FROM THE EDITOR: State of the Union, Democratic Response, and the End of Campaigning
The best line Tuesday night was about fixing a problem. It's no coincidence that few picked up on it.
By Martin Davis
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
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“There was a time that we held elections,” said Spotsylvania Supervisor Drew Mullins during a conversation I was having with him recently about redistricting, “then breathed, knowing we could move forward.”
Those days feel very far in our past. For people under 30, there’s an argument to be made they never knew that time.
Which brings us to Tuesday night.
President Donald Trump, in office just over a year, delivered his State of the Union Address to a joint session of Congress. Shortly after the record-setting 108 minute speech that started cheery before turning dark, Gov. Abigail Spanberger, in office just over a month, delivered the Democratic rebuttal from the site where the House of Burgesses first met in 1705 in a tone more traditionally associated with national addresses.
Thankfully, it was markedly shorter than the SOTU address. Right at 13 minutes.
Despite the differences between the two in both speaking length and tone, however, they shared a common thread — both Trump and Spanberger were testing national talking points for the midterms. And testing attack lines, too.
Of the thousands of words spoken Tuesday evening, and the 10s of 1,000s written about them in the hours since, it is interesting that the line I identified as the best of the night has — to my knowledge — drawn sparse attention.
It came from Spanberger’s rebuttal:
Our broken immigration system is something to be fixed.
“Something to fix.”
That is something that all of us as Americans should be able to embrace, debate, and resolve.
The chaos that is the current immigration system didn’t emerge overnight. It’s not the fault of this party or that party. It’s a system that over 70 years has failed to keep up with a rapidly changing world. Throwing out everybody deemed “illegal” — a term that is fraught with difficulties as our story about Mirna Benitez’s deportation exposed — doesn’t address the problem. But it’s a great campaign line for the midterms.
Neither does refusing to recognize that there are necessary limits on the numbers of people coming in.
It’s not that we don’t understand what the problems are. The Cato Institute has a succinct, largely accurate, list. Nor do we lack for ideas to fix the problem. Many good ones are outlined by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
It’s that the institutions with the power to fix it — mainly Congress, but also the Executive Branch — can’t move their sights off the next elections long enough to fix anything.
This problem is not limited to immigration. Affordability, climate, healthcare, housing, violence, name your preferred concern — all suffer from greater to lesser degree because of our collective desire to see these issues not as problems to be solved, but as election themes to exploit.
Before jumping up and blaming the politicians, however, consider who put them there.
We did.
How do we fix things so that we move from a perpetual campaigning mindset to a fixing-problems mindset? Demand more.
Demand more of politicians — Negative campaigning works, and so it finds its way into post-election policy debates and high-profile addresses. That will continue so long as we continue to measure leaders not by the problems they fix, but by how they make us feel about the opposition.
Demand more of ourselves — The best way to learn how to solve thorny problems is to get one’s hands dirty at the local level. Yes, you’ll make mistakes. Yes, people will get mad at you. Yes, you may even lose friends along the way. But as with everything, practice makes perfect. Learning to work with those we disagree is hard — but necessary.
Embrace optimism — The idea that the world is on the fast-track to Hades is a well-worn trope. I’m not suggesting one dim one’s eyes to the real struggles and challenges before us, but remember who we’re working to make things better for. The generations coming up. it will motivate us to fix the problems that vex and limit us.
If you’ve made it this far, you might be thinking — “You didn’t give Spanberger’s full quote.” True. Let’s correct that:
Our broken immigration system is something to be fixed — not an excuse for unaccountable agents to terrorize our communities.
The question to ponder — which part of that quote does one focus on. Fixing the problem? Or the political undertones about ICE’s activities?
Regardless how one feels about ICE and current immigration policy, the idea that the system itself needs to be fixed is generally shared across the electorate.
There’s a time to campaign, and a time to get to work.
Let’s focus on the work — regardless of the challenge.
It’s past time to breathe, and move forward.
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I really appreciate this essay’s insistence that elections should be about fixing problems, not just exploiting them as campaign themes. The focus on immigration as “something to be fixed” rather than ammunition for attack ads is exactly the kind of framing we need more of, from both parties.
I’d add one more layer to your diagnosis: our underlying electoral rules and incentives are part of what keeps us stuck in permanent campaign mode. We keep asking politicians to act differently inside a system that rewards them for doing exactly what they’re doing now.
When most races are winner‑take‑all, districts are heavily gerrymandered, and primaries are dominated by the most energized partisan voters, the safest choice for many elected officials is to double down on slogans and outrage, not compromise and problem‑solving. Broad, cross‑party agreement on specific policies rarely translates into action because the incentives push toward “owning” the other side rather than working with them.
If we truly want to “breathe, and move forward” after elections, we have to look not only at our leaders’ choices but also at the structure that shapes those choices: how districts are drawn, how votes are translated into seats, how primaries work, and whether voters can support coalition‑builders without fearing their vote will be “wasted.”
That’s a very hard job, and it will take years of steady work to correct—if enough of us are willing to move in that direction. In that sense, fixing immigration, or any other big issue, and fixing our electoral rules belong to the same project: building a system where solving problems is actually the safest political move, not the riskiest.
"Our broken immigration system is something to be fixed."
Unfortunately the Democrats' solution is always grow the government and throw (the taxpayers') money at it.