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Real estate investors are buying up long-term care facilities. Residents can suffer

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Real estate investors are buying up long-term care facilities. Residents can suffer

Leslie Adams holds a photo of his mother, Shirley, who died after developing infected bedsores at a rehabilitation center, according to a lawsuit he filed. A court awarded the family $17 million, but they are still trying to collect it.

Taylor Glascock for KFF Health News


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By the time she was hospitalized in 2020, Pearlene Darby, a retired teacher, had suffered open sores on both legs, both hips, and both heels, as well as a five-inch-long gash on her tailbone. She died two weeks later at age 81 from infections and bedsores, according to her death certificate. Her daughter sued the nursing home, alleging it had left Darby sitting in her own feces and urine time and again.

The lawsuit, settled on confidential terms last year, blamed not only the managers of City Creek Post-Acute and Assisted Living but also the building’s owner, a real estate investment trust, or REIT. In the year Darby died, City Creek paid CareTrust REIT more than $1 million in rent, while the Sacramento, California, nursing home ran a deficit, court records show.

Federal tax rules ban REITs from running health care facilities, but CareTrust was not an absentee landlord either, according to internal records filed in the case. It chose the nursing home’s management company and required through the lease that the home keep at least 80% of beds occupied. CareTrust granularly tracked how well the home kept to its financial plan, down to the money spent monthly on nurses and food, the records said. And the documents showed that the real estate company kept tabs on government safety inspection findings and Medicare quality ratings.

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Both CareTrust and the nursing home operator denied liability for Darby’s death. CareTrust officials said in court papers that it is not involved in day-to-day nursing home decisions or patient care, and that it monitors facilities to ensure nothing jeopardizes rent payments.

In a written statement, CareTrust Corporate Counsel Joseph Layne told KFF Health News: “We are the property owners, not the operators.”

Pearlene Darby is shown in a family photo with her grandson Caleb Darby. She has a big smile and they are both doing a dance move, with an outstretched arm.

Pearlene Darby, pictured here with her grandson Caleb Darby, was a resident of a Sacramento, California, nursing home. She died two weeks after being hospitalized for bedsores and an infection. The home denied liability and the case was settled out of court.

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Shirlene Darby

Landlords with influence

Over the past decade, real estate investment trusts have bought thousands of buildings that house nursing homes, hospitals, assisted living facilities, and medical offices. A KFF Health News examination of court filings and corporate records shows that these landlords have more influence than the health care facilities publicly acknowledge.

The documents reveal REITs often select the management who oversee the operations and leave them in place even when they are aware of threadbare staffing, floundering governance, repeated safety violations, or other problems that hamper quality of care. A California jury in March awarded $92 million in punitive damages against a former REIT over the death of a 100-year-old resident with dementia who froze to death outside her assisted living facility.

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“The REITs are in charge,” said Laraclay Parker, one of the lawyers who represent Darby’s daughter.

Absence of oversight

Despite their ubiquity, REITs remain invisible to state and federal health regulators. Hospitals and nursing homes are not required to disclose rent payments or landlord identities in the annual reports they submit to Medicare.

Under President Donald Trump, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services indefinitely suspended a Biden-era requirement that nursing homes disclose REIT involvement. Catherine Howden, a CMS spokesperson, said in a statement that the agency does not regulate facilities based on their tax status or corporate form and instead focuses on the quality of the care they provide.

REITs now own a fifth of the nation’s senior housing, which includes assisted living, memory care, and independent living, according to an industry analysis. REITs also hold investments in 1 in 6 nursing homes. Publicly traded REITs that focus on health care are now worth nearly a quarter of a trillion dollars, according to Nareit, an industry association.

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While one research study found REIT investments were associated with higher spending on nursing wages, another concluded that after being bought by REITs, nursing homes frequently replaced registered nurses with less skilled nurses and aides. A third analysis concluded that health inspection results were worse after REIT investment.

Researchers also found that investor-owned hospital chains that sold buildings to REITs were more likely to close or go bankrupt, as happened in 2024 with Steward Health Care. Often, private equity investors kept the sale proceeds as profits while the hospitals were burdened with new rent costs. “There were no improvements in clinical outcomes,” said Thomas Tsai, an associate professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

REITs are required to distribute most of their income and don’t have to pay the 21% federal corporate income tax on it. There is a catch: A REIT that “directly or indirectly operates or manages” a health care facility loses the tax break for five years. Typically, a REIT leases the property to another company that runs the nursing home or assisted living facility and maintains its tax break. Nareit said health care REITs distributed more than $7 billion in dividends in 2024.

