Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger is struggling to explain how her popularity has collapsed just months into her administration. At a press briefing designed to look like a happenstance meeting with reporters on the sidewalk outside of the governor’s mansion in Richmond, Spanberger addressed a Washington Post/Schar poll that showed her losing 11% of her approval since November’s election, when her approval rating was 57.4% to 46%. Her answer was more cringe than an impromptu chat with Kamala Harris: “If everybody hated me, why is everybody putting my face on their mailers for the referendum?” Spanberger said. Excuse us, madame governor, but that wasn’t the question. ? JUST IN: Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D) is CONFRONTED about how she is the most unpopular Virginia governor in the 21st century, after she let illegal aliens kill VirginiansHer response: "If everyone hates me why are they putting my face on their mailers?!" Buyer's remorse is… pic.twitter.com/LwxoXjFJxe— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) April 8, 2026 Two folks I have recently spoken to could shed some light on the issue for the governor if she were to reach out to them. Rather than waiting for her Cheshire grin to vanish, let’s lay it out. First, I spoke with former state Sen. Chap Petersen, a Democrat from Fairfax County, and asked him if diving headfirst into the redistricting vote contributed to the decline in her support. “I think it was a mistake—I felt like it was really a bad mistake for her to start her administration that way on such an openly partisan issue.” Petersen said. “You know, I think when she got started, she ran successfully as a moderate Democrat, someone that was going to work with both sides, work across the aisle,” he added. “She got elected with a very large majority, which I think reflected that, and she got dragged into this redistricting issue, which she had not run on. [Redistricting] had not been part of her platform, and I think that was a mistake.” Other partisan issues Spanberger downplayed on the campaign seem to be the crux of Spanberger’s flailing popularity. Twenty gun ownership-restricting bills have already passed the Virginia General Assembly during Spanberger’s term. Democrats also proposed a massive expansion of items open to sales tax, which didn’t make it through, but it’s the thought that seems to count with Virginia’s voters. And while Democrats propose new taxes, little progress has been made on the affordability issue. Even more problematic for Democrats, in Richmond and in Washington, is polling that suggests “no” will carry the day for Virginia’s April 21 redistricting referendum. Redistricting failure would be yet another sign that Virginia’s Democrats seemed to have awakened the sleeping elephant that sat out the 2025 gubernatorial election. Coupled with the tattered coattails of the governor, it does not bode well for Virginia playing a major role in flipping the U.S. House of Representatives for Democrats. And things seem poised to get worse for the governor’s affordability agenda. Stephen Haner is a policy analyst for the Thomas Jefferson Institute, and after a lifetime spent on both sides of the lobby, he correctly predicted that if Spanberger rejoined the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), Virginians would be paying more for their electricity. “It’s going to be a big number” he said, “And it’s going to be far more than it was when we were paying it three years ago—on a typical bill it was $3 or $4. So, we were paying about $15 or $16 a ton at the end three years ago. It is now $25 or $26 a ton, and it’s going to keep going up because in 2027 they’re reshuffling all the rules. They’re eliminating a lot of the allowances.” The proposed budget creates a new category for “large consumers” of energy (namely, data centers). Nevertheless, the rates on consumers are going up anyway. I asked Haner if data centers are really making the average Virginian pay more for their electricity. “Nobody really sort of put RGGI and the data centers together either, but again, their raw material is electricity,” he replied. “So RGGI raises the price of their electricity and their raw materials as well. That [means] they’re going to be paying a huge amount of this money when the time comes.” Just like all of us. On April 6, the Virginia Mercury reported that state officials “expect the commonwealth to participate in the program’s September (RGGI) auction once regulations to reestablish the CO2 budget trading program are finalized. Dominion Energy plans to petition the State Corporation Commission in June to add the cost of those credit auctions back onto ratepayer’s bills.” Later that day, the Virginia Public Access Project exposed that the governor, who said on the campaign trail she does not take donations from corporate entities, accepted a $100,000 contribution from Dominion Energy for her inaugural fund. Perhaps the party that ran on affordability has forgotten that believability may be their bigger problem. The post Spanberger’s Problem Isn’t Affordability. It’s Believability appeared first on The Daily Signal.

