WILLIAMSBURG, Va. — Shannon Taylor’s plan to defeat Republican Rep. Rob Wittman, an almost 20-year incumbent, is to turn his strength into a weakness.
She’s taking the fact that Wittman has served his Northern Neck region for decades — from a town council victory in 1986 to state government, then Congress two decades later — and using it against him.Washington has changed him, she says.
“I hear the stories, and the way I categorize it is: He’s lost his way, he was somebody that people thought they could count on over 20 years ago, and they can’t count on him now,” Taylor told The Washington Sun.
Thirteen members of Congress lost their primaries this summer — seven Democrats and six Republicans — and Taylor is hoping an anti-incumbent summer turns into an anti-incumbent fall.
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What happens in the commonwealth will also give a window into what happens everywhere: Since Virginia finishes its ballot counting quicker than most states on Election Day, early calls in two House races that stretch south and east from Richmond and across the Chesapeake Bay will be key for determining the House majority.
In Virginia’s 2nd Congressional District, anchored around Virginia Beach, Republican Rep. Jen Kiggans is in a rematch with her 2022 opponent, Elaine Luria, who held the seat from 2019 into 2023.
It’s a classic swing district: Republicans have won it five times and Democrats three times since 2008. Adding up vote totals for each party in the last four contests, Democrats received 660,000 votes in the 2nd District while Republican candidates received 659,000.
A Kiggans victory would suggest Republicans could weather the storm in 21 tossup races, as rated by the Cook Political Report.
But a Democratic victory in the 1st District would signal that a blue wave would rise high enough to swamp once safe incumbents like Wittman, who has won every reelection contest by double digit margins.
Taylor, 58, a county prosecutor in Richmond’s suburbs, portrays herself as a tough-on-crime Democrat. She might remind some voters of Gov. Abigail Spanberger, who flipped a longtime Republican seat outside Richmond in 2018 and went on to a blowout victory in last year’s gubernatorial race.
Taylor is running on an anti-corruption message that raps Wittman for years of trading stocks in his personal portfolio despite voting for a ban on such trades. She also supports a 12-year limit on terms in the House and Senate and a lifetime prohibition on former members becoming lobbyists.
“Put your money where your mouth is, right? If I come up with these anti-corruption proposals, they are proposals that I’m going to follow,” she said after touring a local community health clinic.
Wittman, 67, is a head-down lawmaker who believes he has the right experience. He focuses heavily on the House Armed Services Committee and defense-related projects he has delivered for his military-centric district. If he wins, he could become the top Republican on the coveted committee next year.
“Experience matters,” he told a local TV station in a profile that ran this month.
One of his first ads — he had four times as much campaign money to spend in the final four months of the race — literally mapped out the drive he takes to Washington rather than renting an apartment on Capitol Hill.
“I never forgot who I represent because I never left,” he said.
This district was actually ranked as the absolute political median out of 435 House seats, according to a University of Virginia analysis. It will serve as a political science experiment about whether no-frills incumbents can still win in an era where many lawmakers run to social media and ideological cable news for political adrenaline hits.
Wittman is a lawmaker from the old era when voters often told pollsters they disliked Congress but liked their own representative.
Those days might be finished.
Today’s Congress is reviled across the political spectrum. President Donald Trump’s own disapproval among voters — some polls show close to two-thirds of voters opposed to his job performance — looks rosy when compared to the 80 to 85% of voters who have disapproved of Congress for the past year, according to Gallup’s monthly poll.
An unpopular president overseeing an unpopular war abroad and soaring gas prices at home, mixed in with a toxic brand for Congress, opened the doors for Democrats to move beyond just the traditional battlegrounds like Virginia’s 2nd District.
Wittman’s district has favored Trump all three times he appeared on the presidential ballot. Yet his margin has shrunk from a robust 14-point win here in 2016 to less than 5 percentage points in 2024.
The growing Richmond suburbs now account for more than 40% of the votes, and Spanberger broke through and won this district in her gubernatorial race by more than 2 points.
Democratic Sen. Mark Warner is coasting to a reelection victory over a little-known challenger, giving him a chance to run up his vote tally in rural areas that he still covets as other Virginia Democrats focus heavily on urban areas.
That leaves down-ballot Republicans like Wittman without any cover from above.
Wittman knows his district has changed and he’s prepared for this race like never before. By June 30 he had raised more than $4 million, twice as much as he raised for the entire 2022 campaign.
Republicans point to the bounce-back in the spring when the Democratic-dominated state legislature put a referendum before voters to gerrymander the congressional lines: Conservatives here turned out and the “no” side won by 10 points, even as the ballot won a narrow victory statewide.
That referendum became national news as the Democratic response to Republican-led states like Texas and Ohio drawing new lines to try to fortify the majority for House Speaker Mike Johnson (Louisiana).
But after the Virginia Supreme Court struck down the referendum, after its narrow passage, the spotlight shifted to other states. It’s now shifting back to the commonwealth.
Taylor, who narrowly lost a bid for the Democratic nomination for state attorney general last year, rarely mentions the president’s name on the stump. She’s aware that she needs to win over voters who have supported the president at least once, if not more.
“We talk about Rob Wittman. He’s the person that is trying to be rehired for his job, and I’m the one who’s highlighting why he needs to be fired from his job,” she told The Sun.
Independent partisan groups have flooded the district, which is split between the Richmond and Norfolk media markets, with ads on local TV.
By early August, road signs lined many of the highways that boiled each party’s message down to its most basic form:
“No on Wittman, we can’t afford him.”
“Vote common sense, vote Republican.”
Taylor and her allies have pinned higher prices on Republicans and policy decisions related to tariffs and the Iran war. While touring the Olde Towne Medical & Dental Center, she peppered the staff with questions about drops in patients using Medicaid given Republican cuts to the healthcare program to finance permanent tax cuts.
In August, 109 fewer patients used Medicaid and 111 more showed up without any insurance, according to Aaron Thompson, the center’s CEO.
“It’s almost like we’re going back in time,” he told Taylor.
Wittman has tapped into the type of culture wars that Trump used so successfully in his presidential bids, highlighting cases where Taylor sought lesser jail time for criminals.
“She lets the worst criminals out of jail early,” he said in one ad, as local sheriffs stand behind him.
Taylor’s team has reams of data points showing how crime has gone down in Henrico County, but she also often points to her prosecution of a prominent Democratic state legislator for sexual misconduct with minors.
She says she expects to stand up to the far-left wing of the House Democratic caucus, which will be populated next year by several new members who espouse socialist views.
Ultimately, the race could turn on whether Taylor can successfully turn Wittman’s tenure against him.
Wittman told his local TV station that voters still value someone with a four-decade record of serving local, county, state and federal government.
“That experience has taught me that good public policy is not about how something looks on paper. It is about whether it actually works for the people and communities,” he said.
Taylor reiterated her pledge to support term limits because voters “hate what they see both parties doing.”
“If we put a restriction on how long someone can actually serve, maybe they will focus on the job that they’re supposed to be doing,” she said.
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