08-08-2025
Spanberger's Playbook Is the Right One for Democrats
Flashback to 2020 and this headline: This Democratic congresswoman just spoke some hard truth to her party. That congresswoman was Virginia's Abigail Spanberger, a former CIA agent and US Postal Service inspector who blamed rhetoric around socialism and defunding the police for her party's underperformance in that year's election.
She is now running for governor of Virginia, a purple state, and her words back then are worth noting for their prescience about the possible costs of her party's progressive branding. '[L]ook at the things that they say about us, that they say about the Democrats, that they say about the way that we talk to people and the way we talk about things,' she said to her colleagues during a House Democratic Caucus call in November 2020, shortly after Election Day. 'Because whether we think it's just an attack ad … doesn't matter, because it works.'
