By Karen Tumulty

If the future of the Democratic Party hinges on its candidates connecting better with the pressures that average Americans are feeling, there might be no greater hope for the losing side at this moment than Abigail Spanberger of Virginia and Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey.

The two congresswomen, both moderates, have shared a Capitol Hill apartment for the past four years, eating frozen entrées from Trader Joe’s and balancing their work as legislators with their roles as busy moms.

Both came to Washington with impressive credentials in high-pressure national security jobs — Annapolis grad Sherrill was a Navy helicopter pilot; Spanberger was an undercover CIA officer — and each had won in a district that hadn’t sent a Democrat to the House in decades.

They even look somewhat alike, though Spanberger’s hair is a few shades blonder; they have been mistaken for one another by constituents visiting the Capitol and even by some of their House colleagues. During a conversation I had with them in September, they sometimes finished each other’s sentences.

And now, they have something else in common: The two women are strong contenders to be the next governors of Virginia and New Jersey. Their races in 2025 will show how well Democrats are heeding the lessons of 2024.

Sherrill, 52, who remains a House member, announced her bid for governor on Monday. “Everyone here knows the opportunity that New Jersey affords, but nobody can afford New Jersey,” she told me. “Whether they’re making $50,000 year or $150,000 a year or more, it just feels like they’re not able to get ahead. They’re not able to get to stable ground. That’s why I’m running for governor, because I truly and deeply believe that well-run, efficient government can deliver for people.”

Early polls suggest the only woman on either side in that race so far starts at or near the front of the pack. Still, New Jersey politics are known for being wild, and Sherrill will be competing in a crowded primary to replace term-limited Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy.

Spanberger, 45, who did not seek reelection to her Virginia House seat, is proving such a formidable contender for governor that she faces no opposition in the Democratic primary.

Her Republican opponent is all but certain to be Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, a Marine veteran whose 2021 campaign posters featured her holding an assault-style rifle. Which means that a commonwealth where past governors have included Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe, but never a woman, will probably be choosing between two of them next year.

The contests that Virginia and New Jersey hold the year after presidential elections have long been early indicators of how the political landscape is shifting ahead of the midterm elections. More often than not, they swing against the president’s party.

But these two races might also validate a broader movement in the electorate: This year, Vice President Kamala Harris carried both Virginia and New Jersey, as expected, but her margins over Donald Trump were only about half what Joe Biden’s had been four years before.

Spanberger certainly seems to understand voters’ volatile mood. “I’m going to continue talking about the things I hear most about from voters, and that’s, frankly, lowering costs. It’s strengthening our public schools. It’s keeping our communities safe. It’s protecting our rights, particularly in Virginia, the last state in the South that hasn’t seen further restrictions on abortion rights since Dobbs,” she said, referring to the 2022 Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade.

But a new set of concerns might matter in a purplish state that is home to vast numbers of federal workers and contractors who could be decimated by Trump’s plan for a top-to-bottom overhaul of Washington. “I will, both as a candidate and ultimately as a governor, have to be able to respond along the way to ensure that Virginia is doing everything to protect people, their livelihood, our economy and their health,” Spanberger said.

When Sherrill and Spanberger arrived in Washington in 2019, each rented an apartment on the same floor of a building near the Capitol.

“Some people seem to have fun in Congress. Speaking for both of us, while we’re here, we’re away from our families. We just work from the time we get up to the time we go to bed, and it’s meeting, meeting, meeting,” Spanberger said.

What’s more, she added, it was lonely to begin and end each day in a rented apartment where “the only sound is your own.”

So they asked one another: Why not move in together?

The apartment they have shared Mondays through Thursdays when Congress is in session was no palace when they moved in. They sat on a stained 20-year-old living room couch that Spanberger dragged out of storage. Dinners together were eaten off Sherrill’s gold-rimmed wedding china, which — inconveniently — couldn’t go in the microwave.

To occupy what little free time they had, they drank a lot of coffee, occasionally took a sauna and resolved to make more visits to the gym. The mention of that last one brought a burst of laughter. “Aspirational,” both of them admitted.

