Two New Democratic Governors Just Betrayed the People Who Elected Them. Here’s How We Make It Cost Something.
We aren’t helpless and we aren’t hopeless. Time to act.
10 min read
·
Jun 2, 2026
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Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill.
AP/Getty Images
Note from the author: Below you’ll find several things. An article factually outlining what happened, with sources hyperlinked where the claim is made. After that you’ll find info on the underlying principles for how to respond when politicians betray their voters, then some targeted contacts to shake key support for these specific cases, followed by free Existentialist Republic resources.
Angela Arrington cleaned other people’s houses for a living, and she had never once voted, never knocked a single door, until Abigail Spanberger gave her a reason to do both in 2025. The Washington Post found her this spring among the Virginians who poured their faith into the new governor and now watch something curdle.
She is the kind of person a campaign builds its whole machine to reach, the first-time voter who shows up because she believes a promise. Six months into the job, a lot of the people who made that promise come true feel like the promise was made to someone else.
Spanberger and Sherrill arrived together. The press paired them from the start as the moderate, national-security model for a battered Democratic Party, two former servants of the federal government who flipped red districts and then ran statewide on competence over chaos.
Spanberger spent three terms in Congress and a career before that as a CIA case officer. Sherrill flew Navy helicopters out of Bahrain and Naples before she put on a suit.
Both won in November 2025 in a sweep that rattled the White House, and both governed for five months before the people who elected them started using the same word about each of them. Betrayal.
So let us look at the word and decide whether it has earned its place, because a grievance that survives scrutiny is worth more than ten that collapse on contact.
Start in Virginia. On May 14, 2026, Spanberger vetoed a bill that would have let most of the state’s public workers bargain collectively over their wages, their hours, and the conditions they labor under.
She did not do it cleanly. First she tried to gut the bill from inside, sending it back with amendments that swapped the word “shall” for the word “may”, pushed the start date out two more years, and traded binding arbitration for the toothless advisory kind. When Democratic legislators refused to swallow amendments that would have hollowed out their own bill, she killed it outright.
The detail that stings is the one the American Prospect put plainly: during the campaign she promised first responders she would sign exactly this kind of law. The firefighters and home care workers and teachers who knocked doors for her remembered the promise.
The Virginia Public Sector Labor Coalition, which speaks for the state AFL-CIO, AFSCME, the teachers, the communications workers, SEIU Virginia 512, and the Virginia Professional Fire Fighters, called the veto a betrayal and described her reasoning as Orwellian, since she had told them she was with them.
Her own lieutenant governor, Ghazala Hashmi, broke with her in public and restated her support for the workers. The Republicans across the aisle, the ones she had spent the campaign positioning against, publicly thanked her for the veto.
That veto did not stand alone. Spanberger has rejected thirty-one bills passed by a legislature her own party controls, more than any Virginia governor whose party ran the General Assembly since the 1990s. Among them, a board to hold down prescription drug prices and the legal retail marijuana market voters were promised years ago. A worker who was told to her face that her right to bargain would finally arrive, and who then watched that right die on the governor’s desk, can point to the exact promise that broke.
Now cross the river to New Jersey, where the flashpoint is a building with barbed wire around it.
Delaney Hall sits in the industrial flats of Newark, a private lockup run for profit by the GEO Group, holding roughly three hundred immigrants, most of whom have committed no crime. Inside, detainees launched a hunger strike against rancid food, denied medical care, and conditions that human-rights monitors describe as a catastrophe on American soil.
Gabriella Soto, pregnant with her third child, says her husband Martin has been trapped in there since February, fed spoiled milk and food with worms in it, and that the officials allowed brief tours are not seeing the truth of the place.
Sherrill ran her whole campaign as a war on this administration, and she accused the president in her inauguration speech of illegally seizing power.
When the hunger strike started, she asked ICE to let her into Delaney Hall and ICE refused, she sent state health inspectors and the operators turned them away, and she called for the place to be shut down.
Every one of those moves was a request, and none of it moved the federal government an inch. The one kind of force she could actually command, she pointed the other way.
Sherrill announced the deployment in the language of protection. She was sending the New Jersey State Police, she said, to keep the peace and to deny ICE any pretext for a federal takeover of the streets.
Then a few hundred people came to the gates to support the hunger strikers, and the troopers she had sent turned on them. Over two nights they fired rubber bullets, tear gas, and flash-bang grenades into the crowd, charged it with officers on horseback, and drove people back with riot shields and batons.
She had sent the State Police to calm the street; under her command they turned on the people standing in it.
A military veteran named Ian Austin pulled up his shirt for a livestreaming reporter to show the red welts where rubber rounds had hit him four times. A nurse named Norma Bowe, who had already been shoved to the ground by federal ICE agents earlier that week, came back because she trusted the governor to protect New Jerseyans, and watched the state escalate instead.
The political director of the ACLU of New Jersey, John Butler, called the trooper response an unnecessary attack on free speech and peaceful protest, and warned that the state must not copy the militarized tactics of the federal government it claims to oppose.
Worse than the batons was the language. Sherrill blamed the violence on outside agitators, and offered as proof that four of six people arrested one night came from New York and one from Pennsylvania, in a metro area so braided together that New Jersey hosts New York’s football teams.
The phrase has a pedigree. George Wallace reached for outside agitators in 1965 to justify the state troopers who beat marchers bloody on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and Martin Luther King Jr. answered that slander directly from the Birmingham jail.
A Democratic governor who ran as the antidote to authoritarianism ended the month sounding like the men King was writing against.
