growth,” Carnegie said in her answer. “Repealing right-to-work won’t hurt Virginia’s economy. What companies really look for is workforce quality, infrastructure, and a stable, well-governed climate, not whether workers have rights.”

There’s some evidence that right-to-work is not as popular as some Republicans think it is. The business community certainly believes right-to-work is a cornerstone of Virginia’s economy. Ordinary voters may not be so convinced. 

In 2016, when Republicans still controlled the legislature but saw Democrats rising, they sent to the voters a proposed constitutional amendment that would have elevated the right-to-work law from simple state code into the harder-to-change state constitution. They thought the amendment would pass easily. Instead, it failed — 53.6% voted no. The “no” votes out of Democratic areas such as Northern Virginia were predictable. The surprise was how many Republican-voting rural areas rejected the amendment. Dickenson County voters must have remembered the days of miners’ unions because 63.1% there voted no — a higher percentage than in Arlington County. In Covington, 58.1% said no, a more emphatic rejection than in Fairfax County. 

Spanberger’s vague but nuanced position has dulled one of Earle-Sears’ main lines of attack. However, the results from that 2016 referendum suggest that supporting repeal might not be as deadly a position as it once would have been. That also means Democratic legislators might not be reluctant about putting a bill on Spanberger’s desk, even if she doesn’t want it there.

To see where the House candidates in your district answered our questionnaire, and what they said if they did, see our Voter Guide — we have individual pages for all 133 counties and cities in Virginia.