Discovering how the House operated — and didn’t — quickly became a source of shared frustration. The 116th U.S. Congress had an unusually large number of freshmen, 19 in all, who came to the job with backgrounds in national security. They had won in districts where Democrats typically didn’t, and, it was hoped, they would be an antidote to partisanship and gridlock. Five of them were women, who christened themselves “the Badasses.”

“All of us were sort of predisposed to working together on a mission,” Sherrill said. “In the military, you’re not like, oh, are you a Democrat or Republican? Or did you come from New Jersey or from Alabama? You work with people from all over the country, all different backgrounds, but you all share the mission focus.”

Congress, however, was not built that way. It moves slowly, when it moves at all, and members rarely step outside their partisan and ideological lanes. “We were like, ‘What’s the strategy? Where’s the strategy?’” Spanberger said. “There’s just an urgency problem: What’s the problem? Identify the problem. What are the risks? How do we move? Let’s move.”

When they stood together, though, they could get results. It was their voices in September 2019 that led to Trump’s first impeachment. The issue was the president’s attempt to coerce Ukraine’s newly elected leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, into investigating Joe Biden by holding back nearly $400 million in military aid to the country.

Trump had been accused of other misdeeds. But the moderate, national security-minded freshmen hadn’t been convinced that those uncovered in special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election rose to the Constitution’s “high crimes and misdemeanors” standard for impeachment.

To them, refusing badly needed weapons to Ukraine clearly did. “We saw he was withholding those because he wanted Zelensky to dig up and manufacture evidence against Biden, who he thought was going to be his opponent in a democratic election. Finally, we all said that is a bright line,” Sherrill recalled.

The Badasses, plus two of their male freshman colleagues, wrote a powerful Post op-ed, in which they argued: “We have devoted our lives to the service and security of our country, and throughout our careers, we have sworn oaths to defend the Constitution of the United States many times over. Now, we join as a unified group to uphold that oath as we enter uncharted waters and face unprecedented allegations against President Trump.”

More-progressive House members representing safe districts had already been arguing to impeach Trump. That these seven freshmen were willing to put their political careers on the line and join them persuaded then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi (California) to end her own resistance to taking such a dramatic step against a sitting president. Within 24 hours of their op-ed being published, Pelosi announced the opening of an official impeachment inquiry against Trump.

What they saw nationally and what they experienced within their own families during the covid-19 pandemic brought another turning point for Spanberger and Sherrill, convincing both they could make a bigger difference by returning to their home states.

Densely populated New Jersey was one of the earliest and hardest-hit states, Sherrill noted. Congress did vital work during the pandemic, she said, providing money “to keep people connected to their small businesses and to keep people employed and to keep people getting paychecks to be able to buy food.”

“But it wasn’t the same as delivering PPE gear to hospitals or being able to institute the Defense Production Act and get the manufacturing base engaged in a crisis to deliver for people. It wasn’t the power that an executive would have in that instance,” she explained. “Seeing what governors across the country have been doing, and how Washington has become so partisan and toxic … I just feel that often the future of how we really deliver for people, or the effectiveness of how we can deliver for people, resides in these governors across the country.”

The two women also felt the impact as mothers whose children — Sherrill has four; Spanberger has three — are still showing the effects of school shutdowns. They told me about their anxieties for a daughter who spent kindergarten and first grade in front of a computer screen and still hasn’t learned to read as she should; the middle-schooler who doesn’t want to have friends over. They recalled the sheer ridiculousness of watching a son put together empty paper towel rolls and call it an art project. And theirs, they stressed, are kids who have had every privilege.

“I don’t think people without school-age kids understand what covid has done to our children,” Sherrill said. “A lot of us lost all ability to monitor screen time in our children because their entire life was online. And now we come out of the other side of covid, and we’re having a second trauma of all of the algorithms and what kids are seeing online and all of their social media profiles.”

Still, for all the advantages Spanberger and Sherrill have, winning executive office has always been a harder lift for female candidates than winning legislative office. Research has shown voters are more willing to accept women in collaborative roles than as the chief decider. For many disappointed Democrats, Harris’s defeat only confirmed it.

But the good news is, there are a dozen women — a record — serving as governors.