This has gotten lost: Abigail Spanberger won big after vowing to RESCIND Glenn Youngkin's executive order directing local cooperation with ICE and voting AGAINST the anti-immigrant Laken Riley Act. Yet she gained bigly with working class.
New piece laying this out:
Did she make a similar vow about disenfranchisement ?
It’s astonishing to me that Spanberger never posted about this on BlueSky. I contributed time and money to her campaign, but was often bored with her messaging here. I never saw it. I shouldn’t have had to look.
Walk AND chew gum. Adjust the balance per local conditions. Not complicated! And yes, Abigail is absolutely a model for a national strategy.
I would not extrapolate from Abigail Spanberger’s win in Virginia.
Virginia is a unique case, with an economy that has been brutalized by Trump‘s and musk‘s government vandalism.
The effect of positions on issues is overrated. It's the person.
"But we should also see it as something else: an expression of Trump’s growing political weakness on the broader immigration issue." IMHO, tech Bros got to him and told him this. He is weak minded and easily led around by smarter people. (And that is nearly everyone he meets!)
She also has been talking with Unions from the beginning of her run.
Live in Richmond and survived this god awful contest and can tell you no one was talking about this at all…so am not sure why you’re suggesting this was a factor.
It wasn't like her opponent was hitting her on those things. Her opponent went hard on the AG nominee and trans stuff.
Those issues are less salient now with proof of how terrible this all is. The whole national mood on immigration has shifted.
Re the term “working class.” I ride a bus every morning with the working class, and not many of them look like MAGA.
No Democrat should have given him a win like that in his first month.
If you are with Fetterman on a Republican bill you’re probably wrong.
Working class doesn't care much for culture wars if the economy is tanking, and it hits their pockets. Mamdani got the message right - economic equality plus standing up for marginalized communities like immigrants and LGBTQ. Everything all at once. Not one or another.
I think it's hard to draw conclusions when the opponent was Winsome.
But I think what's overlooked is the treatment of Federal Workers and contractors by the regime as a factor for Spanberger's victory. Many Federal Workers and families love in the areas she won...
Talk about Spanberger's Republican opponent.
Her background
B.A., University of Virginia; M.B.A., Purdue University, teacher; postal inspector, United States Postal Service; case officer, Central Intelligence Agency, 2006-2014
suggests that she will gather information and make informed decisions.
That puts her way ahead of most GOP Pols.
Bigots who would never vote for a Dem did not vote for Earl-Sears, a black woman.
No one not directly engaged with Spanberger's campaign knew anything about her outside of "not Republican." It was her campaign to lose.
Leaving Dem light Sen Brian Murphy hates immigrants and wants them violated at the border.
Most People in power (esp oligarchs and oligarchs worshipers) hate regular people and want us to suffer.
Aside from greed this is their primary motivation in life.
Ds automatically take the opposite position as Rs, often unthinkingly. And often, I think Rs know this and set Ds up with positions that confuse the fuck out of non-political people.
Timing is everything. We have had experience with the REAL Trump that we didn't have when the Laken Riley Act was proposed. The purported crime wave has been exposed as bullshit. Why else would ICE be deporting au pairs?
And as soon as she takes office Virginia will be crawling with “jack booted thugs!” sent by big government Republicans to stir up trouble.
talk about overreading. the two contexts are completely different.
You heard it here first, potus someday. She’s closest to what people want.
I think the untold story of working class latino people is that they share workplaces with a lot of working class white people and they are as a result influencing eachother's politics, and it works both ways.
Any other questions on that poll? As a VA resident, I would bet that many of those who voted MAGA in '24 were dissatisfied with DEMs v. really supporting Trump. No doubt that jobs and the economy have taken precedent over immigration but perhaps not the only reason for Spanberger's success.
Not to necessarily discount your assertion, but there is a dissonance:
every governor or mayor says the cops aren’t going to assist ICE but there’s no shortage of local cops lead blocking for their PB brethren, based on video accounts.
Remember when Ruben Gallego preened around over his support for the Laken Riley Act, and pundits treated him as having the magic key to Dems' working class woes?
Well, Spanberger voted against it and erased GOP gains with working class, including among Latinos:
newrepublic.com/article/2030...
