发布时间：2026年2月24日，美国东部时间凌晨4:00
[阿比盖尔·斯潘伯格] 并不以雄辩著称，而更以深入钻研政府工作和抵制党内领导层的决策而闻名。
周二晚上，她将发表一场政治上颇具风险的演讲，需要巧妙地把握发言方向。
这位46岁的弗吉尼亚州州长，是该州首位女性首席执行官，被众议院少数党领袖哈基姆·杰弗里斯选中，在周二回应唐纳德·特朗普总统的国情咨文演讲。特朗普曾警告称，此次国情咨文可能再次冗长不堪。
这位前中央情报局官员从不使用口号或吸引人的承诺，曾在接受美国有线电视新闻网（CNN）采访时将自己描述为“乐观而充满理想主义的务实主义者”。她拒绝支持南希·佩洛西担任议长，并曾反驳前总统乔·拜登的总体经济推动计划，称没有人选他来试图成为新的富兰克林·罗斯福。
斯潘伯格将在威廉斯堡殖民地现场发表演讲。一位助手表示，她选择这个地点——现在是学校团体喜爱的实地体验殖民时代重演的热门地点——是因为1776年弗吉尼亚州正是从这里派出代表团参加大陆会议，提议独立，不到一个月后，又通过了《弗吉尼亚权利宣言》。
助手补充说，斯潘伯格的演讲将围绕以下主题展开：经济可负担性、特朗普政府和国会共和党人未能更多地抵制总统所造成的“混乱”，以及她将引用自己在中情局的经验，指出政府正在全球范围内造成危险的不确定性。
在应对又一场大风暴的同时，斯潘伯格还在处理大量祝贺和建议的电话与短信。她和高级助手们一直在撰写和排练这场他们深知极具挑战性的演讲。
她不仅要立即反驳一位常常即兴发挥的总统，还要以此作为其政党中期选举活动的开端。她需要成为一个在立场和目标上仍存在巨大分歧的政党的统一声音。
杰弗里斯在宣布选中她时称斯潘伯格是“唐纳德·特朗普的鲜明对比”。
斯潘伯格倾向于谈论弗吉尼亚州选民的感受——该州在2024年投票支持卡玛拉·哈里斯，但优势远低于预期——以及他们如何看待特朗普的第二个任期。
“我对他这个人没有好感，但这是他做出的选择。这些选择得到了其他人的支持或纵容，无论他们是来自弗吉尼亚州，还是来自其他州的参议员和众议员，”去年选举日之前，她在竞选巴士上接受美国有线电视新闻网采访时表示。当时她以超过15个百分点的优势获胜。
她说，民主党人的回应不应继续困惑地询问人们为何会投票给特朗普，而应具体指出他的议程实际带来的影响。
“答案是：他欺骗了他们。他欺骗了弗吉尼亚州的农民。弗吉尼亚州的农民正在挣扎，而他们却看到他在救助阿根廷？”她在特朗普政府向阿根廷经济提供200亿美元救助后不久说道。“按照很多州的标准，我们这里有规模较小的家庭养牛场。他们需要的是本地化加工，而不是更多垄断性的肉类加工行业，以及他们所产产品的市场。而他却要让美国市场充斥阿根廷牛肉？这是对他们的侮辱。在我们的大豆种植者在2017年失去中国市场之前，情况就已经如此糟糕了。
“有太多人觉得，‘是的，这不是你承诺的’，”她说。
斯潘伯格花了两年时间准备竞选州长，但即便如此，她上任的第一个月也比任何人想象的都要紧张。
1月中旬，在今年第一场冬季风暴来临前几天宣誓就职时，这位民主党人立即遭到了一场抹黑运动，被塑造成一个极左的“白女巫”，部分原因是她在就职典礼上穿着的全白色服饰让人联想到女权运动者，还有一部分原因是将她与州议会其他议员提出的各种法案联系起来。
尽管斯潘伯格一直强调自己是一位获得大量共和党人支持的温和派，但特朗普的第一任白宫新闻秘书肖恩·斯派塞上周在X平台（原推特）上称她的任命是“一份礼物”。
“再也没有比斯潘伯格更能摧毁一个州的例子了，”他写道，尽管她上任才一个月。“如果选择（纽约市市长佐伦·曼达尼）会更好。”
除了准备演讲，斯潘伯格还在制定紧缩的州预算。她正在改革一系列由共和党前任州长格伦·杨金留下的任命和决策。她还在推动一项民主党重新划分选区的计划，这可能会淘汰该州目前由共和党人占据的几个众议院席位。
斯潘伯格已经采取了几项强硬举措，首先是要求弗吉尼亚大学和乔治梅森大学董事会的几名杨金任命者辞职，然后提名了自己的一批任命者，他们将组成管理这两所机构的多数派。
她的大部分立法议程仍在制定中，但就在周五晚上，她签署了一项法律，正式定于4月21日举行特别选举，让弗吉尼亚州选民投票决定是否采用新的选区划分方案，这可能让民主党有机会赢得该州11个众议院席位中的10个。
在当地法官应共和党人要求颁布禁令后，弗吉尼亚州最高法院预计将最终决定是否允许公投继续进行。
但在接下来的几个小时里，斯潘伯格正精心准备如何在演讲中传递全国性的关切，并确保自己不会重蹈阿拉巴马州参议员凯蒂·布里特、如今的国务卿马科·卢比奥曾被批评抢水喝，或是2018年民主党回应者、前众议员乔·肯尼迪的覆辙——当时他的精彩演讲被过度涂抹润唇膏而显得“流口水獠牙”的形象所掩盖。
What to expect from Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger’s State of the Union response
PUBLISHED Feb 24, 2026, 4:00 AM ET
[Abigail Spanberger] is less known for her oratory than for drilling down into the work of government and bucking her party leadership.
