FREDERICKSBURG, VA. — The candidates to represent Virginia’s 7th Congressional District both say democracy is in trouble.
Republican Derrick Anderson and Democrat Eugene Vindman each claim the administration has failed voters in the district and across the country as leaders embrace extreme politics. In this year’s elections, they say, the future of the country is at stake.
And that’s pretty much where their messages diverge.
Anderson, a former Army Green Beret, presents himself as an affable candidate who can use simple competence to bring people together in the district where he grew up.
“Ultimately, I think people are just ready for someone to just govern – get things done in Washington, DC, and stop breathing fire,” he said in an interview.
Yevgeny “Eugene” Vindman rose to national prominence after helping his brother blow the whistle on President Donald Trump for pressuring Ukrainian officials to investigate the Biden family. The former army colonel sees another threat: Trump himself.
“Some people have forgotten this issue — some haven’t, and it’s just a mix in the district,” Vindman said of the scandal that led to Trump’s first impeachment. “But I think, given the context, this is not ancient history. Why? Because Donald Trump is now the leading party candidate.”
For months, Vindman, 49, and Anderson, 40, have been entrenched in a vote-by-vote crisis in their fast-growing district, where veterans are part of about 12% of the population. The two Army veterans, who have never before been elected to public office, are vying for the seat in the House of Representatives after Rep. Abigail Spanberger, a moderate Democrat, declined to seek re-election so she could run for governor.
In a competitive race, both have largely followed their sides’ playbooks. Anderson has emphasized the economy and immigration, while Vindman has emphasized the right to abortion and fending off extremism.
But Vindman and Anderson’s perspectives also reflect two different types of voter fears American democracy. And in one deeply divided nationVoters’ choices could impact not only the 7th District, but also control of Congress.
Democrats hope to tighten their hold on the district, which Republicans represented for nearly 50 years until Spanberger flipped the seat in 2018. For conservatives, the race is a chance to win a seat in a duel. without an office holder.
Stephen Farnsworth, a political science professor at the University of Mary Washington, said it is Virginia’s most competitive race.
“There is a lot of national interest in the 7th Virginia, and it is the kind of district where majorities in Congress are won and lost,” he said. “If you can’t win the suburbs of big cities in America, you’re not going to get into the majority of the House of Representatives.”
Democracy is central to the race in part because it forms the basis of Vindman’s national profile.
In campaign videos and on the road, he has described the episode that led him to attack Trump as his call to serve a democracy “uninterrupted, but not blameless.” He said it inspired him to run.
While working as an ethics lawyer in the White House in 2019, Vindman’s twin brother Alexander told him about a phone call in which Trump pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to investigate current President Joe Biden and his son Hunter. The brothers, career military officers who came to the U.S. as toddlers after emigrating from Ukraine, have expressed their concerns with others. The alarm they raised quickly became the focus of Democrats’ first impeachment inquiry into Trump.
In 2020 they were firedand that of the Ministry of Defense The inspector general later said Eugene Vindman likely faced retaliation. He was transferred to the Army until his retirement in 2022.
Despite the scandal, Vindman said he had no vendetta.
“It basically highlights that a major party candidate — the potential president of the United States — has done these things,” he said.
His controversial past made Vindman unique in a busy primarywhere he was a newcomer in a pool of career politicians. The impeachment also helped him raise campaign money – he almost did that $3 million in the bank in late September, compared to Anderson’s $1 million. More than half of the $9 million Democrats spent on general election ads came directly from Vindman’s campaign account, while Anderson relied heavily on Republican outside groups.
But in a diverse district with a small number of independent voters spread from the Washington suburbs to the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, the race is close. Vindman’s ties to Trump’s impeachment could impact his ability to sway moderate voters.
Anderson, meanwhile, is trying to win those votes by portraying Vindman as a partisan Democrat. Together with his criticism of Vindman military rank and service recordAnderson has said the Liberal candidate’s unique history with the former president should cost him dearly.
“He thrives on division because he focuses on his past — his revenge on President Trump — while we focus on the future,” Anderson said.
Vindman thinks voters will respect his actions.
“Moral courage is a rare thing and one of the most valuable qualities,” Vindman said. “That’s the biggest difference between me and Mr. Anderson.”
The race saw a lot of unrest, including a campaign photo Anderson sent showing him posing with a woman and her three daughters. To some, it may have looked like a family photo, except the people with him were not his family.
Vindman said Anderson “tried to fool voters in the district about his fake family” after the photo surfaced The New York Times. Anderson blasted Vindman for dragging the local family through the mud, insisting he was not using the photo to deceive anyone, but to celebrate community ties.
A bigger challenge for Anderson could be finding a ticket with Trump at the top.
In a neighborhood where roughly residential 60,000 federal employeesAnderson deflects questions about Trump’s pitch 100,000 government employees move from the Washington area. His team has said he is against the idea.
Trump has underperformed in this district compared to his fellow Republicans. Under the redrawn boundaries, voters backed Biden by seven points in 2020, data show, while Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin won by about five points.
“Trump is not popular in Northern Virginia,” said Bob Holsworth, a Richmond-based political analyst. “The challenge for any Republican candidate in No-Va is that Trump is someone who came in and said he wanted to drain the swamp.”
Democrats spend more than twice as much on advertising as Republicans and have highlighted Anderson’s ties to Trump. Vindman himself has repeatedly targeted Anderson running a campaign “funded by MAGA extremists,” tying him to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” platform. But Anderson, who Trump endorsedhas vowed to be an independent voice in Congress.
“When I was in the military overseas, it didn’t matter if you were Republican or Democrat — your race, your color, your religion,” Anderson said. “We were all on the same team and we all had a mission.”
Still, Vindman said Trump, and those who supported him, have deepened rather than repaired the rifts in America.
“If they’re Democrats,” Vindman began to say.
He paused and thought about his words.
“If democracy wins the next election, we will have to do a lot of rebuilding.”
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Associated Press writer Gary Fields in Quantico, Virginia, contributed to this report.
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Olivia Diaz is a staff member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative.