Copyright nytimes
Favored from the start, Ms. Spanberger, 46, ran a disciplined campaign focused on jobs and the cost of living. She also emphasized her support for abortion rights and she vowed to roll back an order directing state police to cooperate with the federal government on immigration enforcement. But she rarely veered far from the center. In August, she welcomed the endorsement of the Virginia Police Benevolent Association, the state’s largest police organization. Since she entered politics in 2018, centrism has been Ms. Spanberger’s brand. Her law-and-order résumé and her moderate mien seemed in many ways tailor-made for politics in Virginia, a once solidly conservative commonwealth that has turned a light shade of blue over the past two decades. This change in political hue has been driven largely by the tens of thousands of government contractors and civil servants who have come to live and work in the northern part of the state. The havoc wreaked on this population by Trump administration cuts made it fertile ground for almost any Democratic candidate, but especially one who worked for the Central Intelligence Agency, which has its headquarters in Langley, in Northern Virginia. Ms. Spanberger, the daughter of a nurse and a law enforcement officer, spent her teenage years in the Richmond suburbs. After graduating from the University of Virginia and then earning a master’s degree in business, she applied to the C.I.A. While she waited to pass the lengthy background check, she worked as an agent with the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, where she focused on drug-related and money-laundering crimes. Once she was hired at the C.I.A., she spent eight years as an officer, working in the United States and overseas. In 2014, Ms. Spanberger moved with her husband, Adam, a software engineer, and their three daughters to the Richmond suburbs. And after working for a consulting firm for several years, she decided to run for Congress.
