Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.) had a stark warning for members of her party in the aftermath of the Democrats’ underwhelming performance in the House of Representatives in 2020.
Less than two days after Democrats failed to gain a single seat prognosticators like Larry Sabato and Stuart Rothenberg said they would, Spanberger told her caucus in a conference call, “If we are classifying Tuesday as a success from a congressional standpoint, we will get [expletive] torn apart in 2022.”
Spanberger highlighted two reasons why Democrats floundered in the House. First, Republicans used the progressive “defund the police” mantra as a cudgel against every Democrat. Next, she pointed out the effects of hearing words like “socialism” on swing voters. By advocating for policies that are popular in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s district, the party undermined its standing elsewhere, even with people who couldn’t hold their nose to vote for Donald Trump.
Those dynamics had serious consequences for Democrats in swing districts from California’s Central Valley to Northeast Iowa.
Ultimately, Spanberger’s warnings went unheeded. Now, she’s back with some hard truths, even as others chalk up Tuesday’s GOP victories to “dog whistle racism.”
Bacon’s Rebellion reports on Spanberger’s comments:
“We were so willing to take seriously a global pandemic, but we’re not willing to say, ‘Yeah, inflation is a problem, and supply chain is a problem, and we don’t have enough workers in our work force,’” said Representative Abigail Spanberger, a Virginia Democrat facing a bruising re-election. “We gloss over that and only like to admit to problems in spaces we dominate.”
More pointedly, Ms. Spanberger said Mr. Biden must not forget that, for many voters, his mandate was quite limited: to remove former President Donald J. Trump from their television screens and to make American life ordinary again.
“Nobody elected him to be F.D.R., they elected him to be normal and stop the chaos,” she said, alluding to the sweeping agenda the president is seeking to enact with the thinnest of legislative majorities.
Spanberger nailed it. The centrist Democrat is rooted in political reality — and constituents in her Republican-leaning district will like what she has to say. Now, let’s see if she can, in the words of Spike Lee, “do the right thing” by voting against the fiscally reckless, pork-laden tax-and-spend monstrosities grinding their way through Congress.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of The Republican Standard.
