Spanberger inaugural team: People who wrote big checks to get her ear

The Abigail Spanberger transition team announced the leadership team of the governor-elect’s inaugural committee on Thursday.

A lot of people with a lot of money there.

I don’t see any names of anybody who looks like an average Virginian.

Sorry to harp on this, but this just reinforces the notion that politics is for the elites.

I mean, yeah, obviously it is, but we could at least pretend.

At the top of the list, the chair of the inaugural committee is a well-connected Richmond lawyer.

The honorary co-chairs have their names on the $80 million UVA Football operations center.

The campaign money provided by this group is gobsmacking.

• The honorary co-chairs, Robert Hardie and Molly Hardie, gave the Spanberger campaign $450,674.
• Mehul Sanghani, a Northern Virginia tech guy, and his wife, Hema Sanghani, who chairs the family foundation: $140,000.
• Jan Brandt, a former vice chair and chief marketing officer at AOL: $60,000.
• Jeffrey Breit, a Virginia Beach-based trial lawyer: $39,946.
• Mark Bowles, the chairman of McGuire Woods Consulting: $21,776.
• Gurpreet Sandhu, a Richmond-area restauranteur: $20,000.
• Warren Thompson, a restaurant guy in NOVA: $19,500.
• Pam Royall, a Richmond-based marketing strategist: $15,000.
• Dana Shell Smith, a former ambassador to Qatar: $13,496.
• Kellie Meiman Hock, a NOVA-based business consultant: $3,250.

I’ve only got the chair, C. Evans Poston Jr., the director of federal and state government affairs at Troutman Strategies, down for $2,750.

Troutman Strategies is a subsidiary of Troutman Pepper Locke, which leverages its money with big donations to both sides – in the 2024-2025 cycle, Troutman Pepper Locke wrote big checks to the campaign of House Speaker Don Scott and the Democratic Party of Virginia, and also to Moving Mountains PAC, a pet PAC of Republican Del. Terry Kilgore, and the Jason Miyares AG campaign.

The two names on the list of 15 that didn’t give money: Whitney Holt, who was the finance director for the Spanberger gubernatorial campaign, and had served as finance director for Spanberger’s congressional campaigns previous to that; and Adisa Muse, a lobbyist at Hunton Andrews Kurth, another law firm that gives bags of money to both sides to leverage its sway.

I feel like I need a shower just reading through this stuff.

These are the people who get the governor’s ear.

If you’re lucky, one of her assistants reads one of your emails about something important to you before hitting delete.

Forgive me for thinking that the main thing we did last week was replace one set of elites lording over us for another, if we’ve even done that.