Democrats’ Tech Comeback Starts with Spanberger and Sherrill

Here’s a model Democrats should study: leading 2025 candidates for Governor who are optimists about American technology.

Both Abigail Spanberger in Virginia and Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey have married forward-leaning tech agendas to their national security biographies. As the off-cycle state elections approach next week, it’s worth taking a closer look at their tech records.

Spanberger: An Advocate for Tech-Driven Growth

A former CIA case officer and House Intelligence Committee member, Spanberger has consistently cast emerging tech as both a growth engine and a security obligation. In 2024 she voted to force a sale of TikTok by its China-based parent company, explaining, “As lawmakers, we have a responsibility to protect the data of the American people and keep our country safe online.”

Spanberger introduced the SECURE IT Act to harden election systems via red-team testing and vetted vulnerability research. Her legislative record also includes bipartisan work on critical-infrastructure risk management and cybercrime metrics.

Spanberger also understands that tech is about opportunity, not just risk. Her “Growing Virginia Plan”is a workforce-first economic agenda focused on apprenticeships, digital-skills training, and advanced-industry pipelines. The key provisions of that plan would:

• Leverage AI and emerging technologies in education to align schools with modern workforce needs.

• Strengthen partnerships among entrepreneurs, universities, and industries to commercialize research and attract innovation-focused companies.

• Connect investors with cutting-edge research to drive growth in Virginia’s high-tech sectors.

• Expand collaboration between schools and businesses to provide paid internships in technical fields.

• Reinforce Virginia’s leadership in cybersecurity, defense, shipbuilding, and dual-use technologies.

• Align energy infrastructure and economic development to support technology-driven industries.

The elements of this plan connect innovation directly to the welfare of Virginians and their hopes for the future, showing the ways that innovation ties to good jobs in local communities.

This strategy of tech optimism and security is working. Polls have put her consistently ahead of Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears with margins ranging from the mid-single digits to low double digits.

Sherrill: Tech Leadership Champion

Mikie Sherrill, a former Navy helicopter pilot who serves on the House Armed Services Committee, has built her campaign around innovation as both a national-security imperative and a local prosperity strategy. She backed the CHIPS and Science Act and then followed through by steering research dollars to New Jersey institutions and introducing legislation to build a national strategy for technological leadership.

Sherill has also taken the case directly to local innovators, telling TechUnited:NJ that New Jersey has “more scientists and engineers per square mile than anywhere else” and advocating for a “Garden State Innovation Hub” focused on education for an AI economy, cutting energy costs, and cutting red tape on permitting.

On the defense tech side, she has emphasized the importance of the U.S. Army Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center (ARDEC), located at Picatinny Arsenal, protecting New Jersey’s workforce and US national security from Trump Administration cuts. Picatinny Arsenal is a key innovation hub for the Army, developing the military’s most advanced conventional munitions; scientists and engineers develop advanced weapons and defense technologies using cutting-edge research in materials science, robotics, AI, and manufacturing.

Sherrill has also released a “New Jersey Safety Agenda,” spanning ideas that have been tied up over constitutional challenges (like social media warning labels and age-appropriate design codes) but also broadly popular ideas like cracking down on online scams, banning phones in schools, and training kids to use tech services responsibly.

Overall, this agenda aligns technology policy with innovation-friendly principles — emphasizing ethical AI, transparency, collaboration, education, and public–private research. It promotes a balanced innovation ecosystem where tech growth and societal safeguards coexist, offering strong potential benefits to startups, universities, and tech companies in New Jersey.

Focus On Tech Opportunity

Neither Spanberger nor Sherrill treats technology as a panacea or a bogeyman. Spanberger supports AI and modernization while pushing clear cyber standards and election-security reforms. Sherrill champions semiconductor capacity and regional innovation while backing measures to curb adversarial risks, including oversight of outbound investments in sensitive sectors like AI and quantum computing.

Their approaches to tech recall the party’s best traditions.

From the Clinton-Gore era of internet expansion to Obama’s embrace of digital tools, Democrats once led with optimism about innovation. That thread was weakened in the Biden era, as tech became an easy target for anti-corporate energy.

But polling has long shown that Democratic voters remain more favorable toward technology than Republicans. Democratic voters want accountability, not hostility. Spanberger and Sherrill exemplify that balance: clear-eyed about risks, yet optimistic about the potential for technology to expand opportunity, lower costs, and secure America’s leadership.

Spanberger and Sherrill are also building something replicable by other Democrats. Their message assumes Americans want powerful, modern tools in their lives—faster chips, AI-enabled services, better logistics—and also want a government that keeps those tools safe from espionage, cybercrime, and with appropriate parental controls.

This is the kind of reset Democrats need after years of drifting into tech skepticism. When our nation embraces innovation, every American stands to gain through better jobs, smarter tools, and a stronger position in the world. Democrats do not have to be blindly pro-tech, but they cannot afford to be reflexively anti-tech either. At a time when fear too often eclipses possibility, leaders like Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill are showing that optimism and responsibility can go hand in hand. Their forward-looking agendas embody the best of modern progressivism: a belief that technology, guided by ethics and purpose, can drive shared prosperity, strengthen democracy, and secure America’s global leadership. That is the vision at the heart of the Blue Horizon Project, a future where innovation is powered by shared values and strong relationships that improve the lives of all Americans.