Democratic Virginia Rep. Abigail Spanberger wins competitive re-election
Democratic Virginia Rep. Abigail Spanberger has won re-election, helping the party maintain its numerical advantage in the lower house of Congress.
The Associated Press called the race on Sunday, giving Spanberger the nod over Republican challenger Nick Freitas.
Spanberger held on in a competitive race in the purple state to help stem the party’s losses in the 2020 slate of elections.
Though the party has again clinched a majority in the House, they have thus far lost seats to the Republicans, with a few more tight races still to be decided.
On an intraparty conference call late last week, Spanberger — a former CIA member considered one of the more moderate House Democrats — pinned the losses on extreme positions regarding socialism and defunding the police, according to CNN.
“The number one concern in things that people brought to me in my [district] that I barely re-won, was defunding the police,” she fumed, according to the outlet.
“And I’ve heard from colleagues who have said ‘Oh, it’s the language of the streets. We should respect that.’ We’re in Congress. We are professionals. We are supposed to talk about things in the way where we mean what we’re talking about. If we don’t mean we should defund the police, we shouldn’t say that.”
Firebrand New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — a self-described democratic socialist also celebrating a re-election win — on Sunday conceded that Republicans succeeded to an extent in weaponizing those positions at the poll.
“I acknowledge first of all the really hard fight that a lot of our swing district members had. It is not to deny that Republicans levied very effective rhetorical attacks against our party,” Ocasio-Cortez said on CNN’s “State of the Union,” hosted by Jake Tapper. “That, I believe, is absolutely true.
“But I think one of the things that’s very important is to realize that very effective Republican attacks are going to happen every cycle,” she continued. “So, the question is, how do we defend ourselves against that?”
She argued that those liberal stances, while sincere, were not the primary focuses of Democratic candidates’ campaigns.
“Not a single member of Congress that I’m aware of campaigned on socialism or defunding the police in this general election,” she said.
“These were largely slogans, or … demands from activist groups that we saw in the largest uprising in American history around police brutality,” she added, referring to unrest following the Memorial Day death of George Floyd in Minnesota.