Coming next week: We’re preparing to launch a brand new series of posts. Look for it on Tuesday! Today, instead of our usual deep-dive, we have a recap of social media highlights from the last couple of weeks. Facebook, BlueSky, and Instagram allow us to respond rapidly to whatever Wittman is doing, saying, or voting about, and as always, it’s been a lot!

Our Substack has been busy as usual:

• Last Thursday we showed you how Wittman uses immigration as a political wedge - without ever trying to do anything to solve the real immigration problems that do exist - to divide our district and fool people into voting for him.

• On Tuesday we wrapped up our “Myth of the Week” series by examining Wittman’s record as a public health professional in the legislature. Shocker: he votes with his party and almost never with the scientific consensus.

Now, here’s a sampling of rapid-response items from our socials that you may have missed. We embed links to BlueSky here because they’re viewable without a login; you can also find them on Facebook and Instagram.

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Wittman predictably silent on the largest, most brazen Presidential corruption in US history

The $1.776 billion “settlement fund” (it’s not a settlement) is illegal, unconstitutional, and a moral outrage, and it’s not even remotely questionable. There is absolutely no doubt that this is cause for impeachment of Trump and everyone who has enabled it. It is cut-and-dried theft from the American people, right in front of us, in the open. And Rob Wittman has said not one damn word about it. So we suggest that we all do something about it!

June 6th Candidate Forum in Williamsburg

The Democratic primary is probably the most important next step on the road to ridding our district of Rob Wittman. While our recent post described each of the seven candidates (plus one more who has since dropped out), hearing from each of them in person will help all of us decide who’ll get our vote.

Other forums are being held, including today in Richmond, but the June 6th event will have at least six of the seven in attendance.

Doing nothing, taking credit

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Plenty of us in VA-01 understand the stakes

Don’t forget: HR1’s biggest cuts haven’t even kicked in yet - but they soon will

Rob profits as Virginia’s largest utility approaches monopoly status

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Wittman is a rubber stamp for all of Trump’s crazy

Wittman could vote to stop the Iran war but instead wraps himself in the flag while ignoring the needs of our military

Wittman applauded himself for receiving a “Champion of Science” award but his voting record doesn’t match this title. At all!

To get the full picture on Rob Wittman, subscribe to this Substack (two emails a week, and we’ll never bombard your inbox about anything else) and any of our social media channels: Facebook, Instagram, BlueSky, or Reddit.

Thanks for reading, and let us know your thoughts here in the comments. What else should we cover? What angle are we not seeing? What is driving you crazy about Rob Wittman right now? When he’s kicked out, what should be the new representative’s first priority?

MYTH:

Congressman Rob Wittman is a public health professional with integrity

REALITY:

Wittman uses his credentials and experience to claim a special interest in public health, while he dismantles public health programs

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The very least we should expect from our elected officials — even and especially in the modern political landscape — is that they stand behind their promises and back up their claims. In other words, they should have integrity.

Congressman Rob Wittman claims he’s “passionate about protecting Virginians and raising awareness about how public health issues impact lives and communities.” Let’s find out if his public health-related actions line up with the way he presents himself to his constituents.

Credentials and background

After obtaining a master’s degree in public health, Wittman worked for 26 years at the Virginia Department of Health. At one point, he was an environmental health specialist for health departments in Virginia’s Northern Neck and Middle Peninsula regions. What might his duties have entailed? According to the Virginia Health Workforce Development Authority (VHWDA):

Environmental health specialists educate and consult clients and enforce regulations governing the sanitation of food, milk and water; hazardous and infectious waste; sewage; institutional environments; and health hazards. They help improve water and sanitation facilities at recreational areas, nursing homes, schools, restaurants and other locations, and are actively involved in the overall environmental quality of a community.

As a congressman, Wittman has made plenty of statements about the importance of robust public health programs and policies. But his voting record doesn’t show any real commitment to those ideas. As a former environmental health specialist, he has not used his power to support needed regulations in the areas of food and water sanitation, or to maintain or improve environmental quality in the communities he represents. It’s hard to see how or whether his public health background ever informed his congressional efforts.

Wittman’s actual Congressional actions on public health

He claims to be a “champion of protecting and restoring the Chesapeake Bay” and introduced the Chesapeake Bay Accountability and Recovery Act, which became law in 2014. Wittman claims to value conservation and the environment, and pledged to support the Chesapeake Stewardship Grants, which Congress was already funding.

More often than not, however, he says one thing about public health issues and does another. Wittman claims to have “professional expertise” in water quality and other natural resources issues, but in Congress he voted to roll back clean water safeguards. He stayed silent when President Trump repealed the Endangerment Act and voted to increase our exposure to lead (which is especially egregious because Wittman’s own former employer — the state’s Department of Health — runs a lead poisoning prevention program!)