For more than a decade, American politics has undergone a decisive shift thanks to President Donald Trump. This shift places the economic interests of middle- and working-class families squarely at the center of national policy. Early in his tenure, Trump issued an executive order directing the federal government to eliminate regulations that deny consumers the benefits of a competitive marketplace. The proposed Union Pacific-Norfolk Southern railroad merger stands in stark contrast to this effort, so it should come as no surprise that there is growing concern from around the country. Seven state attorneys general in Republican states, led by Montana’s Austin Knudsen, are asking the U.S. Department of Justice to provide greater scrutiny of the merger. This follows letters from nine Republican state attorneys general led by Jonathan Skrmetti of Tennessee, Brenna Bird of Iowa, and Kris Kobach of Kansas. Additionally, more than 50 Republican state legislative leaders from across the country have expressed serious reservations about this $85 billion consolidation.   Vice President JD Vance captured the essence of this thinking during his comments to a conservative audience with his statement warning about the dangers of monopolies, arguing “it’s bad for liberty, and it’s bad for prosperity.” This is a return to foundational conservative principles about dispersed power, genuine competition, and economic opportunity for working-class Americans. Real conservative jurisprudence, from the trustbusting of Theodore Roosevelt to the consumer welfare standard articulated by Robert Bork, has always recognized that protecting competition at times requires challenging consolidation. Consider who gets hurt when railroad monopolies are allowed to tighten their grip. It’s the farmer in Iowa who can’t negotiate better rates to ship grain. It’s the factory worker in Ohio whose plant closes because shipping costs make U.S. manufacturing uncompetitive with foreign countries. It’s the small business owner in rural America who faces take-it-or-leave-it pricing from the only railroad serving his region. These are the Americans who helped put Trump and Vance in office, and Republicans are right to fight for them. The attorneys general correctly warned that concentrating “too much power in too few hands” risks squeezing out American manufacturers, farmers, and consumers. When four railroad companies already control 90% of freight traffic, adding more consolidation doesn’t enhance competition. Far from it. It only fuels market distortions and monopolies that harm the overall economy.  This unprecedented and costly railroad merger would be particularly devastating for workers and producers here at home. The deal would favor intermodal container shipments that can pivot to trucking, benefiting foreign-made goods while U.S. manufacturers moving chemicals, grain, steel, and bulk commodities would be locked into paying increased rates to one railroad with nowhere else to turn. Foreign competitors would get flexibility while American workers get higher costs and worse service. That’s not “America First.”  Free markets thrive on competition, and increasing monopoly power in any form is the first step toward losing both liberty and prosperity. In line with this broader movement toward enhancing competition, the Surface Transportation Board has advanced important reforms aimed at dismantling the entrenched barriers that have long stifled competition in the freight rail industry. The proposed Union Pacific-Norfolk Southern merger represents exactly the kind of consolidation that Republicans should oppose. Vance is right: We must defend the working Americans who depend on competitive markets to earn their livelihoods. The fact that Republican state leaders and the conservative legal movement recognize this truth once again proves that the Republicans are focused on delivering for the working class. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post Conservative Leaders Are Right: The UP-NS Rail Merger Is a Bad Idea appeared first on The Daily Signal.

This year’s midterm elections aren’t just about who wins in November; they’re about who wins fights over gerrymandering taking place right now. Nowhere is the battle fiercer than in Virginia, a state where voters just six years ago approved a constitutional amendment to take partisanship out of congressional redistricting. Now Democrats want to make an exception to the rule Virginia voters approved by a nearly two-thirds majority in 2020: They want this year’s congressional map to be drawn up by their own state legislators, erasing the districts set up by the bipartisan board established by the amendment just a few years back. It’s no surprise when a state like Texas or California that leans overwhelmingly toward one party indulges in partisan gerrymandering. But Virginia is a purple state, and its congressional representation—six Democrats, five Republicans—currently reflects that. Yet, if Democrats get their way on April 21, they’ll be able to seize 10 of Virginia’s 11 congressional seats for themselves, in the most brazenly unjust reapportionment seen anywhere in decades. This isn’t about making a blue state bluer or a red state redder; this one’s an effort to manufacture a virtual monopoly for one party, depriving millions of the other party’s voters of their representation. One thing the sheer audacity of this move suggests is that Democrats nationwide aren’t quite as confident as they pretend to be about winning the midterms fair and square. If they expect voters coast to coast to repudiate President Donald Trump’s GOP in a landslide, why resort to such extreme measures in a place like Virginia? Either Democrats are more worried than they let on, or they want to do more than just win—they want to annihilate their competition. They’re proving far more ruthless than Republicans, who balked at the opportunity last year to redraw Indiana’s congressional map from a 7-2 partisan split to a nine-seat GOP sweep. What Democrats are attempting in Virginia is tantamount to legalized election theft, if voters are unwise enough to approve the amendment they’re pushing. There’s a political cost for this attack on small-d democracy: Gov. Abigail Spanberger, for one, is paying a price in her polling. She was elected by a whopping 15-point margin last year and was soon touted as the Democrats’ new face of moderation, which is why she was the party’s choice to respond to Trump’s State of the Union address this year. Yet her approval ratings are already poor, with a Washington Post survey at the end of March finding 47% of those polled gave her a passing grade, while 46% disapproved of her performance in office so far. The numbers are similar to polling on the amendment to give Virginia’s Democrat-controlled legislature the power to draw the congressional districts for the midterms: 50% say they approve, 47% disapprove. The amendment can pass with a simple majority, but if the polls are right, Democrats have no margin to spare, and early voting reports so far indicate there’s particularly strong turnout in