Governor Spanberger has now made two trips to western Virginia in her first hundred days. On April 16 she was in Abingdon. On April 27 she was in Roanoke. The visits happened. The way they happened is the story.
In January, before the inauguration, Cardinal’s Dwayne Yancey gave the incoming governor five pieces of advice. The third one was “show up — a lot.” He coined what he called the Roanoke Rule: a Roanoke address does not count as Southwest Virginia. Some don’t believe the New River Valley counts either. The advice was specific and the test was clear. Three months in, the test has been run.
The Regional Readiness Summit on April 16 brought more than 100 senior public safety leaders to Abingdon. Sheriffs, fire chiefs, emergency management. The kind of room a governor uses to build standing in a region she does not represent politically. The Abingdon stop was the inaugural event in what the administration is calling a Unified Readiness Framework, executed under Executive Order 12. It is exactly the kind of substantive, region-specific event Yancey was asking for.
The governor’s public schedule listed the April 16 event as closed press.
The press release came out of Richmond the next day. The local coverage ran a few days later off that release. There were no photos of the governor with a sheriff in front of a courthouse. There was no on-camera moment of her listening to a fire chief explain what crisis response looks like in coal country. The standing accrued to the administration’s internal record. It did not accrue to the region’s sense of being seen.
Closed press is a choice. It is not a scheduling accident. Governors close events when the substance is sensitive or when the room needs candor that cameras would chill. A regional readiness coordination meeting is not that kind of event. The administrative goal of the meeting and the political function of a governor showing up in Washington County are not in tension. They are complementary, and they are both available, if the governor wants both. Spanberger took the administrative goal and skipped the political function.
On April 27 the governor signed twelve bipartisan education and workforce bills in Roanoke at the 100-day mark, at the Roanoke Higher Education Center. A real list of bills, including one that makes the Roanoke Community Builders Pilot Program permanent. The event was open press. It generated the kind of regional coverage southwest Virginia rarely gets from a sitting governor.
Protesters from Botetourt County drove to Roanoke to confront the governor about the data center sales tax exemption and the recently approved Google data center in their county. Asked about the exemption, Spanberger said it was “wholly appropriate for the legislature to continue having conversations” about whether it should exist into the future. That is the kind of sentence a governor uses when she does not want to take a position in the room she is standing in. It is defensible in Richmond. It reads differently in Botetourt, where the people asking the question had to leave their county to ask it.
The Botetourt protesters did the work the governor’s schedule would not. They closed a presence gap by traveling. The closing of that gap, by them, is the evidence of the gap.
Two visits. One closed press in the place where the visit would have mattered most as a regional signal. One open press in a place that, by Yancey’s own rule, is not southwest Virginia. The pattern is consistent and it is not subtle.
None of this is to argue the governor has done nothing for the region. Her appointments to the Virginia Tech Board of Visitors and her early decisions on data center policy are substantive interventions with consequences. The question is whether a governor who has made those moves can afford to keep making them without the standing that comes from showing up.
Mark Warner launched his 2001 campaign in Abingdon, the same town where Spanberger held her closed-press summit twenty-five years later. The choice of place was deliberate. Warner spent the next eight months working southwest Virginia hard enough to win a majority of Virginia’s counties, the last Democratic gubernatorial candidate to do so. The permission was still cashable a decade later.
Spanberger won the governorship by 15 points — the largest gubernatorial percentage margin since 2009. The margin came from federal worker fury in Northern Virginia and from a Republican opponent who never found a message. It did not come from southwest Virginia and it did not come from Southside. The governor knows this. Her schedule reflects it.
Earning the room is not complicated. Bring the cabinet to a community college in Wise County and let the workforce funding conversation happen in front of cameras. Sign the next gun bill at a sheriff’s office in a county where the sheriff supported the legislation, with the sheriff at the podium. Hold an open-press version of the Abingdon summit in Tazewell or Norton. Visit Botetourt before the protesters drive to Roanoke to find you.
What happened in April was none of that. A closed-press administrative briefing in Abingdon and an open-press bill signing in Roanoke do not, taken together, constitute a regional strategy. They constitute a calendar.
There is still time. The 100-day mark is a media event, not a political ceiling. The Regional Readiness Summit series will continue. The bill signings will continue. Where to hold them. Who appears on the podium. Whether the press is invited. The administration makes those choices one event at a time. Each of them is legible from this end of I-81.
By the Roanoke Rule, the governor has been to southwest Virginia once in three months. The visit was closed press. The region can read a calendar.
Tommy Turner of Christiansburg is a researcher whose analysis of institutional governance and Virginia policy has appeared in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Virginian-Pilot, Roanoke Times, and Virginia Mercury.