Michael Stroyeck, head of health care analysis at Green Street, a real estate research company, said “there’s definitely a symbiotic relationship” between REITs and facility managers because they have the same goals. He said he has seen REITs replace operators that are having difficulties or go bankrupt.

John Kane, a senior vice president at the American Health Care Association and the National Center for Assisted Living, an industry group that represents nursing homes, said in a statement: “Given government funding often falls short, REITs have been valuable partners in helping to invest in long term care without influencing daily operations.”

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Low staffing at a chain

Strawberry Fields REIT, which like CareTrust trades on the New York Stock Exchange, owns or controls the buildings of 131 nursing home facilities. The nursing home operations inside 66 of those facilities are owned by Moishe Gubin, Strawberry Fields’ chief executive, and Michael Blisko, one of its directors, according to Strawberry Fields’ annual report for last year.

Gubin and Blisko also jointly own Infinity Healthcare Management, which manages their nursing homes; Blisko is Infinity’s CEO. On average, Infinity-affiliated nursing homes provided an hour and a quarter less nursing care per resident per day than the national average of four hours, a KFF Health News analysis of federal records found.

Infinity and several of its nursing homes have recently settled 30 death and injury lawsuits in Cook County, Illinois, totaling more than $4 million, said Margaret Battersby Black, a Chicago lawyer. A jury last year awarded $12 million in a lawsuit brought against Infinity and one of its Chicago nursing homes over the 2023 death of Shirley Adams. A retired candy factory worker, Adams died after developing infected bedsores at Lakeview Rehabilitation and Nursing Center, according to the lawsuit.

“She had wounds that no one could explain,” one of her adult children, Leslie Adams, testified at trial. Medicare gives Lakeview its lowest quality rating, one star out of five.

Leslie Adams is shown sitting on a staircase outside a brick building.

Leslie Adams lost his mother, Shirley, who died after developing infected bedsores at Lakeview Rehabilitation and Nursing Center, according to a lawsuit he filed. “She had wounds that no one could explain,” he testified. (Taylor Glascock for KFF Health News)

Taylor Glascock for KFF Health News

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Paul Connery, a lawyer for Adams’ family, said they are still trying to collect on the judgment against the nursing home and management company, which now totals $17 million with interest and attorney fees.

“If I get caught speeding and I went to court, they issue me a ticket and I’ve got a fine to pay,” Adams said in an interview. “How are they able to still continue to move on with business like nothing has happened?”

In a phone interview and an email, Gubin said Strawberry Fields, Infinity, and the nursing homes are all legally distinct and that he has not played an active role in Infinity in more than a decade. He said nursing homes get sued all the time but that the verdict against Lakeview is so large that it will force the home to declare bankruptcy or shut down.

A multistory brick building on a city street is show. Two bare trees are visible. The word "Lakeview" appears on an awning, and a large sign says, "Thank you, Staff."

The owners and operators of Lakeview Rehabilitation and Nursing Center in Chicago also are directors of the real estate investment trust that owns the building, a securities filing shows.

Taylor Glascock for KFF Health News


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“The whole thing is unfortunate,” Gubin said by phone. “For 15 years they were a perfectly good guardian” and “a well-run building,” he said. “You wouldn’t think it was fair to be judged on your worst day.”

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Blisko and an Infinity lawyer did not respond to requests for comment.

Strawberry Fields, which owns 10 assisted living facilities and two long-term care hospitals in addition to the nursing homes, earned net income last year of $33 million from $155 million in rent, a 21% profit margin, securities filings show. Gubin said those weren’t excessive returns.

A $110 million verdict

Traditionally, REIT leases make the operating companies responsible for paying property taxes, insurance premiums, and maintenance costs. In 2008, Congress gave health care REITs a new option to make money: On top of collecting rents, they could set up subsidiaries and take profits directly from health care businesses. They still must have independent management overseeing care decisions. Many REITs have embraced the role even though the subsidiaries must pay corporate taxes and risk losing money if the businesses do poorly.

Colony Capital was a REIT that through layers of shell corporations owned both the building and the operation of Greenhaven Estates, a Sacramento assisted living and memory care facility. In 2018 Greenhaven paid Colony $1.4 million in rent, nearly a third of its $4.5 million in revenue that year, according to financial records filed in court.

