Last cycle, Democrats ended up fielding only a little-known perennial candidate for Virginia’s 2nd Congressional District, and Republican Scott Taylor unsurprisingly won the open seat 61-38, running far ahead of Trump’s 49-45 margin. On Wednesday, retired Air Force Colonel Dave Belote, the chair of the Virginia Beach Democratic Party, announced that he would run.
Belote ran for an open state Senate seat in 2015 in SD-08, a Virginia Beach seat that Romney won 53-46, and that Trump would carry 51-43 the next year. Democrats didn’t seriously target the race and Belote lost 59-41, though he raised a credible $400,000. Belote also was on Jeopardy! six times in 2009 when he was serving in the Air Force, and he ended up walking away with just shy of $135,000.
This seat, which includes all of Virginia Beach and the state’s portion of the Delmarva Peninsula, as well as Jamestown, Williamsburg, and Yorktown, is an important one, and not just because it’s home to many high school American history test answers. If you sort all 435 House seats by Donald Trump’s margin of victory over Hillary Clinton, Virginia’s 2nd falls right in the middle. This one seat likely won’t be the seat that determines who controls the House, but Democrats need to win light red seats like VA-02 to win back the speaker’s gavel.