Wittman urged reform of America’s healthcare system to provide quality, affordable healthcare and commended U.S. public health professionals by posting about H.Con.Res. 62 on “Public Health Thank You Day.” But once again, his legislative work contradicted his messaging. He voted for H. R. 1, which includes steep cuts to Medicaid and cancer research; endorsed a plan to make pre-existing conditions a part of our healthcare coverage; undermined the Affordable Care Act; aligned himself with radical conservatives out to destroy the ACA; makes inappropriate medical decisions for his constituents; signed multiple anti-abortion bills; and supports forced birth.

The man who should have seen the hantavirus outbreak coming

Wittman didn’t object when the Trump Administration gutted the CDC’s Vessel Sanitation Program in 2025. His silence is especially alarming given the hantavirus outbreak aboard a Dutch cruise ship in May 2026. That outbreak resulted in three deaths and at least “10 confirmed or suspected cases” — including two Americans.

The outbreak situation is especially ironic given that Wittman’s job as an environmental health specialist likely involved duties to ensure proper sanitation. He also once worked as a field director for the Virginia Department of Health’s shellfish sanitation division. Wittman’s education and job experience tells us he knows — or at least should know — the importance of sanitation in public health, yet we can find no record of any statement, press release, or public speech in which Wittman sought to prevent or even criticize the shutdown of the CDC’s Vessel Sanitation Program.

Why isn’t Wittman bringing his expertise in sanitation to bear on a deadly outbreak of hantavirus? Who is he really protecting: our health and lives, or the Trump Administration?

Wittman’s harmful voting record belies his public health credentials

Potential voters who hear Wittman crow about his master’s degree in Health Policy and Administration and public health work experience might conclude, “Here’s a politician who actually cares about public health.” It’s true that he earned that degree and that some Virginians may have benefited from his work in the Department of Health.

Whether through his voting record, inaction, or silent complicity, Wittman supports Trump administration policies and regulatory rollbacks that weaken or dismantle public health and environmental agencies and programs. Such anti-public health attacks risk a loss of public health benefits to the tune of $22.3 billion. Millions of Americans are impacted by “lost consumer savings; more premature mortalities, hospital admissions, and asthma cases; worse air pollution; and higher greenhouse gas emissions.”

Wittman has been spinning a myth about how his public health experience informs his legislative work. The reality is that, as a Congressman, he’s been actively shredding the programs and funding we need to stay healthy. He pretends to be a public health professional with integrity when the opposite is true: Wittman’s votes have stripped our healthcare coverage and harmed our environment; he is sabotaging our quality of life.

How do you think Rob Wittman could show some integrity in the public health arena? Let us know in the comments here, or on any of our social media channels: BlueSky, Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit.

• Last week we showed you how data centers power Wittman’s pocketbook.

• On Tuesday we served up eight better options than Rob Wittman for VA-01.

• Check out our social channels for punchy posts and lively discussion. Join us on Substack, Facebook, BlueSky, Instagram, or Reddit.

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Congressman Rob Wittman wants you to believe he’s serious about immigration. His issues page opens with the line “America was built by immigrants” before pivoting to ominous talk of a “broken system,” “catch and release,” and the urgent need to enforce the law. It’s a familiar two-step: a polite nod to the people who built this country, followed by a long list of reasons we should be afraid of them.

So let’s ask the question Wittman doesn’t want asked: What has he actually done?

Has he supported the only serious bipartisan immigration fix in a generation?
No — he stood by while his party killed it.

Has he proposed a workable, humane plan to fix legal pathways that have been deliberately strangled?
Nope.

Has he told VA-01 the truth about what immigrants contribute to our economy, our farms, our shipyards, and our communities?
Absolutely not.

What he has done is vote for political-stunt bills, parrot misleading talking points about “open borders” and immigrants getting free smartphones, and exploit grief over a tragic killing to falsely attack the governor for trying to keep state law enforcement focused on actual crimes.

It’s time to separate what’s real from the propaganda, and look hard at the gap between what Wittman says about immigration and what he does.

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First, the truth: immigrants built (and still build) Virginia

There are more than one million immigrants in Virginia today, making up 12.5% of the state’s population. Of the top ten states by immigrant population, Virginia leads in the share of foreign-born residents with a bachelor’s degree or higher. And a majority of Virginia’s immigrants are naturalized U.S. citizens.

Even undocumented Virginians — the population Wittman talks about most often, and most demagogically — pay an estimated $689.8 million in state and local taxes every year, funding Virginia schools, roads, and emergency services they themselves are mostly barred from accessing. They pay a higher effective state and local tax rate (7.9%) than Virginia’s top 1% of households (7.2%). More than a quarter of undocumented immigrant Virginians live with a U.S. citizen child under 18. These are our neighbors.

Nationally, the data is clear: immigrants — including undocumented immigrants — commit crimes at lower rates than native-born U.S. citizens. In the years in which border encounters reached record highs, violent crime in border states actually declined. The “migrant crime wave” Wittman and his allies invoke is a campaign slogan, not a data-driven statistic.

