Abigail Spanberger, Virginia’s governor-elect, won the 2025 election through a singular focus on the state’s high cost of living, though her plans for reducing those costs were vague.
Last month at the Virginia Capitol, flanked by Democratic state legislative leaders, Spanberger announced her affordability agenda. She claimed that her “overarching, unrelenting focus in 2026 will be making the Commonwealth more affordable” by reducing health care, energy, and housing costs. Spanberger is joining Democrats across the country, including New York City’s new mayor Zohran Mamdani, in leaning into the “a-word.”
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But despite her focus on affordability, Spanberger’s plan amounts to a series of expensive mandates that will drive costs higher. Spanberger has provided a disquieting preview of progressives’ affordability agendas elsewhere.
Most of Spanberger’s proposals would drive up expenses for one group of consumers in order to benefit another group deemed more deserving—what economists call “cross-subsidization.” For example, Spanberger supports a bill that will ban health insurers from charging higher premiums to smokers. This will almost certainly raise costs for nonsmokers—as outgoing governor Glenn Youngkin noted in vetoing the bill last year.
Spanberger also wants to limit health insurers’ ability to require prior authorizations for medicines or treatments for people with long-term conditions. Complaints about health insurers are often justified, but these authorizations are one of the few ways they have of limiting expenses. The result of Spanberger’s plan would be to increase health-care spending and thus premiums for others with the same insurance.
Even more surprising for an affordability agenda: Spanberger’s first proposal on the website spelling out her plan includes ensuring that “independent and community pharmacies are fairly reimbursed.” This means requiring that insurers and patients pay more for their medicine to make sure that certain pharmacies get sufficient profit. Whatever the reason for such a proposal, it can't be affordability.
On energy, Spanberger tries to align progressives’ climate obsessions with the concerns of electricity-cost-burdened households. But one of the main causes of higher electricity prices in Virginia is the state’s Clean Economy Act, passed in 2020. The law requires the states’ utilities to be carbon-free within two decades. Dominion Power last year said that it would need to charge ratepayers $220 billion—about $25,000 for every man, woman, and child in the state—to pay for the long-term costs of renewable energy “certificates” to meet the mandates.
Nonetheless, Spanberger wants to go deeper with expensive climate demands. She supports a bill that would require more battery storage to backstop unreliable renewable power sources. Ratepayers will ultimately have to pay these storage costs. Spanberger also wants to require electric utilities to make low-income houses more energy-efficient. But such energy-efficiency programs bring minimal energy savings and, again, it’s other ratepayers who will have to pay for them.
On housing, Spanberger wants to lengthen the time it takes for landlords to end a lease. As recent research shows, protections for nonpaying or scofflaw tenants force landlords to raise rents for everybody else.
Spanberger also wants to let more cities and counties create “inclusionary” zoning programs. These require developers to construct low-income housing in addition to their normal housing. Such programs hike rents for regular tenants who must subsidize their new neighbors.
Most of Spanberger’s affordability plans force average citizens to subsidize other groups, such as climate companies and smokers, through their regular purchases. Some of her plans would use government funds to subsidize consumers in general. Such subsidies drive up demand, and therefore costs, while also burdening taxpayers. For example, Spanberger wants to use Virginia tax dollars to underwrite health-insurance premiums on the Obamacare marketplace. Recent evidence shows that those subsidies, which Congress refused to extend last year, were riddled with fraud. One report found almost five times more low-income subsidy recipients in Florida than would be eligible for the program.
Spanberger also wants to issue more state bonds to pay for subsidized housing. Since she does not clarify how she will pay for this, the likely answer is more debt and more taxes. This is the opposite of affordability.
The governor-elect’s plans provide hints of how progressives elsewhere will try to tackle affordability problems. Yet the actual drivers of higher costs are a lax Federal Reserve in Washington, more intensive regulations, rising taxes, and mounting debt. All these policies are favored, or at least tolerated, by progressive activists.
Their response, similar to Spanberger’s, will be even more cross-subsidies between different groups, more mandates, and more spending. These efforts to tackle the high cost of living will thus worsen its causes—in Virginia, New York, and elsewhere.
Photo by Matt McClain/The Washington Post via Getty Images