Republican areas of the state. The early vote is outpacing early voting in last year’s gubernatorial election, too. Arguably, the amendment shouldn’t be on the ballot at all: it’s faced several legal challenges, with the state Supreme Court ultimately deciding the April 21 election can proceed even while doubts about its legality remain to be settled later. The very wording of the amendment is illegal, Republicans contend, since state law specifies the text accompanying the measure “shall be limited to a neutral explanation,” while the amendment itself is tendentiously worded as an attempt to “restore fairness.” Who wouldn’t vote to restore fairness? The campaign for the amendment has been a master class in deceit and manipulation, with even news outlets in the deep-blue D.C. suburbs of Northern Virginia noting the copious use of “pink slime” techniques by the “Yes” side. Those techniques involve propaganda disguised to look impartial—like a made-to-purpose publication branded as The Virginia Independent, which the Arlington-based news site ARLNow.com describes as “a partisan newspaper advancing Democrats’ arguments.” That slime has been flooding into voters’ mailboxes, including mine. Maybe my blue suburb hasn’t been a target of whatever efforts the Republicans are making—though the other possibility is that the GOP just isn’t trying as hard. Texas kicked off the latest wave of redistricting ahead of the midterms, as Republicans there looked to widen their advantage over the Democrats. Yet as the divergent examples of Indiana and Virginia show, it’s the Democrats who are more hellbent on winning, even if they have to turn state constitutions into confetti to do it. Politics is a test of wills, and if Republicans fail this one, they’ll almost certainly fail in November, too. COPYRIGHT 2026 CREATORS.COM We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post Virginia: A New Extreme in Gerrymandering appeared first on The Daily Signal.

In 2023, over 100 leading economists from around the world, including progressive darling Thomas Piketty, signed a letter warning that “far-right” Argentine presidential candidate Javier Milei’s policies, which were “rooted in laissez-faire economics,” would cause “devastation,” spike inflation, expand poverty, and worsen unemployment. Celebrated economists never penned any open letters warning that the preceding Peronists’ or Kirchnerists’ perverse blend of fascism, socialism, and unionism would drive Argentina—once one of the world’s wealthiest nations—into destitution, unemployment, soaring inflation, and bankruptcy. But that’s how it always goes. Political scientist Ian Bremmer warned, “Economic collapse is coming imminently.” Felix Salmon, then chief financial correspondent at Axios (now at Bloomberg), argued that Milei’s “wrecking ball” policies would plunge Argentina into “a deep recession.” When the U.S. provided Argentina with a $20 billion currency swap line last year, former New York Times columnist and Milei critic Paul Krugman argued that there’s “no plausible scenario in which even $20 billion in U.S. loans will save Javier Milei’s failing economic strategy.” Argentina only tapped around $2.5 billion of that funding and then fully repaid the loan in January of this year with interest, far ahead of schedule. Well, Argentina’s 2025 gross domestic product also blew past expectations, growing 4.4%, the highest in years. The International Monetary Fund expects the GDP will grow at similar rates in 2026 and 2027. When Milei’s socialist predecessor Alberto Fernandez reopened the economy after COVID-19 and saw the entirely predictable rise in GDP, popular Nobel laureate economist and Hugo Chavez fan Joseph Stiglitz called it an “economic miracle.” Over the next year, inflation rose to 97%, while poverty spiked, real wages fell, and GDP stagnated. Since Milei’s party won power in 2023, inflation has dropped over 200%, plunging to the lowest level in eight years. Though this is likely the fastest any nation experiencing hyperinflation has improved its position in modern history, Stiglitz still warns that Milei is leading Argentina into “crisis.” Yet it had a fiscal surplus for the second consecutive year in 2025, marking the first time since 2008 that it accomplished the feat, and the poverty rate dropped significantly in 2025, reaching its lowest level since 2018. The crisis Milei took on was stark: In the first half of 2024, around 52.9% of the population was living in poverty, with 18% in extreme poverty. Poverty fell 14 percentage points, to 38%, last year. It is at 31% now. Milei did all this the old-fashioned way. He removed price controls, got rid of tariffs and opened trade, privatized a slew of government-run agencies, cut red tape, weakened union monopolies, made major cuts in spending, and eliminated an array of needless state jobs. In other words, all the usual stuff that free marketers preach will work—and experts warn us will bring on Armageddon. True capitalism has never been tried. But even partial capitalism works every time. And we never run out of examples. After gaining independence and moving away from a planned economy in the 1990s, Estonia was one of the first former communist nations to embrace free-market solutions. It soon became one of the most successful, tech-driven economies in Europe. The Poles moved slower, but they also shed socialism for capitalistic reforms, abandoning price controls and scaling back state power. Now they’re one of the few former communist nations economically on par with the West. In the 1980s Ireland was the poorest nation in Western Europe. After its stagnant economy adopted a slew of laissez-faire reforms, deregulations, and lower taxes, Ireland not only grew to have a higher GDP per capita than Britain but became the third-wealthiest nation in the world. Singapore, once destitute, transformed into a free-market economy and now edges out Ireland on the world’s-richest list. South Korea, also once one of the poorest nations, undertook economic liberalization efforts in the 1980s and accelerated them in the 1990s, shedding its top-down government-controlled protectionist economy for a market system. Now it’s one the world’s most dynamic economies. For its first decades of existence, Israel was a one-party quasi-socialist state with a union-run economy that was constantly teetering on the edge of economic crisis. It wasn’t until the 1990s, after an extensive deregulation of Israel’s economy, that the nation experienced an explosion of productivity and quality of life. Israel’s per-capita GDP now outperforms most European nations, while its tech sector outperforms most of the world. Yet no matter how many times the technocrats or socialists or progressives are proven (sometimes catastrophically) wrong, they are never treated as the radicals. No matter how often free-market reforms work to better the lives of millions, they will never be credited. COPYRIGHT 2026 CREATORS.COM We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post Argentina Is Booming—Capitalism Remains Undefeated appeared first on The Daily Signal.

