Virginians found out a lot about their still newish governor on Tuesday.
A lot of Republicans were thrilled, or at least relieved. A lot of Democrats weren’t.
Gov. Abigail Spanberger inked vetoes to 19 bills, including some of her party’s top priorities, such as creating a Prescription Drug Affordability Board and legalizing retail sales of cannabis.
Call it the Tuesday Afternoon Massacre.
These vetoes come after last week’s veto of another Democratic priority — a wider range of collective bargaining for public employees.
What tied most of these vetoes together was a single theme: She supported the concept, but not the details. With all these bills, she had proposed amendments, the General Assembly rejected them, so she vetoed the original bill.
In one veto statement after another, she used similar language. “The General Assembly rejected my amendments, but I look forward to working with the bill’s patron and stakeholders to address this issue in the future.”
Democratic legislators — some privately, others not so privately — have grumbled that Spanberger’s amendments weren’t simple tweaks, they were wholesale rewrites of bills. After last week’s veto of the collective bargaining bill, Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell, D-Fairfax County, pronounced himself “dismayed and perplexed.”
In her amendments, “the governor proposed an entirely new bill,” Surovell said. “That’s not really how the legislative process works.” He said Democrats felt “blindsided” by many of her amendments.
What’s particularly notable is that all of Spanberger’s vetoes — now 29 in all — come with her party in control of the General Assembly. When Glenn Youngkin vetoed 201 bills in 2024 and 195 in 2025, no one should have been surprised. He was a Republican, the General Assembly was under Democratic control. The legislature passed a lot of bills it wanted, but also expected him to block.
Now that there’s a Democrat in the governor’s chair, those Democratic legislators expected their bills to sail through.
That’s not the case. According to figures compiled by the Virginia Public Access Project (and which start with the George Allen administration in the mid-1990s), Spanberger has vetoed more bills than any other governor whose party controlled the legislature. The accounting gets complicated because the legislature often passes duplicate bills — House and Senate bills that do the same thing — so on Tuesday Spanberger vetoed 19 versions of 12 different things. However you count them, the last Democratic governor with a Democratic General Assembly was Ralph Northam; he vetoed four bills in 2020 and none in 2021.
There are likely several things going on here.
1. Spanberger has a learning curve
She’s never served in Richmond and may not fully understand how legislators like to work with a governor of their own party. Her only experience is in Washington, where things work very differently (or often don’t work at all). Here’s a hard fact that all governors have to learn: Legislators often regard governors as temporary inconveniences who come and go while they see themselves as the ones who really run the show. Most legislators were there before any governor arrives and are still there when the governor leaves.
2. Spanberger is sending a signal
It’s entirely possible that the message here with all these vetoes is “there’s a new sheriff in town.” When the General Assembly met for the reconvened session to deal with Spanberger’s amendments, legislative leaders simply didn’t bring many of them up to a vote. Now they may understand that if they want these bills enacted they’re going to have to deal with what Spanberger wants. It’s also possible that Democratic legislators put Spanberger in a corner — if they rejected her amendments and she signed their bills anyway, she may have felt they’d never take her seriously. If that’s how she viewed things, then she may have felt forced to veto some of these bills.
Either way, we now have a Democratic governor and a Democratic General Assembly at something of an impasse — not on everything, but certainly on some things.
3. Spanberger is cautious and detail-oriented
Another interpretation of what just went down is that Spanberger is simply doing her due diligence. She talked often of reading every line of every bill (something not all legislators do). Most of her amendments were aimed at — well, some would say “watering down” bills. She’d say improving the details. Opinions vary. However you choose to interpret that, Spanberger has stood her ground on some measures where it might have been politically convenient to simply sign the bill and move on.
4. Spanberger may wind up owning some issues she doesn’t want to
Last week police raided some cannabis stores in Bristol, seizing more than 300 pounds of marijuana. It’s clear there’s public demand for weed. That will not go away; it just means those sales will continue in an unregulated, and untaxed, black market. If you travel west of the Roanoke Valley, you’ll encounter a cannabis store operating openly in almost every county. Spanberger now owns those, metaphorically speaking.
The two sponsors of the vetoed cannabis bill — Sen. Lashrescse Aird, D-Petersburg, and Del. Paul Krizek, D-Fairfax County — issued a pointed statement: “The Governor’s veto ignores the reality that cannabis is already being sold everyday across Virginia. The only question is whether we as leaders will finally ensure those sales occur within a legal, regulated market or continue turning a blind eye to a booming illicit market while pretending to be outraged by its existence. The General Assembly provided Virginia with an opportunity to lead on this issue, but instead this veto prolongs uncertainty and provides comfort to those profiting from the illicit market. This veto and its consequences belong to the Governor and Governor alone.”
5. Spanberger probably isn’t running for president
Just about everything Youngkin did was viewed through the lens of his presidential ambitions. When Spanberger was elected, and by such a wide margin, suddenly her name was mentioned as a possible president or vice presidential candidate. It’s hard to see her actions so far in that light. Spanberger’s reservations about the details of collective bargaining and cannabis and prescription drugs and everything else may well be right, but it seems hard to explain those to Democratic partisans in the hothouse of a national campaign. One caveat: If she is harboring thoughts of running for president, she must see a different route to the nomination than what seems likely these days.
6. Spanberger may face some tough budget decisions
We still don’t have a budget. We don’t even have budget negotiations. That’s not on the governor; that’s on House Democrats and Senate Democrats who are at odds over how data centers should be taxed. The longer that goes on, the more there will be pressure on Spanberger to intervene and knock some heads. Is this a precursor to that? Or do her vetoes complicate things? There’s been some chatter that unhappy Democrats might simply write some of these vetoed bills into the budget, then wait until late June to pass the budget — giving Spanberger little time to react. At Tuesday’s Senate Finance meeting, Senate Finance Chair Louise Lucas, D-Portsmouth, assured people that Virginia would have a budget “by June 30.” How literally did she mean that? We now may be in a six-week game of “chicken.”
This is what we know now. By June 30, we’ll know even more.
We’ll likely also know more things by Friday, and some of those are likely to find their way into West of the Capital, our weekly political newsletter. Sign up for any of our newsletters here:
