by Gordon C. Morse

Next week, Virginia will open the 2026 regular session of the Virginia General Assembly, with the Democratic Party ruling both House and Senate, then proceed to inaugurate a new governor, Abigail Spanberger.

How will it go?

Ah, yes, there’s the question. You can guess, but you don’t really know and that will make the weeks and months ahead “instructive.”

Virginia’s cultural unity, the sureness and confidence of its political institutions, got clattered and banged in the first quarter of the 21^st century. Virginia has never been more pluralistic, never more given to negotiation. We ignore the cleavages, grasp for rhetorical reassurances and, with reason, the Virginia Chamber of Commerce prefers it that way.

But, c’mon. We have a geographic, political arrangement called “Virginia” you can sketch on a map and that’s about it.

The fellow who employed me 40 years ago – Jerry Baliles – carried every Virginia congressional district in his successful 1985 bid for governor. Democratic lawmakers commanded the General Assembly then, too, but you’d find them dispersed about the entire state. Their political thinking favored disparity, as well.

Think Kipling. “Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.” Democrats command the populous eastern half of Virginia and Republicans hold the west and trees don’t vote. Where does that leave us?

It’s not just where the votes land. Open hostility to Virginia – its history, traditions, habits, proclivities and peculiarities – came to the State Capitol in recent years and it didn’t have to pitch any tents on the lawn. It got elected.

Will Spanberger speak to the Great Divide that has characterized recent legislative sessions? We’ve just had a House Speaker succeed himself for the first time in a decade. She’ll certainly want to set a tone for her administration and outline the path forward.

But can she craft compelling language to accurately and insightfully describe the true “state of the commonwealth?” That’s a higher hurdle to clear.

Spanberger will catch her stride soon enough. Like Youngkin, like McAuliffe, she will be better at being governor a year from now. For the moment, however, she has no framework of experience from which to work. She’s never done this before and the Virginia legislative process little resembles that of Congress.

The numbers – who belongs to which party – mean that Spanberger will be a productive governor. It’s hard to imagine things going badly for the Democrats generally, unless they insist upon it.

Will they? With the surge of new Democrats in the House of Delegates, courtesy of November’s election, will they be able to discipline themselves? Will they try to do everything at once? They did previously and it cost them.

We have the form of legislative leadership in Richmond -– lawmakers have organizational titles — but scant evidence of its substance. There’s not a strong, clear voice in the bunch of them, Democrat or Republican. Eloquence appears to be out of question.

Or, to put it on a more positive basis, there’s an open door in Richmond for someone to stand up and foster reason, collective judgment, to express the why’s and wherefores’.

Is there a preacher in the room?

Democratic theory converges on a set of core qualities: transparency, inclusiveness, legal regularity, accountability and genuine deliberation.

Deliberation. That’s where the Virginia General Assembly flops these days. Two legislative chambers; two empty pools. At best, in Richmond, you get an aggregation of raw preferences and routine snarled references to this or that. No one presently creates space for reason‑giving and compromise. More often than not, the members just vote.

For Spanberger, the bargaining starts – with others, with herself – immediately and for the remainder of her term as governor. In time, we’ll soon get a better sense of this new governor’s character and intents.

How could it not be interesting to watch? Spanberger promises to hold the center, to produce practical solutions, but with the two parties so far apart she’ll feel a strong pull from her loyalists to make good on their enthusiasms. Spanberger will not drift far from her core of political support. She can’t.

Which was always Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s dilemma. Four years ago, he came into office as an attractive, intelligent Republican who had never previously held public office. It was a splendid opportunity to establish himself on his own terms, as a creative and independent thinking political leader. He did not need to immediately pander to Fox News audiences.

But he did. Why?

Well, it’s very hard these days not to do so. State politics and the running for state office has less and less to do with the state. Parties, candidates, and voters treat state offices as extensions of national partisan conflict and national issue agendas, often dispensing with traditional, admittedly provincial concerns. National party alignment is now the thing and, for many young lawmakers, the only thing. Who wants to be provincial?

Maybe Spanberger will talk about that, too. She has a couple of speeches coming up that she might use to her advantage. Her inaugural address, for instance, offers her a chance to do the larger picture of where Virginia sits in time and motion. It can be a powerful moment if you have powerful words and ideas.

Most Virginia governors show up for their inaugural lacking either of those. They are too obviously thrilled – to the exclusion of almost anything else — that the universe has acclaimed, via the Virginia electorate, their worthiness to lead the commonwealth for the next four years. It will be wonderous, but not strange in their telling. An ode to me.

It’s been a very long time since anyone has stepped out on the South Portico of the State Capitol and said something compelling. You may get a nice line or two, but whatever gets said gets forgotten within five minutes of “may God bless the Commonwealth of Virginia.”

It need not be so. You avoid that fate by first acknowledging that four years is scant time to alter the world. But, on this day (so you would say) we may take an accounting of where we are and appear to be going. Insert some facts. Insert what you think about those facts. Insert what, in general terms, you propose to do about those facts. Point the way and acknowledge that you will be making choices, that no governor can ever manage to do it all.

You might also add that, for a quickly passing governor’s term in office, it’s a persuasion game from start to finish. Promise that you will keep that in mind.

You can trick it up with some moving rhetoric, if you like, but better to not try too hard on that score. See if you can get through the thing without mentioning Martin Luther King, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry or Maggie Walker. Unless, that is, you happen to actually possess some insight into those people, that you’re not just positioning them as so many lightbulbs on a Xmas tree.

Avoid first-person references (“I am that I am”) and skip the generalities about Virginians, too. There are no generalities anymore. That’s the problem. Youngkin got up and started rambling on about “the tenacity and grit” of Virginians and what malarky. Some have that; some don’t. Some are tall (like Youngkin), some are short (like me.) The common denominators are, these days, in short supply.

A combination of greater religious disaffiliation, increased racial and ethnic diversity, and an expanded, highly educated suburban belt around Washington and Richmond and out to the coast has produced a more secular, cosmopolitan public culture — at least in the more populous portions of the state — than previously existed.

So what to make of that? What to say about it?

It’s daunting to realized that next year marks something of a personal anniversary. It will be 50 years since working through, as a legislative aid, a full session of the Virginia General Assembly. That was 1977 or two years prior to the birth of the new governor. Yikes.

We’re overdue on having someone lead Virginia with the capacity for perspective and targeted action — for stepping back, then drilling down. Abigail Spanberger has great potential. She has notable advantages in the composition of the General Assembly. You just wish she didn’t suffer the disadvantage of having to learn on the job.

Gordon C. Morse has been writing commentary and speeches in Virginia since 1983. This column his republished with permission from his Substack account Heart’s Desire.