She and other Democrats are bracing for the GOP onslaught, unwilling to let Republican attacks go unanswered this year. Instead, they’re preemptively correcting the record. Spanberger, who spent years in law enforcement herself, offered a model on how to do that in a recent half-day tour that demonstrated her support for the Culpeper Police Department — speaking to over a dozen officers as they showed off drones and their K-9 unit, followed by a ride-along.

“If your words are ‘defund the police,’ they’re going to think you mean that. And they know the world is on fire,” she said after the police visit, sitting outside a Culpeper coffee shop. “They know things are upside down. They know they’re afraid, they know there’s a pandemic. So why are you going to just say you want to do something that you actually, maybe, don’t want to do?”…

Other battleground Democrats have acknowledged that some of their colleagues have shied away from talking about controversial topics like immigration or policing — in a way that could help Republicans in the long run.

“You should not be afraid to talk about it,” said Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.), another swing-district Democrat promoting his recent work to support law enforcement. While he said there are some people on the “far extreme of our party” who have said there can’t be both justice and investments in law enforcement, he called it a “false paradigm.”