On July 4, American taxpayers are set to resume funding one of the nation’s largest providers of so-called gender-affirming care for children, which also just happens to be the nation’s largest provider of abortion. If that’s not a killjoy for America’s 250th birthday, I don’t know what is. Last year, President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act defunded Big Abortion providers like Planned Parenthood of almost $800 million in taxpayer-funded Medicaid reimbursements, dealing a significant blow to the nation’s largest abortion franchise.   In July 2025 alone, Planned Parenthood shuttered 25 clinics across the country, and the total number of closures has reached 47. Planned Parenthood cannot seem to survive on its own without a $792.2 million crutch from hard-working Americans who, by and large, do not want to be complicit in its practices. While the one-year defunding of Big Abortion businesses in the “One Big, Beautiful Bill” demonstrated one of the largest legislative wins in pro-life history, the defunding is set to expire on July 4, 2026. Come America’s 250th, taxpayers will be footing the bill for the nation’s largest abortion franchise once again.   Little do many realize, however, that funding Planned Parenthood also means propping up one of the nation’s leading providers of so-called gender-affirming care: cross-sex hormones, puberty blockers, and referrals for mastectomies and other sex-rejecting procedures. In a 2025 study analyzing Planned Parenthood’s insurance claims, the American Principles Project found that 80% of Planned Parenthood clinics provide so-called gender-affirming care, while 70% provide abortions. That’s right—more Planned Parenthood clinics provide “gender-affirming care” services than provide abortions.  In a similar expose, The Free Press published that from 2017-2023, Planned Parenthood filed 12,000 gender related insurance claims for children aged 12-17, and that 1 in 6 children and young adults who took cross-sex hormones received them via Planned Parenthood. Concerned Women for America, drawing from Planned Parenthood’s annual reporting, also reported on a 1,514% increase in total “transgender services” 2021-2022, from 15,902 services to 256,550 services. Planned Parenthood is not ashamed of its preeminence in so-called gender-affirming care nationwide—the franchise brags about being the “second largest provider of hormone therapy.” Even as the cultural tide turns on the ills of chemical and surgical mutilation, the corporation’s business model is ever-increasingly centered on “transing” vulnerable children and adults.  In a 180-degree turn from the Biden administration, Trump has made historic strides in ending the chemical and surgical mutilation of children. In a single year, around 40 pediatric “gender-affirming care” clinics have closed nationwide, citing the president’s executive order “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation” as their cause for closure. The White House has also executed a historic clampdown on fraud, waste, and the abuse of government resources—namely, hard-earned American taxpayer dollars. The impending Independence Day refund will hand back upwards of $800 million in taxpayers’ money to a corporation that demonstrably exists to kill babies and sexually mutilate children—on the 250th birthday of our nation, no less. American taxpayers should not be forced to float an ideology-driven gender-affirming care business, especially not in the wake of over a year of resounding successes against those very abuses. The American taxpayer dollar is to be stewarded, not wasted on testosterone for teenage girls. The good news is that the July 4 refund is avoidable—Congress and the White House should do everything within their power to draw up a reconciliation bill that includes a provision to permanently defund Big Abortion providers. Planned Parenthood should not be empowered by hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to dole out puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and sex-rejecting procedure referrals to American youths. Any corporation neck deep in child mutilation—Planned Parenthood chief among them—should not receive a single cent from American taxpayers. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.  The post Will Taxpayers Foot the Bill for Abortion and ‘Gender-Affirming Care’ in 2026?  appeared first on The Daily Signal.