Virginia's 7th District incumbent congresswoman, Abigail Spanberger, should be ecstatic that her district's county registrar found a mislabeled thumb drive to put her ahead of Republican Nick Freitas on Wednesday.  Instead, she's furious.

After eking out a victory in 2018 against Dave Brat, Spanberger assumed she'd be a shoe-in in 2020.  So, when she found herself losing to Freitas a day after the polls closed, the writing was on the wall. Either find more votes or lose her seat in the House.  Soon after messaging her supporters not to worry, Henrico County registrar Mark Coakley found a memory stick erroneously marked "provisional" with 15,000 early in-person missing ballots.  As luck would have it, the discovery catapulted Spanberger past Freitas by over 5,000 votes.  Coakley joined WRVA talk radio host John Reid Friday morning to reassure voters that the convoluted mishap was an unintentional oversight on his part.

The tight race with Freitas, the registrar's "error," and the House's loss of seven Democrat seats with more on the way infuriated Spanberger.  On Thursday's three-hour Democratic Caucus call, released by the Washington Post, a livid Spanberger blamed the chaos on the Party's left-leaning shills.

"The number one concern that people brought to me in my race that I barely won was defunding the police," she said.  "And I've heard from colleagues who say, 'Oh it's the language of the streets, we should respect that.'  We're in Congress.  We are professionals.  We are supposed to talk about things in the way where we mean what we are talking about.  If we don't mean we should defund the police, we shouldn't say that."

In the joint call, Spanberger became even more testy:

We have to commit to not saying the words 'defund the police' ever again We need to not ever use the words socialist or socialism ever again….It does matter, and we have lost good members because of that. From a congressional standpoint, it was a failure. It was not a success, We lost members we shouldn't have lost. If we are classifying Tuesday as a success and we run this way again, we will get f------ torn apart in 2022.

As a former CIA employee, Spanberger understands the importance of an effective cover.  Here in the 7th, words matter.  She's got wine-swilling suburban moms with BLM signs strewn all over their lawns on one side and working-class, rural, Second Amendment, pro-God family and country conservatives on the other.  If not for the memory stick from nowhere, Freitas, a 41-year-old pro-life Green Beret combat veteran, could have unseated Spanberger, and she wasn't in the mood to hold back.  (As of this writing, Freitas has not conceded.)

Unfortunately, for the congresswoman, her tirade didn't go over well with the radical leaders of her party.  "Squad" member Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) hit back: "Don't blame myself and others who are fighting for issues that matter to our communities."

Seattle socialist Rep. Pramila Jayapal focused her comments on "job number one... to get Donald Trump out of the White House and to get Joe Biden into the White House.  That requires us to unify, including progressives, for whom Joe Biden wasn't our first choice."

House majority whip Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) sided with Spanberger, warning his colleagues not to advertise their radical agenda:

"We have to focus on Georgia for the next several weeks," he said on the caucus call. If Democrats "are going to run on Medicare for All, defund the police, socialized medicine, we're not going to win."

At a press conference on Friday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi attempted to bring the two sides together: "We lost some battles.  But we won the war.  We have the gavel," she said.

Meanwhile, Spanberger and other swing district Democrats are looking ahead to 2022, hoping they can convince the AOCs of their party to drop the radical pose.

Image credit: Spanberger for Congress, screen shot via shareable YouTube.