What the National-Security Democrats Want
12 min read
Under a clear blue sky, on a warm spring day, several dozen Virginians gathered in a suburban backyard near Richmond to plot the future of the Democratic Party. Not that this was what they said they were doing. This was a meeting of the Henrico County Democratic Committee, “dedicated to electing Democrats in Henrico County, the Commonwealth of Virginia, and nationwide,” and they had come to rally neighborhood support for Abigail Spanberger, a local girl made good.
Spanberger, a member of Congress and now a candidate for governor, lives in Henrico County—about 10 minutes away from that suburban backyard, she told me. Although she currently represents a more rural Virginia district, this is her home base, and the home team wants to help her current campaign. A local official introducing Spanberger thanked everyone present for spending “a lot of hours in offices and knocking on doors and writing postcards and delivering signs.” Another spoke about “getting the band back together,” reuniting the people who helped Spanberger during her improbable first run for Congress, in 2017, when she came from nowhere to beat a Tea Party Republican, Dave Brat.
The audience cheered when Spanberger talked, as she often does, about her notable career trajectory. Famously she served in the CIA, from 2006 to 2014 (and has always been circumspect about what, exactly, she was doing). When she returned home, she told me, “I thought I was done with public service”—until she was galvanized by the election of Donald Trump. Now, after three hard-fought wins in purple-district congressional races, her aspirations stretch beyond the Virginia governor’s mansion: She wants to change the way Americans talk about politics. “We want to turn the page past the divisiveness, the angriness, and just focus on brass tacks, good policy, and governance,” she says.
In today’s Congress, those goals are wildly idealistic. On both sides of the aisle, “divisiveness and angriness” attract headlines. Outrage, not brass tacks, produces attention. Marjorie Taylor Greene is repeatedly interviewed and profiled, even though she has never been associated with a serious piece of legislation. Matt Gaetz, known for nothing except being Matt Gaetz, is more famous than many important congressional committee chairs. Even among the Democrats, the ranking members of many important committees have a lower profile than the members of “the Squad,” a group who come from very blue House districts and have defined themselves to the left of the party.
Spanberger is part of a different, less splashy friend group, one that also includes House members Jason Crow of Colorado, Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania, Seth Moulton of Massachusetts, Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey, and Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, among others. Most are in their 40s or early 50s; many come from purple districts and swing states. They are sometimes called the “NatSec Democrats,” a phrase that explains their origins but doesn’t quite encompass who they are or what they do. Most, it is true, are veterans of the military or the intelligence agencies. Most entered Congress in 2018. Most hadn’t been in politics before that. Some of them were helped or encouraged by Moulton, a former Marine who was first elected to Congress in Massachusetts in 2014, made a quixotic run for president in 2020 and created the Serve America PAC, which backed 15 of the 28 Democrats who flipped the House in 2018. Moulton told me that Trump inspired a lot of veterans to consider political careers for the first time—and to run as Democrats. “He’s so uniquely unpatriotic and anti-American. I mean, this is a guy who didn’t try to hide the fact that he was a draft dodger. He said, The people who signed up were suckers. The people who got killed are losers.”
In retrospect, the members of this cohort turned out to be precursors of an important change, one that may end up redefining American politics. For half a century, the Republicans were the party that embraced patriotism most intensely, talked about loving America most loudly, and seemingly took a harder line on national security. But now the Republican candidate calls America “a nation in decline” and refers to the U.S. economy as an “unparalleled tragedy and failure.” That language has inspired a geographically diverse, pro-Constitution, no-nonsense backlash in the Democratic Party, a movement in favor of patriotism, concerned about national security, and convinced that only a democracy that delivers practical results can stay safe. The effect was clearly visible at the Democratic National Convention when Kamala Harris promised “to uphold the awesome responsibility that comes with the greatest privilege on Earth: the privilege and pride of being an American,” and when delegates responded by waving American flags and chanting “USA, USA.”
