BLACKSTONE, Va. — Abigail Spanberger chuckled as she stood, in heels, in the middle of a pack of American Guinea hogs on a rural Virginia farm Wednesday. Walking into a muddy enclosure with hogs is likely one of the easier things the former CIA operative has done.
“Who is it that said if you wrestle a pig, you’ll get dirty?” she said.
Just days away from a pivotal election that could send Spanberger to Congress and put Democrats in the House majority, the first-time candidate is trying to resist the natural urge in politics to go negative.
Making her way through the rural communities of Blackstone and Burkeville last week before returning to her daughters for some trick-or-treating, Spanberger told voters that the district they live in is not a Republican stronghold.
“We can win this seat,” Spanberger said to roughly 40 people who joined her for a coffee in a cafe on Blackstone’s Main Street. “We are in interesting times we are in a time where people across our communities are scared and nervous.”
But, Spanberger said, “our district [and] the 5th District, they are winnable seats, people need to know that.”
“If you feel like your the only Democrat walking into your polling place, one, I promise you you’re not, and two, we need all of the votes,” she said.
Speaking to voters in Blackstone, a town that skews heavily red, Spanberger did not directly mention her opponent, incumbent Republican Dave Brat, focusing on healthcare, Social Security, and her CIA service. But the race for Virginia’s 7th Congressional District took a dark turn last month when a Paul Ryan-aligned super PAC flooded the airwaves with ads insinuating Spanberger has ties to terrorists because she taught at a Saudi-Arabian-funded Islamic school attended by two students who later became extremists. The CIA knew about her brief teaching job at the school and subsequently cleared her to become an undercover CIA operative who fought terrorism for eight years.
“There are members of Congress who are so afraid to lose their seats that they’re willing to deal in falsehoods and try to scare people to the polls,” Spanberger said in an interview in between campaign stops. “It’s a sad state of affairs as an American.”
Though the attacks have been denounced by religious leaders and some Republicans, the Congressional Leadership Fund won’t pull them off the air, and Brat supports the ads. But the attempt by Republicans to cast Spanberger as a security “risk,” nursing extremist sympathies, wasn’t on voters minds six days out from the election. Instead, rural residents of the sprawling central Virginia district said they’re scared about their Medicare and Social Security being gutted. And the Republicans who spoke to the Washington Examiner said they considered Spanberger to be a “good” person who is running an effective campaign.
“The man is calling me a terrorist on TV and on the radio. The only reason [the race is] not nasty is because I refuse to go there,” Spanberger said. “He is nasty to me.”
Spanberger and Brat found themselves in the same small town of Blackstone on Halloween. At her morning coffee with voters, Spanberger spent two hours mingling, taking photos and answering questions. Across Main Street in Blackstone’s historic downtown, Brat held a private rally in a pub with supporters.
As the contested race comes to a close, Brat’s final message to voters is “don’t go back to a failed economy.”
“Move forward, let’s keep the momentum growing,” he said Wednesday, asserting Spanberger wants to “increase the size of D.C.”
When asked if Trump should tone down his rhetoric given the recent hate crimes against Jews, black people, and Democrats, Brat avoided the question: “If the press would avoid the horse race and talk about policy, the press doesn’t do us any favors right now when they just follow the horse race and won’t report that my opponent wants a $32 trillion healthcare piece and to double the taxes.” Fact-checkers have disputed Brat’s characterization of Spanberger’s healthcare position.
“Everybody just needs to calm it down and focus on policy, right?” Brat added.
Asked if that applies to his attacks implying Spanberger trained terrorists at an Alexandria school, Brat became combative.
“The press hasn’t done any homework, have you done any homework on that issue?” Brat said. “Go research it. The news — you guys are reporters, you don’t report.”
The school was “a Saudi-funded Islamic academy that was affiliated with fundamentalist Islam and the Wahhabi sect and it taught hatred,” Brat continued. “Can you imagine if it was reversed and a Republican had taught at that school? You’d be doing your research and have different questions.”
Brat then abruptly ended the interview. Brat is facing his first tough re-election since shocking the Republican establishment with his defeat of then-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in 2014.
Spanberger taught AP English at the school several years after Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, the subject of the GOP ads, graduated. Abu Ali was later convicted of working with al Qaeda to assassinate the president at that time, George W. Bush. The Congressional Leadership Fund found out Spanberger taught there after the Republican American Rising opposition research firm was given a confidential questionnaire improperly released by the Postal Service. The breach has drawn scrutiny from fellow intelligence officers, who sent a letter to National Intelligence Director Dan Coats warning that the violation of trust could have a chilling effect on aspiring public servants, who must be “confident that their information will be handled securely and never released pursuant to a political agenda.”
Though Brat and Republican leaders are sticking to the attack, other Republicans have endorsed Spanberger, including the former chairman of the Senate Intelligence and Armed Services Committees, Virginia Sen. John Warner.
Blackstone Mayor Billy Coleburn, 50, describing himself as a “noxious” Trump supporter, isn’t backing anyone in the race, but he praised Spanberger’s “textbook” and “centrist” campaign. “She’s a good person, she came to a festival in Crewe and [stood] for hours in pouring down rain,” Colburn said.
Bryan Wright, 51, a local auto-supply owner, said he’s probably going to vote for Brat “because of lower taxes,” but he thinks Spanberger could win because “did you see the C-SPAN debate?”
And then, there are voters like Gregory Robertson, 29, a self-described “middle of the road constitutionalist” who voted for Trump in 2016 but is voting for Spanberger this year because of Trump’s recent assertion that he’d try to strip birthright citizenship. “It opens up a dangerous door,” he said.
Spanberger doesn’t mention Trump by name on the stump, aware that to win in the district she grew up in, she needs to not only bring the base out to vote but also “middle of the road folks.” Spanberger alludes to Trump, but in broad terms when talking about restoring “decency and civility back to politics” and making it possible for residents of the 7th district “to have the television on when their grandkids or their kids are home.”
But she doesn’t hold back when asked directly about the attacks on her clandestine career.
“For [Brat] to lie about my policy positions, for him to cast aspersions on my background and my experience with the CIA, it’s just shameful, and it’s one of the reasons that I’m running because I refuse to accept that that’s normal in politics.”
