Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-VA), a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) spook, has complained about having to talk to her constituents, according to a recent interview.
“Conversations become very lengthy… We ended up spending 30 minutes inside my constituent’s home,” Spanberger lamented, noting some issues she’s run into while campaigning alongside Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD).
Raskin, one of the chief Trump critics among Congressional Democrats and propagators of the Russia Collusion hoax, has hit the national campaign trail to help boost the electoral prospects of Democrats like Spanberger by energizing the anti-Donald Trump vote in their races. In Spanberger’s case, the Virginia Democrat is foregoing re-election in Congress and instead seeking her party’s nomination for Virginia governor in 2025.
Some have seen Spanberger’s move as a tacit admission that she would be unable to hold her vulnerable House seat in Virginia’s 7th Congressional District. While the district went to President Joe Biden by nearly seven points in 2020, Spanberger’s lack of responsiveness to her constituents and out-of-step liberal voting record on immigration has led to the partisan-lean narrowing. Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R-VA) won the district by five points in 2021.
Spanberger’s background as a CIA officer made her an appealing candidate in 2018 — especially as national Democrats hyped up conspiracies about then-President Donald Trump and Russian collusion in the 2016 election. However, voters across the spectrum have increasingly tuned out the Russia conspiracy theories as real-life concerns regarding unfettered illegal immigration mount. Spanberger has left herself increasingly vulnerable on this issue, most recently voting against the Laken Riley Act.
While Spanberger and Virginia Democrats appear to have recognized her elite and globalist politics made the former CIA spook unpopular among constituents in her Congressional District, it isn’t clear what they think changes regarding her appeal to Virginians at large.
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