The Democrats who were in the vanguard of that backlash have been working together for some time. Spanberger, Moulton, Slotkin and others wrote a joint letter to President Joe Biden in December, for example, warning against Israel’s strategy in Gaza, on the grounds that “we know from personal and often painful experience that you can’t destroy a terror ideology with military force alone.” But national-security experience isn’t the only thing that links them. Tom Malinowski, a former State Department official who was also part of the group—he was elected to Congress from a previously a red New Jersey district in 2018, then lost in a close race in 2022—points out that although most of his cohort had never held elected office before, all of them had taken oaths to protect and uphold the U.S. Constitution. They came to Congress in that spirit. “We were very idealistic in our belief that our job was to protect democratic values and institutions in this country,” Malinowski explains, “and very pragmatic on the day-to-day work of Congress on issues like the economy, the budget, immigration and crime.” In other words, he explains, “we all believe the country would be fine if we had to compromise on issues like that. What was essential was not to compromise on democracy.”
Malinowski, who suggests calling the group Service Democrats, agrees that they are defined by attitude as much as issues. Although motivated to enter politics by their disdain for Trump, all of them say they are happy to work with individual Republicans. Sherrill told me that she thinks “getting as broad a coalition as possible on the legislation I want to see passed” is a sign of success. This outlook is very different from the obsessive hatred of compromise that has prevented the current Republican House majority from passing almost any legislation at all. “Anytime a Democrat supports a Republican piece of legislation, then it’s not good enough. It’s obviously not extreme enough, because then it’s a RINO bill or something,” Sherrill says.
The group’s attitude also redefines what it means to be a moderate in the Democratic Party. By an older standard, Spanberger, Slotkin, Moulton, Sherrill, and Crow might have been called progressives. They believe in abortion rights, for example—a cause once avoided by what used to be called conservative Democrats—and have joined pro-abortion-rights caucuses. But if, again, a moderate nowadays is someone willing to talk with the other side in order to find solutions, then this group is a bunch of moderates. Sherrill said she could see the appeal of what she described as a “progressive model” of politics: “deciding what you want and accepting nothing else until you get it.” But there is also a risk to that model, because you might not get anything at all. Had the Democrats in Congress been more willing to bargain with the Trump administration over the border, she thinks, they might have secured concessions for Dreamers, the children who arrived in the U.S. with their undocumented parents and have no citizenship status.
Still, the NatSec Democrats’ deeper objection is not to any particular ideological faction, but rather to politicians who, as Spanberger says, “don’t actually want to fix anything,” because “performance is all there is.” As an example, she cited the border-control bill that was written and shepherded through the Senate by senior conservative Republicans but was then blocked—to the surprise of the bill’s authors—by Trump, who thought that fixing the border might help Biden. Her friends, by contrast, want to fix things: the border, the health-care system, even democracy itself. Having served in places that have collapsed into chaos, they know what it’s like to live in places that don’t have governance of any kind.
They also learned how to operate in that sort of chaos, which is useful now too. Elissa Slotkin, a Middle East analyst who was elected to the House from Michigan in 2018 and is now running for the Senate, says she still thinks the same way about solving problems as she did when she worked for the CIA, the National Security Council, and the Defense Department, among other previous employers: “My job is to identify real threats and go after threats. The No. 1 killer of children is gun violence. Mental-health issues, suicide, opioid addiction—those are real threats. I’m not going to spend a ton of time on things that I believe are exaggerated threats, like books or teaching Black history in our schools.” Spanberger, also used to being challenged, makes a point of traveling in the redder parts of her district and talking in detail about the agricultural bills she’s introduced in Congress: “You can’t both think I’m some crazy deep-state whatever, or some radical leftist,” and at the same time be chatting politely about meat-processing regulation.
Given members’ experience, the group’s special interest in foreign policy is unsurprising, but it doesn’t come cloaked in bluster. When speaking at the DNC, Jason Crow—an Army Ranger and paratrooper who served three tours in Iraq and Afghanistan before winning a House seat in Colorado—contrasted “tough talk” and “chest thumping” with the “real strength and security” that comes from alliances, competence, and continuity. “I refuse to let Trump’s golf buddies decide when and how our friends are sent to war,” he said. Over coffee a few months earlier, Crow told me that isolationism’s appeal is overrated. An outward-looking America appeals to voters, especially those concerned about security. He reminds people, he said, that “America can be a great force for good, that we are at our best when America is engaged and American leadership matters,” and he thinks they listen and care.