Here is where most pieces stop, with the disappointment catalogued and nothing handed to the reader but the weight of it. We are going to do something more useful, because anger that has nowhere to go just rots.
There is a framework political scientists use to explain why leaders do what they do, and it cuts straight to the bone of both of these stories. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith laid it out in The Dictator’s Handbook, and they call it selectorate theory.
The core of it goes like this. Every leader, the saint and the tyrant alike, survives only by keeping happy the specific group of people whose support they actually need to stay in power. The authors call that group the winning coalition.
A dictator’s coalition is tiny, a handful of generals and bagmen he buys off with stolen money. A governor’s coalition is larger and runs on votes and turnout and the organized groups that deliver both.
The practical lesson falls out cleanly. You do not move a leader by pleading with the leader. You move a leader by reaching the people inside the coalition the leader cannot afford to lose, and getting those people to make their support conditional.
So what did Spanberger and Sherrill bet on? The same thing, the oldest wager in the playbook: that their base has nowhere else to go.
Spanberger had reason to believe it. The state AFL-CIO, sore over right-to-work, never endorsed her, and she won anyway. The unions that did back her, SEIU and the federal employees’ union among them, learned what that confidence buys when she vetoed the bargaining rights they had knocked doors for. She killed the bill because she was sure they would swallow it.
Sherrill made the same wager on the immigrant-rights left, courting the endorsements while parking her brand in the center, counting on the people who fear ICE to stay loyal no matter what her troopers did.
That is the bet, and the point of everything that follows is to make it a losing one. A base that will withhold its hands, its money, and its name stops being something a governor can spend and forget. Support that carries conditions is the only kind a politician respects.
This is where the theory turns into a to-do list. These organizations are her keys to power. They are how she won: the checks, the volunteers, the knocked doors, the names that told wavering voters she was safe.
So we go to them, not to her. We ask each one to pull its endorsement, to say in public that what she did was wrong, and to tell its own members why. The members are the muscle, and a governor who loses the muscle loses the next race.
Some of these groups are angry enough to move already. Others carry enough weight that even a few cool words from them do real damage.
We will do one key for each governor here, to show the move. Each has many more behind it, and once the shape is clear, the rest are easy to spot.
Start with Spanberger, and start with SEIU Virginia. It endorsed her, it ran the collective bargaining fight, and it has already broken with her in the open, calling on her to sign the original bill and pressing legislators to reject the version she gutted. The fight is already moving, which makes it the easiest place to add your weight.
Reach SEIU Virginia 512 at 571–432–0209, at info@seiuva.org, or through seiuva.org. The wider SEIU Virginia State Council takes messages at seiuvirginia.org.
Tell them you know they endorsed her, that she vetoed the bill she promised first responders, and that you want three things: pull the endorsement, say in public that the veto was wrong, and tell their members what she did.
Now Sherrill, and the Rutgers AAUP-AFT. The faculty union endorsed her for one plain reason, that with the federal government attacking their rights they needed a governor who would shield them. Then her State Police fired on people protesting a federal immigration jail. She failed the exact test they wrote into their endorsement.
Reach the Rutgers AAUP-AFT at 732–964–1000 or through rutgersaaup.org.
Tell them you know they endorsed her, that her troopers fired rubber bullets and tear gas at people protesting an ICE jail, and that you want the same three things: pull the endorsement, say in public that it was wrong, and tell their members what she did.
A call takes two minutes. An email takes five.
That is one key apiece, and each governor has many. Spanberger also leaned on the firefighters she made the promise to and on the federal employees’ union, and the national AFL-CIO, which never endorsed her, can still make her veto a warning to every governor in the country. Sherrill was carried by the New Jersey State AFL-CIO and its million members, by the teachers of the NJEA, by the health-care and public-sector unions, and by the Latina Civic PAC that fights for the state’s immigrant families, while the ACLU of New Jersey, which endorses no one, has already called the crackdown an attack on free speech.
Start with the one key in front of you. Once you have felt what it is to put real weight on a governor’s supporters, you will find the rest on your own. If you want the full map of who holds each governor’s keys and how to reach them, tell us, and we will lay it out.
None of us does this alone, and we should not try to. Each of us who writes can bring one more person along, a friend or a coworker or a neighbor who knocked the same doors and feels the same sting, because a single message is easy to file and forget, and a steady stream of them is a problem the leadership has to answer for. Forward this, and ask whoever receives it to send one of their own.
This is not a campaign to punish allies for sport, and we should say so plainly. We elected these governors because the alternative was a Republican, and calling the unions and the advocacy groups to account is not an act of war against the Democratic Party. It is an act of ownership over it.
The organizations that endorsed these governors command a kind of power the rest of us can borrow, because a union that pulls its endorsement is a sentence that lands in a governor’s office with weight that a thousand angry replies never carry. When the coalition speaks, the leader listens, because the coalition is the only thing keeping the leader in the chair.
Which brings us back to Angela Arrington, who had never voted until last year, and to Norma Bowe, who trusted her governor to keep her safe and got rubber bullets for the faith.
The temptation after a betrayal is to conclude that the vote was wasted and the door-knocking was a fool’s errand, to fold the disappointment into the long American habit of expecting nothing and receiving it. That conclusion is a gift to the people who would prefer we stay home.
The truer reading of what happened to Arrington and Bowe is that they have more power than they were told, because they are not the audience for these governors. They are the coalition. We are the selectorate.
The federal fight stays tilted against us by design, and the effective terrain runs through the states, and inside the states it runs through the organizations that decide which names go on the endorsement letter. Find those organizations, ask them to take their endorsements back, and make the loyalty conditional. That is how a promise gets kept after the election is over.
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