Greenhaven also was on the verge of losing its license, according to a revocation notice filed in November 2018 by the California Department of Social Services. Greenhaven had racked up years of health violations, including from letting untrained workers administer medications, lacking enough employees to care for people with dementia, and neglecting a resident who smeared feces over his body, bed, floor, and bathroom, the notice said.

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In February 2019, a few weeks after celebrating her 100th birthday, Mildred Hernandez, a resident with Alzheimer’s, wandered out of Greenhaven in the middle of the night. Her assisted living wing had no exit door alarms even though it housed several residents with dementia, court records showed. Berta Lepe, one of Greenhaven’s caregivers, found Hernandez under a bush, wearing only a shirt and underwear. The temperature was in the 30s.

Mildred Hernandez is pictured in a midrange photograph. She is smiling broadly and has curly gray hair.

Mildred Hernandez was 100 when she died of hypothermia after wandering out of her assisted living facility in the middle of the night. A jury awarded $92 million in punitive damages against the owner of the home.

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“She was talking, but I couldn’t understand what she was saying,” Lepe testified at trial over a lawsuit from Hernandez’s family. Hernandez died of hypothermia a few hours later, according to her death certificate.
Frontier Management, the company that Colony had hired to manage Greenhaven, denied liability and settled the lawsuit on undisclosed terms.

Since the lawsuit, Colony has changed its name to DigitalBridge, which no longer owns Greenhaven and gave up its REIT status. At trial earlier this year, DigitalBridge said resident care was the responsibility of Frontier and that Colony “encouraged” Frontier to address problems. Richard Welch, a former Colony executive, testified that replacing management is disruptive. “I viewed it as a last resort,” he said.

In March, a jury awarded Hernandez’s family a total of $110 million: $10 million in compensatory damages, $92 million in punitive damages against DigitalBridge, and $8 million in punitive damages against Formation Capital, an asset management company.

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“REIT money is very detached from knowing about or caring about patient or resident outcomes, because it’s not in their business model,” Ed Dudensing, a lawyer for the family, said in an interview. “Their allegiance is to their investors.”

DigitalBridge has asked the judge to delay finalizing the judgment while its legal challenges to the lawsuit and the verdict are evaluated. A DigitalBridge attorney and a corporate spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment, a Formation attorney declined comment, and a Frontier attorney and a spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.

‘Wet from head to toe’

When CareTrust bought City Creek Post-Acute and Assisted Living in 2019, the Sacramento nursing home where Pearlene Darby lived had a one-star Medicare rating and was losing money. CareTrust leased the building to a management company called Kalesta Healthcare Group based on the business plan Kalesta submitted.

While CareTrust was not the operator, it held periodic phone calls with Kalesta, which provided “a full update of what’s happening at the facility,” including changes in leadership, financial progress, and health inspection survey results, according to deposition testimony by Ryan Williams, a Kalesta co-founder.

According to a state inspection report, in 2020, the year Darby died, City Creek left a resident in soiled linens “wet from head to toe lying in bed” for more than eight hours. During a different visit, a health inspector cited the home after watching a nurse put a dirty diaper back onto a resident after caring for a wound. “It was just a small stool and it is far from where the wound is,” the nurse told the inspector, according to the report.

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James Callister, CareTrust’s chief investment officer, said in his deposition that CareTrust officials “review results of regulatory surveys provided to us by the tenant. We review the five-star rating.” He said, “We evaluate results of care, but we do not evaluate types of care given or how or when, no.”

Darby had been living in City Creek since 2011 after a stroke left her in a wheelchair. She needed help getting in and out of bed. From September through November 2020, Darby lost 30 pounds, her family’s lawsuit alleged. During those months, employees dropped her three times as one worker rather than the required two operated the mechanical lift, the lawsuit said.

The suit alleged City Creek failed to reposition her every two hours in bed or her wheelchair, which is the clinical standard for people at risk of bedsores, and to promptly order devices to protect her skin.

In November, the nursing home sent Darby to the hospital. A blood test found bacteria had entered her bloodstream from her feces’ touching open skin wounds, according to the lawsuit. The hospital diagnosed her with sepsis. A surgeon said she needed an operation to redirect fecal waste from her intestines but concluded she wasn’t medically stable enough for surgery, the suit said.

