Democrats have selected Gov. Abigail Spanberger of Virginia to deliver their party’s response to President Trump’s State of the Union address on Tuesday, putting at center stage a former congresswoman who flipped a red seat to blue ahead of midterm elections in which they are expecting to win back control of the House.
Ms. Spanberger won the governorship in a purple state last November by 15 points, a victory that buoyed Democrats and offered a glint of hope for the future of a party that has struggled to formulate an effective response to a president unbound.
In 2018, she became the first Democrat in 50 years to win Virginia’s Seventh Congressional District, to the north of Richmond. Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, chose her for the response, people familiar with his thinking said, because he believes that her gubernatorial campaign, which focused on affordability and prosecuting the case against Mr. Trump, was a model for how Democrats can win races across the country in November.
Ms. Spanberger said she planned to use her speech to address the issues facing Americans at a pivotal moment: “rising costs, chaos in their communities, and a real fear of what each day might bring.”
The choice of Ms. Spanberger, 46, a moderate Democrat and former undercover C.I.A. officer, in some ways followed the same playbook the party used last year when they selected Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, a relatively young, centrist female lawmaker with national security credentials, to deliver the response to Mr. Trump’s speech to a joint session of Congress.
Unlike Ms. Slotkin, however, Ms. Spanberger is not seen as a potential presidential candidate in 2028. Still, the job of the televised response is often seen as a springboard for an up-and-coming lawmaker to boost his or her political profile.
It can also be a delicate assignment, one that has been botched by so many promising elected officials in both parties that it is now considered almost cursed.
Democrats also announced on Thursday that they had chosen Senator Alex Padilla of California, the first Latino elected to represent his state in the Senate, to deliver the Spanish-language response to the speech.
Mr. Padilla, the son of Mexican immigrants, last year was shoved to the ground by federal agents and handcuffed after trying to ask the Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, a question at a news conference in downtown Los Angeles.
Annie Karni is a congressional correspondent for The Times.
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