early front-runner<\/a> in the race is that Spanberger is so far refusing to allow rage about Trump to dominate the discussion. So when I ask where fighting back against the president ranks among her campaign priorities, Spanberger first talks about the new administration\u2019s negative impact on everything from Virginia research universities to suburban Washington convenience stores to tattoo shops in coastal Hampton Roads. \u201cI am focused on standing up for Virginians, and that means standing up to the Trump administration when their actions are hurting Virginia, Virginia\u2019s economy, our workforce, our people, because that is the job of the governor of Virginia,\u201d she tells me. \u201cMy favorite thing is when the pollsters come back and they\u2019re like, \u2018Wow, people are really talking about the economy.\u2019 I\u2019m like, No shit. Thank you for validating what I\u2019m hearing on the ground.\u201d<\/p>\nSpanberger\u2019s campaign\u2014in a purplish state that has an incumbent Republican governor but went for Kamala Harris<\/strong> last November\u2014is an intriguing test case for a Democratic Party that\u2019s being roiled by arguments over how to rebound. The strongest energy has been on the populist left, with Vermont senator Bernie Sanders<\/strong> and New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez<\/strong> drawing huge crowds for their \u201cFighting Oligarchy\u201d rallies. I tell Spanberger I am not asking her to proclaim a solution for the party as a whole. \u201cEveryone else does!\u201d she says, both brightly and sarcastically. \u201cWe should just take a second and listen to people,\u201d she continues. \u201cWe\u2019re a broad-tent party, and I think we should celebrate that rather than trying to figure out, Okay, who was the most recently successful Democrat? Now everybody do the same thing.\u201d<\/p>\nSpanberger, 45, is tough, funny, and passionately pragmatic, a profile forged by her eclectic background. The daughter of a cop and a nurse, she was born near the Jersey Shore (her mother and aunt went to high school with Bruce Springsteen<\/strong>). As a teenager, she moved to suburban Richmond with her family, eventually graduating from the University of Virginia. Spanberger, a mother of three daughters, later became a CIA case officer, specializing in terrorism and nuclear proliferation.<\/p>\nShe owes her political career, in a sense, to Trump. In 2018, Spanberger was a member of a group of Democratic women who ran for Congress for the first time in reaction to Trump\u2019s original White House win. She served three terms in the House of Representatives, compiling a bipartisan legislative record, twice declining to vote for Nancy Pelosi<\/strong> as Speaker, and occasionally criticizing President Joe Biden.<\/strong><\/p>\nIn November 2023, Spanberger announced she would leave Congress at the end of her term to run for governor in 2025. Mark Rozell,<\/strong> the dean of the school of policy and government at George Mason University, initially expected Spanberger to face a progressive primary challenger looking to \u201cvanquish the opposition.\u201d But no one emerged. \u201cIn statewide elections, Virginia can lurch from one party to the other, so it\u2019s not really clear that running a more firebrand progressive would yield a good result for the Democrats in this state,\u201d Rozell says. Stephanie Taylor,<\/strong> cofounder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee (and a native Virginian), cautions against extrapolating from Spanberger\u2019s middle-of-the-road approach to the national Democratic debate. \u201cShe is working to include progressives and progressive values into her coalition,\u201d Taylor says. \u201cBut I would be careful about reading too much into the race.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Abigail Spanberger talks for nearly three minutes without saying the name Donald Trump. That\u2019s an eternity in Democratic politics these days. The president lives to draw attention to himself, and his cuts to the federal workforce and federal spending are doing significant damage to the state of Virginia, where Spanberger is the Democratic gubernatorial nominee. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":167404,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[645,54,643,644],"class_list":{"0":"post-167403","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrity","8":"tag-democrats","9":"tag-donald-trump","10":"tag-joe-biden","11":"tag-politics"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167403","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=167403"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167403\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/167404"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=167403"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=167403"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=167403"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}