With Virginia’s 45-day-long early voting window, the commonwealth is just slightly less than a month away from the beginning of the 2025 statewide election for governor, lieutenant governor, and attorney general, as well as the contests for all 100 House of Delegates seats. However, candidates are already lining up for the 2026 elections.
In the most curious of magisterial districts, the Scottsville District of Albemarle County, Board Supervisor Mike Pruitt, a Democrat, just announced that he wishes to face first-term 5th Congressional District Republican incumbent Rep. John McGuire in the congressional midterm elections.
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Scottsville is a curious district because Donald Trump carried it three times in his runs for president, Republican Glenn Youngkin carried the district in his 2021 gubernatorial run, and in the most recent Virginia Senate race, Republican Philip Hamilton carried the district over eventual winner state Sen. Creigh Deeds. Yet, it has not had a Republican representative on the County Board of Supervisors since Forrest Marshall Jr. in 1999.
It should be noted that in 2024, McGuire lost the district by 118 votes—3451 for Democrat Gloria Witt to his 3333.
Does this mean that Pruitt is some kind of coalition-building centrist? No, it means that except for Hamilton’s Senate race, Scottsville Republicans don’t seem to vote as much for “down-ticket” races—the smaller races that are further down the ballot.
In his campaign announcement, Pruitt struck a decidedly “non-centrist” tone: “The gap between working people and the billionaire class is the widest it’s been in a century.”
He is a former Navy officer and civil rights lawyer who lives with his husband, an Episcopal minister in the bluest part of a congressional district that McGuire carried by 15%. He will face at least one other candidate for the Democratic Party nomination, Paul Riley, also of Albemarle County.
But that’s not the only 2026 congressional midterm race garnering attention already. In Virginia’s 1st Congressional District, currently represented by Republican Rep. Rob Wittman, Democrats Lisa Khanna, Andrew Lucchetti, James Shea, and Melvin Tull have already declared their candidacies, according to the website Ballotpedia.
In Virginia’s 2nd Congressional District, currently represented by Republican Rep. Jen Kiggans, Democrats James Osyf, Nicolaus Sleister, and John Stringfellow declared their candidacies for the Democratic Party nomination.
There is a commonly held complaint that nothing ever gets done in Congress because as soon as you are elected, you are already running for reelection again. That surely is the case this year as the attempts to tap into anti-Department of Government Efficiency and anti-Trump sentiment has started the midterms early.
However, that is what the Founders intended—near-immediate accountability to the people—when they gave the House of Representative control over the budget.
At this rate, the only thing that might spend more money than Congress are the campaigns designed to “flip” the Republican-controlled House of Representatives in 2026.