A gushing article published Thursday in the Washington Post promotes two former CIA agents and a former Navy officer and federal prosecutor as the rising leadership of the Democratic Party. Prominently placed on page four of the print edition, the article bears the headline, “Three centrist women aim to steer Democratic Party in 2025 elections.”
Abigail Spanberger, Mikie Sherrill and Elissa Slotkin were among the group of military-intelligence officers who moved from the national security apparatus to Congress in 2018, when they were first elected to Congress. Slotkin is now a US senator from Michigan, chosen to give the Democratic response to President Trump’s speech to a joint session of Congress. Sherrill and Spanberger are the Democratic candidates for governor in New Jersey and Virginia, respectively, the two major contests in the 2025 off-year elections.
While Sherrill won a competitive primary June 7 in New Jersey, Spanberger was unopposed for the Democratic nomination for governor of Virginia Tuesday, after the Democratic Party leadership cleared the field for her.
Others of the class of 2018 have gone on to prominent roles, including Andy Kim, who moved up to the US Senate from New Jersey last year, and Jason Crow, a Colorado congressman who was a House impeachment manager and frequent spokesman for the Democrats on military issues. Kim headed the Iraq desk at the National Security Council under Obama, while Crow commanded Army Rangers in Afghanistan.
The World Socialist Web Site drew attention to the unprecedented influx of more than 60 candidates seeking Democratic congressional nominations without any previous experience in electoral politics, but many years of experience in the military, the intelligence agencies or the State Department. Some 30 of the CIA Democrats won Democratic nominations, and 13 of these won Republican-held seats in Congress, playing a central part in the Democratic takeover in 2018.
Spanberger was a CIA agent for a dozen years, after previously being a postal inspector. She was a case officer in Europe for most of her career. Slotkin played a key role in the Iraq war, first as a CIA agent in Baghdad, then on the National Security Council in both the Bush and Obama administrations, before Obama named her to a top Pentagon post. Sherrill was a Navy helicopter pilot given responsibility for transporting top commanders in Europe, as well as conducting liaison with Russian military officials. She had language training in both Russian and Arabic.
The Post article does not seek to conceal the common career path of the three women it is promoting, hailing them as, “a trio of centrist women with national security backgrounds who helped retake the House in 2018 and this year hope to steer their beleaguered party back toward winning.”
They are described as non-political until Trump won the 2016 election, which prompted all three to change direction. “We were never going to run for political office,” Spanberger told the Post. “That was not anywhere in our life plan.”
It is Spanberger who set the most overtly right-wing tone within the House Democratic caucus, declaring after the 2020 elections, in which the Democrats lost seats, “We need to not ever use the word ‘socialist’ or ‘socialism’ ever again.”
When she stepped down from her House seat in 2024 to launch a campaign for governor, the successful Democratic candidate to replace her was Eugene Vindman, the twin brother of Alexander Vindman. Both the Ukrainian-born brothers joined the military, rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel, and worked at the Ukraine desk at the National Security Council before they were removed by Trump for cooperating with the Democratic-run hearings that led to his impeachment in 2019 over delaying military aid to Ukraine.
Sherrill and Spanberger are flaunting their military-intelligence roles and presenting their activities in uniform or undercover, rather than their years in Congress, as their principal credentials for higher office.
Sherrill declared in one primary campaign ad, “I was trained in the Navy that in a crisis, you run toward the fight,” while her campaign website featured her photo in military uniform. Spanberger likewise refers to her CIA career in her campaign ads, without giving any details of what work she actually performed for an agency notorious around the world for assassinations, torture, subversion of governments, and illegal spying.
These two campaigns will be the central focus of Democratic Party electioneering this year, with former President Barack Obama already indicating he would campaign for both candidates in the fall.
A lengthy article in The Dispatch, a publication of anti-Trump Republicans, makes an equally approving assessment of the selection of “pragmatic suburban military women to kickstart the party’s recovery in this year’s key off-year gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia.” It praises the decision of the two gubernatorial candidates to avoid focusing on the Trump administration’s systematic attack on Democratic rights.
Sherrill, 53, represents a suburban district in northern New Jersey, is the mother of four teenagers, and was previously a Navy helicopter pilot. Spanberger, 45, held a suburban district anchored in Richmond before retiring last year, has three children, and is a former clandestine officer in the Central Intelligence Agency. Both are stylistic moderates, focusing primarily on kitchen table issues—most often “affordability”—while only occasionally highlighting plans to oppose President Donald Trump.
The Dispatch, like much of the corporate media, claims that the Democratic campaign in 2024 was too strongly focused on Trump as a threat to democracy—although in reality, the Biden-Harris administration slow-walked the investigation into Trump’s January 6, 2021 attempted coup, and Biden proclaimed as a top priority preserving a “strong Republican Party.”
The right-wing online publication comments approvingly:
To get the pendulum swinging in the Democrats’ direction in the second midterm election under Trump, Sherrill and Spanberger are prosecuting similar campaign strategies, focusing on quality-of-life issues and sometimes wonky statewide matters. Trump, and how they’ll use their office to thwart objectionable White House policies, is discussed sparingly.
The Dispatch is to a large extent the successor to the Weekly Standard, edited by neoconservative warmonger William Kristol, which ceased publication in 2018. It is their common view of the need for an aggressive, militaristic foreign policy that brings together these right-wing Republicans and the CIA Democrats, despite their nominal differences on domestic social policy.
The rise of this group of carefully vetted state operatives is a demonstration of the class character of the Democratic Party. For all the rhetoric of Senator Bernie Sanders and the “left” pretensions of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Democratic Socialists of America, the Democratic Party, like the Republican Party, is unalterably committed to the defense of the global interests of American imperialism.
Meanwhile, the departure of Spanberger, Sherrill, Slotkin and Andy Kim to higher office will not leave much of a gap in the ranks of the CIA Democrats in the House of Representatives. A group of four female military-intelligence veterans is preparing to run virtually as a slate in the 2026 elections, all members of a chatgroup dubbed the “Hellcats,” the name taken by the first group of female Marines.
The four include retired Marine officer JoAnna Mendoza, running against Republican incumbent Juan Ciscomani in Arizona; Rebecca Bennett, a former Navy officer running against incumbent Republican Tom Kean in New Jersey; Cait Conley, an Army veteran who worked on the National Security Council, seeking the seat of Republican incumbent Mike Lawler of New York; and Maura Sullivan, a former Marine Iraq War veteran and Pentagon official seeking to replace incumbent Democrat Chris Pappas in New Hampshire, who is running for the Senate.