Slotkin, who met me in a tiny Senate campaign office she keeps near the Capitol, also told me that voters respond to that kind of expansive message about America’s role in the world. She said she talks about her national-security background on the campaign trail as a way of explaining her other policies: “I really believe that in a multiracial, multi-ethnic democracy, it’s essential that anyone from anywhere can get into the middle class. And if we don’t have that, it’s literally a security problem. If we become a country of the very rich and the very poor, it’s a stability risk.” She thinks her training helps her in a different sense too. Like Spanberger and Crow, Slotkin has also taken oaths to uphold the Constitution, and she, too, has been part of teams dealing with life-threatening situations. “You cut your teeth professionally, in jobs where mission is more important than self,” she said. “And in fact, if you put yourself ahead of the mission, you would have been fired for most of the jobs that we did.”
A few months after Spanberger’s rally, on a rather hotter summer day, I watched Mikie Sherrill deliver an equally pragmatic message. Speaking at an event held at the Ukrainian cultural center in Whippany, the congresswoman, an Annapolis graduate and ex-Navy helicopter pilot, was introduced by Thomas “Ace” Gallagher, mayor of Hanover Township. Gallagher is a Republican, but Hanover suffers from flooding, and Sherrill, he said, had helped his district get money and attention from the Army Corps of Engineers.
“She’s on the Democratic side of the aisle,” he told the room. “But for me, there are not two sides: There’s people that serve and work together and are focused on the common good. As for everybody else, they can do whatever they want to do, as long as they don’t get in the way of our good work.” Soon, he predicted, “you are going to see many people that are more moderate working together … on true solutions to our problems.”
Sherrill, who is expected to launch a run for New Jersey governor herself, seemed as surprised by this optimistic outburst of bipartisan goodwill as I was. “I look around this room, and I’m feeling a little emotional,” she said, and paid tribute back to Gallagher. “Again and again and again, we have come together here in the Eleventh District of New Jersey, to try to problem solve, to try to address the things that are scaring people, to try to make your life a little bit better, to try to just bring some rationality and sanity to a world that right now isn’t making a lot of sense.”
While she was talking—this was on Sunday, July 21—people in the audience started looking at their phones, whispering to one another. At the end of the event, the speakers asked the audience to contribute to Ukrainian charities, stepped off the podium, and learned that President Biden was no longer running for reelection. Two weeks earlier, Sherrill had joined what was still then a very small number of elected politicians openly calling for him to step down. Over lunch, she told me that she had been moved to do so because “we’ve all been saying Trump is an existential threat. But we’ve been acting like we don’t really believe it.” At that point, only two senators had publicly called for Biden not to run: Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Sherrod Brown of Ohio. Not coincidentally, both came from red states. In places outside safe blue states and blue districts, Sherrill told me, Democrats had been looking hard at the polling data and couldn’t see a path to victory.
Earlier, Sherrill had done a small event for Sue Altman, a Democrat who is running for Malinowski’s old seat, attracting the same kind of fired-up-to-do-something-positive crowd as Spanberger, a team of people who seem genuinely excited to knock on doors for a pragmatist who is offering to get things done. Young people in particular, Altman told me, “are sick of the negativity. They’re sick of politics as usual, and they want the government to work properly.” But it’s not a mass movement—nobody gets tens of millions of Instagram followers by finding long-term solutions to flooding in New Jersey.
On the contrary, in a world where social-media algorithms promote anger and emotion, where cable-news teams have an economic interest in promoting the fame-seeking and the flamboyant, charting a different course carries serious risks. The dull work of passing meat-packing bills in Congress, or fixing flooding in New Jersey—none of that will ever go viral on TikTok. Only people who still see politics through the lens of real life, and not through an online filter, will care. In a bitter Senate fight in Michigan, or a close governor’s race in Virginia, the contest could feature candidates who differ radically, but in style as much as substance.
But then, the same can be said about the candidates at the top of the ticket. In a sense, the presidential race is the biggest swing-state race of all. Like the other Service Democrats, Harris also took an oath, early in her career as an attorney, to uphold the constitution. And like any Democrat running in a purple district, Harris also needs to appeal to a wide range of people who are “sick of politics as usual,” to get them to focus on real-world concerns—economics, health care, inflation—instead of culture wars, and to convince them that she is in politics to solve problems and not just to perform. If she looks down her party’s ballots, she’ll find plenty of allies who have been fighting that same battle for years.
