Economy, tariffs and Iran war drive voter concerns in district
Virginia Beach, Va. — A rematch between two Navy veterans — Rep. Jen Kiggans (R) and former Rep. Elaine Luria (D) — is shaping up as one of the marquee House battlegrounds of the 2026 midterms, with both parties bracing for an unpredictable result that could decide control of the chamber. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.) traveled to the district last week to stump for Kiggans, who narrowly held the seat for Republicans in 2024 after defeating Luria in 2022.
The district, which President Trump won narrowly in 2024, has flipped between the parties in recent cycles and sits among roughly 20 tossup races that will determine the majority. “This is a contrast election between common sense and crazy, and increasingly now common sense and communism,” Johnson told reporters at a media event with Kiggans this month. “There is no moderate Democratic Party anymore.”
Democrats are widely favored to win at least a narrow House majority, according to the Wall Street Journal’s analysis of aggregated race ratings from the Cook Political Report with Amy Walter, Inside Elections with Nathan L. Gonzales and Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics. Republicans, who currently hold a 219-212 majority with four vacancies, are betting that changes they made to election maps in several red states and efforts to paint Democrats as irresponsible socialists will be enough to keep control.
The Republican redistricting push is projected to net the party approximately five seats this cycle, according to the Cook Political Report. Even with that gain, Republicans face structural headwinds. A sitting president’s party has only gained House seats during a midterm election a handful of times, most recently in 2002, and Trump’s approval ratings remain deep underwater. Fox News polls in recent months found voters citing Democrats as better on the economy than Republicans — the first time in over a decade the party has held that edge.
“Unless the ship starts to clearly kind of turn around for the Republicans, you’d assume that the Democrats would win the lion’s share” of the tossup races, and even pick up some of the seats currently rated lean or likely Republican, said Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball. He projected House Democrats would number above 220 in the next Congress, above the 218 needed for a majority. Kondik said the Virginia Beach district is a bellwether: if Republicans hold it, they are more likely to either keep Democrats to a small majority or potentially retain the House.
Voters in the district said they are focused on local economic conditions strained by manufacturing and federal job losses, retaliatory tariffs imposed in response to Trump administration levies that prompted a drop in Port of Virginia exports last year, and the Iran war. “The war changed everybody’s day-to-day life here,” said Cheryl Baxter, a 54-year-old office coordinator. “Are we gonna eat today, or do we put gas in the car? Am I gonna pay that light bill, or are we gonna wash our clothes?”
GOP incumbents across the country have had to answer for the Iran war and resulting volatile gasoline prices while trying to campaign on tax cuts and affordability. At an August telephone town hall in a Harrisburg, Pa., swing district, Rep. Scott Perry (R., Pa.) led with a defense of the Iran war, then spent much of the hour fielding skeptical questions about it. Perry won re-election in 2024 by about 5,000 votes. “I’m driving a car too. I’m paying the same high gas prices, and I don’t like it any more than you or anyone else does,” Perry told one caller. “You will see the price of gasoline rapidly drop.”
In a separate development reported by the New York Times, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D., N.Y.) met privately in recent weeks with Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and a key outside adviser, and the two discussed possible areas of common ground, according to two people familiar with the meeting. Asked about the meeting in a Sunday Fox News interview, Johnson said he had first learned of it that morning. “I know Jared is a smart guy and he hedges bets, but I’m telling you what, you better not bet against the House Republicans,” Johnson said.
In the Virginia Beach race itself, both candidates are advocating for increased military spending and healthcare resources for veterans in a district that includes several military bases, but they diverge sharply elsewhere. Luria has painted Kiggans as an out-of-touch incumbent whose pro-Trump votes — including for his “one big, beautiful bill” — hurt the pocketbooks of constituents who rely on Medicaid. The challenger has called Trump’s import levies the “Trump-Kiggans tariffs” and criticized Kiggans’s support for the Iran war. She has also distanced herself from the resurgent left wing of her party, including candidates who identify as Democratic socialists or who want to lower U.S. military spending.
“I frequently voted against the party and for stronger defense budgets” when she was in office, Luria said in an interview. She said she is “clearly not aligned with or ideologically similar to some of these Democratic socialists running around the country.”
Kiggans, who is endorsed by Trump and rarely votes against the president’s priorities, has advocated for temporarily extending enhanced insurance subsidies under the Affordable Care Act. She has linked Luria to Biden-era foreign-policy and border-security decisions she described as weak. “I think we will see gas prices lower even further. But there’s a reason that we have sent our military to that part of the world,” Kiggans said, emphasizing the goal of eliminating Iranian nuclear capability.
Kiggans has raised almost $6 million compared with Luria’s roughly $4.6 million, and both candidates had more than $3 million in cash on hand as of mid-July, according to federal election filings. A July poll sponsored by the Democratic House Majority PAC found the two candidates tied.
District voters interviewed by the Journal split along familiar lines. “I really don’t think Trump’s doing that bad of a job,” said Stuart Pieper, a bike mechanic and Navy veteran. “The military keeps us very Republican. A moderate Democrat would have to come through and sound awfully Republican for me to vote that way. And none of them do.”
Latasha Holloway, a disability advocate and military parent, said she will not vote for Kiggans because of her connection to Trump. “Right now we have an administration that is only willing to run our economy into the ground. Unfortunately, the more pain people feel at the pump, with their electrical bills, that’s going to be reflected in November,” she said.
Democrats’ effort to redraw the Virginia district bluer was thrown out by the state’s top court, giving Kiggans a shot at keeping the seat, according to the Journal.