On Tuesday night, she has one of the riskier speeches in politics to figure her way through.
The 46-year-old Virginia governor, the first female chief executive of her state, was House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’ pick to rebut a State of the Union address Tuesday that President Donald Trump warned would likely again be very long.
The onetime CIA officer doesn’t talk in slogans or catchy promises, once instead describing herself to CNN in an interview as “an optimistic, starry-eyed pragmatist.” She refused to support Nancy Pelosi for speaker and once pushed back on former President Joe Biden’s overarching economic push by saying no one had elected him to try to be a new Franklin Roosevelt.
Spanberger will deliver the speech live from Colonial Williamsburg, with an aide saying that she picked the spot – now a favorite for school groups to enjoy live re-enactments of colonial times – because it was from there in 1776 that Virginia sent its delegation to the Continental Congress to propose independence, and less than a month later, adopted the Virginia Declaration of Rights.
The aide added that Spanberger’s address will hit on themes of affordability, the “chaos” caused by the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress not standing up more to the president. She’ll also talk about how some citizens are pushing back, and, calling on her experience in the CIA, argue the administration is causing dangerous uncertainty around the world.
Between directing the response to yet another big storm and fielding calls and texts of congratulations and advice, Spanberger and top aides have been writing and rehearsing what they know will be a tricky task.
Not only will she have to immediately rebut a president who often goes off script, but she’ll be doing it as the kickoff to her party’s midterm campaign, trying to be the unified voice of a party that remains very much divided over what it stands for and what it wants to be.
In announcing her selection, Jeffries called Spanberger a “stark contrast to Donald Trump.”
Spanberger tends to talk in terms of how people in her state, which voted for Kamala Harris in 2024 but by a much slimmer margin than expected, are processing Trump’s second term.
“I have no positive feelings about him as a human, but it’s the choices he’s making. And those are choices that he’s helped along with by others who are supporting him or who aren’t standing up to him, whether they’re here in Virginia or they’re senators and Congress people from other states,” she told CNN in an interview last year on her campaign bus just before election day, where she went on to score an over 15-point win.
Democrats’ answer, she said then, shouldn’t be about continuing to ask in bewilderment how people could vote for Trump, but citing specifics of what his agenda has actually meant.
“The answer is: He lied to them. He lied to Virginia farmers. Virginia farmers are struggling and they’re watching him bail out Argentina?” she said, speaking shortly after the Trump administration offered a $20 billion lifeline to the Argentine economy. “We have small, by a lot of state standards, family cattle farms. What they need is localized processing. They need to not have more of a monopolistic meatpacking industry and they need markets for what they’re producing. And he’s going to flood the US market with Argentinian beef? It’s a slap in the face. And this is after our soybean growers have lost China as a market and mostly lost it back in 2017.
“There are so many people that it’s like, ‘Yeah, this is not what you voted for,’” she said.
Spanberger spent two years gearing up to be governor, but even so, her first month on the job has been more intense than anyone would have imagined.
Sworn in in mid-January days before the first big winter storm of the year, the Democrat was also immediately deluged by an online effort to make her out as a far-left “white witch,” in part because of the all-white suffragette-nodding outfit she wore at her inauguration, and in part because of tagging her to a variety of bills introduced by others in the state legislature.
Though Spanberger has made a point to talk about herself as a moderate who won with significant Republican support, Sean Spicer, Trump’s first White House press secretary, called Spanberger’s selection “a gift” in a post last week on X.
“There is no better example of how to destroy a state than Spanberger,” he wrote, though she has only been on the job a month. “It would have been better to pick (New York City Mayor Zohran) Mamdani.”
Aside from speech preparation, Spanberger has been putting together a tightened state budget. She’s been revamping a range of appointments and decisions left by her Republican predecessor, Glenn Youngkin. She’s also been helping steer a Democratic gerrymandering effort likely to eliminate several of the state’s currently Republican-held seats in the House of Representatives.
Spanberger has already made several hard moves, starting off with asking for the resignations of several Youngkin appointees to the boards of the University of Virginia and George Mason University and then nominating a slate of her own appointees who would then make up the majorities governing both institutions.
Most of her legislative agenda is still taking shape, but just on Friday evening, she signed a law which formally set a special election on April 21 for Virginians to vote on whether to institute newly gerrymandered maps that could give Democrats a chance at winning 10 of the state’s 11 US House districts.
The Supreme Court of Virginia is expected to eventually decide whether to let the referendum go forward after a local judge issued an injunction sought by Republicans.
But for the next few hours, Spanberger is gaming out how to achieve a national sensibility for her speech and make sure she doesn’t fall victim to the kind of criticism faced by Alabama Sen. Katie Britt, the viral grab for water by now-Secretary of State Marco Rubio, or then-Rep. Joe Kennedy’s 2018 response, when his own big address for Democrats was overshadowed by an over-application of lip balm that left him looking like he had “drool fangs.”
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