Darby began receiving comfort care measures and was sent back to City Creek. She died two weeks later. In court filings, CareTrust and Kalesta denied the allegations.

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In a phone interview, Williams, the Kalesta co-founder, said Darby’s death occurred during the most challenging point of the covid pandemic, when California rules required any nurses testing positive for the virus to be sent home and nurses were quitting out of fear for their health. “It was the most herculean of professional efforts to secure enough staff,” he said.
While expressing sympathy for Darby and her family, he said it was “unconscionable” that personal injury lawyers sued nursing homes over care failures during “the worst of times.”

In court, CareTrust petitioned Judge Richard Miadich to dismiss it from the lawsuit before trial. “This case does not concern a property condition,” CareTrust’s lawyers wrote. “CareTrust is simply a landlord.” But the judge ruled last year a jury should decide whether CareTrust “exercised actual control over City Creek.”

The case was settled out of court a few months later. All parties declined to reveal the settlement terms.

A 67% Profit

As recently as November 2023 — four years after its acquisition — City Creek earned one star from Medicare. It was cited for failing to have the minimum nursing home staffing required by California law during five of 24 randomly selected days in 2022, according to an inspection report. Williams said in the interview that Kalesta had increased spending on nursing over the course of its ownership, including boosting wages, but that it takes a year or two to turn around a troubled nursing home. He said the home’s star rating in 2023 was dragged down by its poor inspection history from before Kalesta took over.

City Creek’s rating has climbed in the past two years, and it now has the top overall rating of five, according to Medicare. Medicare rates City Creek’s current staffing levels as average. That’s better than most nursing homes in more than 200 buildings CareTrust bought before 2025, according to a KFF Health News analysis of federal data. On average, CareTrust nursing homes provided a half hour less nursing care per resident per day than the national average of four hours.

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In its statement to KFF Health News, CareTrust’s counsel Layne said the REIT worked to “identify quality operators as tenants,” and that the homes the REIT rents out have more nurses and aides than the minimum required for nursing homes by their state governments. “The operators are licensed by state regulators and retain sole responsibility for operations,” the statement said.

CareTrust, which now owns more than 500 senior housing and nursing home buildings, reported net income last year of $320 million from $476 million in rents and other revenue — a 67% profit margin. As one point of comparison, HCA Healthcare, one of the nation’s largest for-profit hospital and health care chains, reported a 10% profit margin for last year.  

Lesley Ann Clement, one of Darby’s lawyers, said cases like hers show the nursing home industry is wrong to complain it lacks financial resources for more staffing.

“There’s plenty of money,” Clement said. “They’re just not spending it on patient care.”

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.

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Here’s What the New Virginia House Map Looks Like

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Here’s What the New Virginia House Map Looks Like

Virginians approved a new congressional map on Tuesday that would aggressively gerrymander the state in the Democrats’ favor, giving the party as many as four more U.S. House seats.

The new map draws eight safely Democratic districts and two competitive districts that lean Democratic, according to a New York Times analysis of 2024 presidential results. It leaves just one safe Republican seat, compared with the five seats the G.O.P. holds on the current map.

The proposed map was drawn by Democratic state legislators and approved by Gov. Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat. It eliminates three Republican-held seats in part by slicing the densely populated suburbs in Arlington and Fairfax Counties and reallocating their overwhelmingly Democratic voters into five congressional districts, some stretching more than a hundred miles into Republican areas.

Perhaps the most extreme new district is the Seventh, which begins at the Potomac River and stretches to the west and south in a manner that resembles a pair of lobster claws. Several well-known Virginia Democrats have already announced their candidacies and begun campaigning in the district.

Reid J. Epstein contributed reporting.

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Southern Poverty Law Center indicted on federal fraud charges

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Southern Poverty Law Center indicted on federal fraud charges

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche speaks as FBI Director Kash Patel listens during a news conference at the Justice Department on Tuesday in Washington.

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WASHINGTON — The Southern Poverty Law Center was indicted Tuesday on federal fraud charges alleging it improperly raised millions of dollars to pay informants to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan and other extremist groups, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said.

The Justice Department alleges the civil rights group defrauded donors by using their money to fund the very extremism it claimed to be fighting, with payments of at least $3 million between 2014 and 2023 to people affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan, the United Klans of America, the National Socialist Party of America and other extremist groups.

“The SPLC was not dismantling these groups. It was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred,” Blanche said.

