It probably wasn’t Bill Nye’s political punditry that attracted thirteen hundred people to Charlottesville’s hundred-and-thirteen-year-old, flag-and-bunting-clad Jefferson Theatre on the Tuesday evening two weeks before Election Day. The crowd inside had been lined up for hours to hear from Abigail Spanberger, the former congresswoman running for governor, and Pete Buttigieg, her star surrogate for the night. But the Science Guy, who’d got to know Spanberger through discussions on space policy, had the stage first. “I first heard about Abigail Spanberger after she famously explained to some Democratic Party operatives that they have to stop saying odd, strange, weird things,” he informed the audience, which laughed heartily. “Like,” he continued, “ ‘Defund the police.’ ” The laughter thinned a bit, and the smiles of the students arrayed behind him grew tighter. Nye had become a big fan, he explained. “Some may describe her as a moderate. I describe her as someone who is paying attention.”
It was a blunt version of an increasingly popular argument: that Spanberger, who leads her opponent, the Republican lieutenant governor Winsome Earle-Sears, in nearly every poll of the race, often by double digits, may have something to teach her party about the virtues of moderation. Her advocates often speak of her rating as the most bipartisan member of Virginia’s congressional delegation. She likes to talk about her work improving broadband access in rural areas, and is especially proud of having introduced last year’s Social Security Fairness Act, which restored full retirement benefits to as many as three million public servants whose payments had been cut during the Reagan Administration. But she is best known for her stern words for Democrats shortly after she first took office. Spanberger, a forty-six-year-old former C.I.A. officer and a mother of three, had arrived in Washington, in 2019, after flipping a conservative seat comprising Richmond’s suburbs and a rural swath nearby. Capitol Hill coverage almost immediately posed her and a few other freshly elected military and security veterans as foils to the progressive “Squad” newcomers, especially Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. After House Democrats underperformed in 2020, Spanberger spoke up in a private meeting of the caucus to warn her colleagues against the “defund” language. “I’ve heard from colleagues who have said, ‘Oh, it’s the language of the streets, we should respect that,’ ” she said. “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.” Her comments were promptly leaked, and Ocasio-Cortez replied, on Twitter, “You can’t tell Black, Brown, & youth organizers riding in to save us every election to be quiet.” Not long after, Spanberger again drew headlines for her skepticism of Joe Biden’s growing ambitions, arguing, in the Times, “Nobody elected him to be F.D.R., they elected him to be normal and stop the chaos.”
One needn’t be knee-deep in the Democratic Party’s latest bout of soul-searching and blame-throwing to see the contrast with New York’s likely next mayor,