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Miranda Devine: Dems will roll out their perfect agent of subterfuge, Abigail Spanberger, in response to SOTU

Abigail Spanberger, the new governor of Virginia who has been tapped to deliver the Democrats’ State of the Union reply Tuesday night, is the perfect avatar for her party’s deception.

With her long blond bob, minimalist makeup, pinched face and brisk air, she looks like the sort of competent working mom you’d encounter at school drop-off in any affluent suburb. In other words, she seems like somebody you instinctively trust.

But don’t be fooled by appearances. Spanberger is an expert at subterfuge, having spent eight years as an undercover CIA case officer, aka a spy, under Barack Obama and John Brennan, in the era when Democrats turned national security back on itself.

Like Joe Biden, she posed as a moderate to fool willfully gullible voters and then showed her true colors the minute she took office.

The “national security mom,” who is being touted as a future presidential contender, immediately signed off on unlimited abortion and a gerrymander plan to entrench Dem rule, ordered law enforcement not to work with ICE and presided over the introduction of dozens of new taxes on everything from dog walking to Uber rides.

So much for “affordability.”

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As it was with New York’s new Mayor Zohran Mamdani, “affordability” is her code for spending more taxpayer money.

Mamdani at least didn’t pretend to be a moderate. His appeal is summed up by the cartoon of a grinning wolf addressing a mob of sheep: “I’ll become a vegetarian once I’m elected.”

His Marxo-fascism is out in the open.

“There is no problem too large for government to solve,” Mamdani declared in his victory speech, promising to “replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.”

Tell that to the 19 people he left on the street to freeze to death in last month’s Arctic snowstorm.

By contrast, Spanberger stuck to her moderate disguise, claiming her victory represents a new era for Democrats, “of pragmatism over partisanship,” and that she would “focus relentlessly on what matters most: lowering costs, keeping our communities safe, and strengthening our economy.”

You’ll hear those soothing promises again on Tuesday night.

It’s what Americans wish for.

But the Democratic Party is just pretending. There is no moderate wing left, apart from Pennsylvania’s maverick Sen. John Fetterman.

These days, according to a Gallup poll in January, only 8% of Democrats count themselves conservative, while 60% self-identify as liberal.

Yet America remains far more conservative than it is liberal, with 35% of adults describing themselves as “very conservative” or “conservative” while 28% call themselves “very liberal” or “liberal” and 33% identify as “moderate.”

That’s a problem for a party that has been hijacked by the radical left.

So they choose Potemkin Village candidates like Spanberger, former astronaut Mark Kelly and Tim “Midwestern dad” Walz, with national security credentials or other conservative-coded attributes to trick moderate voters.

The Dems’ fake centrists need to plausibly campaign on affordability and safety and then smoothly raise taxes, enable fraud, handcuff police, refuse to imprison violent offenders and invite millions of criminal illegal aliens into their sanctuary cities, to cement their power.

They will lie to your face that crime is down, that allegations of welfare fraud are racist and that illegal aliens are saints who definitely don’t get Medicare or vote.

Spanberger and Mamdani sound different but they are cut from the same cloth and have the same aims. They are just code-shifting for different audiences.

The problem for Republicans in the looming midterms is that they are not dealing with a normal opposition party.

One member of the administration sees their dilemma in terms of game theory, the mathematical study of strategic decision-making used in Wall Street and the military. In game theory nothing works if one of the players is a “bad actor,” who refuses to play by the rules or according to established norms, and looks only to maximize their power.

That’s what the Democratic Party has become: a bad actor.

It finds its naked representation in the weekend performance of California gubernatorial contender Katie Porter, who once dumped hot mashed potatoes on her then-husband’s head.

A few hours before a would-be Trump assassin was shot dead at Mar-a-Lago, Porter held up a sign emblazoned with the words “F–k Trump” at the California Democratic Convention in San Francisco and urged the audience to chant the filthy slogan.

That’s all they have to offer voters.

Every week, Post columnist Miranda Devine sits down for exclusive and candid conversations with the most influential disruptors in Washington on ‘Pod Force One.’ Subscribe here!

Unfortunately, there are still Republicans who haven’t noticed the bait-and-switch in their colleagues across the aisle and believe that if they play nice, Democrats will play nice in return.

That’s why they won’t get rid of the filibuster in order to get Trump’s agenda enacted — most importantly the SAVE America Act, which requires voter ID at the ballot box and ensures only citizens register to vote.

Democrats are treating the legislation as an existential threat to their hold on power, calling it racist and an attack on democracy. Yet 71% of their voters support it.

Naïve Republicans believe that if they resist the temptation to do away with the filibuster, then the Democrats won’t nix the outdated rule that requires 60 senators to pass legislation — an impossibility with contentious bills in a polarized Senate where the Republican majority is just 53.

Dems tried to do it under Biden but were foiled by two moderate Democrats who are no longer in office.

That’s why Republican Sen. Dave McCormick, from the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania, whose friendship with his opposite number, Fetterman is the most bipartisan act this Congress, has flipped on the filibuster.

He agrees that the Dems’ vow to turn DC and Puerto Rico into two new states with four new senators, and stack the Supreme Court with clones of Ketanji Brown Jackson, would have been catastrophic.

 “Had they done so, seated those four Senate seats, we’d probably never get the majority back,” McCormick told me on Pod Force One.

He now believes Republicans should at least adopt a “talking filibuster” to “force the Democrats to say why they’re against voter ID” and cement other crucial elements of the Trump agenda, such as permitting reform.

The specter of Democrats having to speak for hours on why they oppose a voter integrity measure that 83% of the country supports will only expose the fact that they can’t win on their own merits.

Politics as usual does not work until there is radical reformation of the Democratic Party or a new opposition is formed.

This has to be the Republican message going into the midterms to get Trump voters off their couches: SAVE America to save Donald Trump.

Otherwise, all we have to look forward to after November is two years of impeachment and gridlock as a prelude to disaster.

midterm elections 2026

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