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The civil rights group faces charges including wire fraud, bank fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering in the case brought by the Justice Department in Alabama, where the organization is based.

The indictment came shortly after SPLC revealed the existence of a criminal investigation into its program to pay informants to infiltrate extremist groups and gather information on their activities. The group said the program was used to monitor threats of violence and the information was often shared with local and federal law enforcement.

SPLC CEO Bryan Fair said the organization “will vigorously defend ourselves, our staff, and our work.”

Blanche said the money was passed from the center through two different bank accounts before being loaded onto prepaid cards to give to the members of the extremist groups, which also included the National Socialist Movement and the Aryan Nations-affiliated Sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club. The group never disclosed to donors details of the informant program, he said.

“They’re required to under the laws associated with a nonprofit to have certain transparency and honesty in what they’re telling donors they’re going to spend money on and what their mission statement is and what they’re raising money doing,” he said.

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The indictment includes details on at least nine unnamed informants were paid by the SPLC through a secret program that prosecutors say began in the 1980s. Within the SPLC, they were known as field sources or “the Fs,” according to the indictment. One informant was paid more than $1 million between 2014 and 2023 while affiliated with the neo-Nazi National Alliance, the indictment said. Another was the Imperial Wizard of the United Klans of America.

The SPLC said the program was kept quiet to protect the safety of informants.

“When we began working with informants, we were living in the shadow of the height of the Civil Rights Movement, which had seen bombings at churches, state-sponsored violence against demonstrators, and the murders of activists that went unanswered by the justice system,” Fair said. “There is no question that what we learned from informants saved lives.”

The center has been targeted by Republicans

The SPLC, which is based in Montgomery, Alabama, was founded in 1971 and used civil litigation to fight white supremacist groups. The nonprofit has become a popular target among Republicans who see it as overly leftist and partisan.

The investigation could add to concerns that Trump’s Republican administration is using the Justice Department to go after conservative opponents and his critics. It follows a number of other investigations into Trump foes that have raised questions about whether the law enforcement agency has been turned into a political weapon.

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The SPLC has faced intense criticism from conservatives, who have accused it of unfairly maligning right-wing organizations as extremist groups because of their viewpoints. The center regularly condemns Trump’s rhetoric and policies around voting rights, immigration and other issues.

The center came under fresh scrutiny after the assassination last year of conservative activist Charlie Kirk brought renewed attention to its characterization of the group that Kirk founded and led. The center included a section on that group, Turning Point USA, in a report titled “The Year in Hate and Extremism 2024” that described the group as “A Case Study of the Hard Right in 2024.”

FBI Director Kash Patel said last year that the agency was severing its relationship with the center, which had long provided law enforcement with research on hate crime and domestic extremism. Patel said the center had been turned into a “partisan smear machine,” and he accused it of defaming “mainstream Americans” with its “hate map” that documents alleged anti-government and hate groups inside the United States.

House Republicans hosted a hearing centered on the SPLC in December, saying it coordinated efforts with President Joe Biden’s Democratic administration “to target Christian and conservative Americans and deprive them of their constitutional rights to free speech and free association.”

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Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger Stressed Pragmatism, But Politics Hound Her

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Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger Stressed Pragmatism, But Politics Hound Her

On the night of her resounding win in last fall’s election for Virginia governor, Abigail Spanberger told her supporters that they had sent a message to the world. “Virginia,” she said in the opening lines of her victory speech, “chose pragmatism over partisanship.”

But even then it was clear that the first big issue of her term would be as partisan as it gets: a proposed amendment by her fellow Democrats to allow them to gerrymander the state’s 11 congressional districts.

The push to redraw the Virginia map was another salvo in a barrage of redistricting spurred by President Trump in a bid to keep Republicans in control of the House in this year’s midterm elections.

Virginians vote on Tuesday on whether to adopt the proposed map, and if the “Yes” vote wins, Democrats could end up with as many as 10 seats, up from the six they hold now. The redistricting battles of the last year would end up in something of a draw, with gains for Democrats in California and Virginia offsetting gains for Republicans in Texas, Missouri and North Carolina — unless Florida lawmakers decide in the coming weeks to draw a new, more Republican-friendly map.

Historically, redrawing of congressional maps has been done each decade after the U.S. census. But with Republicans holding such a slim majority in the House, Mr. Trump began by pressing Texas to redraw its maps, touching off the wave of gerrymandering

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Virginia Democratic legislators rolled out their redistricting plan last October, setting in motion the state’s lengthy amendment process just as the campaign for governor was entering its final weeks. At the time, Ms. Spanberger expressed support for the plan, though she emphasized that its passage was up to the legislature and then to the voters.

But even if her formal role in the process was relatively minor — Ms. Spanberger signed the bill setting the date for the referendum — the politics of the effort has loomed over the first few months of her term. Her support for the amendment has drawn accusations of hypocrisy from the right and complaints from some on the left that she has not been outspoken enough in her advocacy.

“There’s always going to be somebody who wants me to do something differently,” the governor said in an interview on Saturday at a rally in support of the amendment outside a home in Northern Virginia. “I will always make someone unhappy, and I will always make someone happy.”

Ms. Spanberger, a former C.I.A. officer and three-term congresswoman, won a 15-point victory in 2025 after running on a campaign focused on pocketbook issues. Centrism has been her political brand since she was first elected to the House in 2018, flipping a district that had long leaned to the right.

Now Republicans campaigning against the amendment have made Ms. Spanberger a prime target, deriding her as “Governor Bait-and-Switch” and highlighting an interview in August 2025 in which she said she had “no plans to redistrict Virginia.”

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“This was the perfect opportunity for her to show that she is the middle-of-the-road suburban mom that she portrayed herself as,” said Glen Sturtevant, a Republican state senator. He dismissed the notion that this was an effort that had been thrust upon her, pointing out that she had signed the bill setting the date for the referendum. “She is certainly an active participant in this whole process,” he said.

Republicans have eagerly highlighted recent polls suggesting that Ms. Spanberger’s honeymoon is over, though because governors in Virginia cannot serve two consecutive terms, public approval is less of a pressure point than it might be elsewhere. Some of her political adversaries have tied the drop in her ratings to her involvement in the campaign for the amendment.

But a number of factors are at play in those sagging poll numbers. Some on the right are irked by her support of standard Democratic priorities like gun control measures and limits to cooperation with federal immigration agents.

But some of the most vociferous criticism of her from Republicans, up to and including the president, has been for a host of proposed taxes and tax hikes in the legislature — on everything from dog grooming to dry cleaning — that she in fact had nothing do with. Most of those taxes, which were floated by various lawmakers, never even came up for a vote.

But Ms. Spanberger did not publicly hit back against these attacks until recent days, a delay that some Democrats say was costly.

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“She let other people define her,” said Scott Surovell, the State Senate majority leader.

Mr. Surovell’s frustration echoed a growing discontent among Democrats about the governor’s recent moves. For all the Republican criticism of her, some operatives and lawmakers said, Ms. Spanberger has not been aggressive enough in pushing for Democratic priorities, redistricting among them.

This criticism broke out into the open in recent days, after the governor made scores of amendments to bills that had passed the General Assembly. Some lawmakers and Democratic allies accused her of unexpectedly diluting long-sought goals like expanded public sector unions and a legal retail marketplace for cannabis.

“Our party base is looking for us to stand up and fight and advocate and deliver,” said Mr. Surovell, who represents a solidly Democratic district in Northern Virginia. “It’s hard to deliver when you’re standing in the middle of the road.”

In the interview, Ms. Spanberger insisted that she supported the purpose of many of the bills but had to make amendments to ensure that her administration could implement them.

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And she said she had been explicit in her support of the redistricting effort, appearing in statewide TV ads encouraging people to vote “Yes” even as an anti-amendment campaign has sent out mailers suggesting that the governor opposes the effort.

But she said she had never been in a position to barnstorm the state as Gov. Gavin Newsom did in the months leading up to the redistricting referendum that passed in California. Mr. Newsom is a second-term governor in a much bluer state, she said, while she only recently took office and has been “in the crush of their legislative session,” with hundreds of bills to read and examine in a short period.

“Those who may not be focused on the governing and only on the politics, they’re going to want me to do politics 100 percent of the time,” she said. “And for people who care about the governing and not the politics, they’re going to want me to do governing 100 percent of the time.”

Her preference, as she has often made apparent, is for the governing over the politicking. But she acknowledged that it is all part of the job.

Asked if she lamented that the highest-profile issue of her term so far was such a polarizing matter, rather than the cost-of-living policies she emphasized on the campaign trail, she said: “Any person in elected office wants to talk about the thing they want to talk about all the time, and that’s it. So I won’t say ‘No’ to that question.”

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