Here in VA-01, immigrants are not an abstraction. They are the workers in our shipyards, the farmhands harvesting Northern Neck produce, the doctors in our hospitals, the engineers at Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren, the small-business owners in Fredericksburg and Williamsburg, the kids in our public schools who are first in their families to dream about college. Wittman represents these people too.

Before we catalogue Wittman’s failures, one more thing needs to be said clearly: there is a real and significant difference between legal and illegal immigration. Legal immigrants — green card holders, visa holders, asylum seekers following the required process, DACA recipients, Temporary Protected Status holders — have every right to be here. Coming here legally has been made deliberately harder; in many cases, nearly impossible. Visa backlogs can stretch for years or even longer. The asylum system is buried under hundreds of thousands of unprocessed claims. Work-visa programs are too rigid to serve the agricultural and seafood employers right here in VA-01.

Wittman and Trump ignore all of this. In their rhetoric and their policy choices, they collapse the entire spectrum into a single threatening category with no legitimate claim to be here. That is not immigration enforcement. It is the deliberate erasure of legal status as a meaningful category. And it is the foundation on which every piece of their dishonest rhetoric is built.

The four big failures

Wittman has failed VA-01 on immigration in four interlocking ways:

1. Wittman helped kill the bipartisan border deal at Trump’s command

In late 2023 and early 2024, three senators — James Lankford (R-OK), Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ), and Chris Murphy (D-CT) — spent four months hammering out a bipartisan border security deal. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell blessed the negotiations. The National Border Patrol Council endorsed the bill. Lankford himself called it the most conservative border security bill in four decades.

The deal would have:

• Raised the bar for asylum claims, with faster processing

• Given the President authority to shut down the border when daily encounters exceeded set thresholds

• Hired thousands more Border Patrol agents and asylum officers

• Funded fentanyl detection at ports of entry

• Ended the practice of having migrants wait in U.S. communities for years before their cases were heard

This was not a Democratic wish list. This was a deal Republicans had spent the previous year demanding. President Biden — whom Wittman calls weak on the border — had endorsed the deal and pledged to sign it.

And then, in a Truth Social post, Donald Trump demanded that Republicans in Congress kill it. Why? Because rather than help the country improve border security, he wanted the border chaos to continue to aid his run against Biden in November 2024.

Senate Republicans collapsed into line. House Speaker Mike Johnson declared the bill dead on arrival in the House. Senator Chris Murphy, one of the deal’s authors, said it plainly: that Republicans had crafted a bill too effective for them to support, because they wanted to keep immigration alive as a political weapon to exploit.

Where was Wittman?

Silent, compliant, and cowering. He did not break with Speaker Johnson. He did not co-sponsor an alternative bipartisan companion. He did not call for the deal to get a vote. He let the most conservative immigration bill in a generation die at Trump’s command — because Trump needed a broken border more than he needed a fixed one.

If Wittman actually believed his own talking points about a “border crisis” — if he genuinely thought Americans were in danger and the system was broken — he would have moved heaven and earth to pass that bill. But he didn’t, because the goal was never to fix the border. The goal was to keep the border useful as a political wedge, and to amp up Americans’ fear of the people they would have embraced as their neighbors.

That is the central unforgivable fact of Rob Wittman’s record on immigration. He never sincerely tries to solve the real immigration problems that America has.

2. Wittman votes for stunts, not solutions

Once the bipartisan deal was dead, Wittman lined up to vote for the showpieces — bills designed to dominate cable chyrons, not to actually overhaul a broken system.

H. R. 2, the “Secure the Border Act” of 2023

Wittman voted YES on this entirely partisan bill in May 2023. It passed the House 219–213 with zero Democratic support. It would have effectively shut down the asylum system, restarted border-wall construction, and barred even religiously affiliated nonprofits from helping migrants. Everyone — including Wittman — knew it had no chance in the Senate. It was a campaign prop, not a legislative effort.

The Laken Riley Act

Wittman voted YES in January 2025. The bill mandates ICE detention without bond for any non-citizen arrested for or merely charged with — not convicted of — offenses including shoplifting and minor theft. Civil rights groups across the spectrum opposed it: the ACLU, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the League of Women Voters, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the National Education Association, the National Council of Churches, and many more. Their core objection was that the bill strips basic due process by mandating detention based on accusation rather than conviction — a principle that should alarm anyone, regardless of party, who understands that “innocent until proven guilty” is fundamental to the American legal system.

The murder of Laken Riley was a horror. Her family deserves justice. But the bill named after her would not have prevented her killing; it would, however, allow ICE to indefinitely detain people accused of stealing diapers. That isn’t border security. That’s expansion of carceral power dressed up in a young woman’s name.

H. R. 1, the “One Big Beautiful Bill”

Wittman voted YES on this monstrosity in 2025, and a major component of it was a record-shattering expansion of ICE and CBP funding — the largest in U.S. history — to fund mass deportation. The same bill strips healthcare from roughly 323,000 Virginians, risks food assistance for 78,000 of us, and threatens seven rural Virginia hospitals with closure. Wittman traded our healthcare and our hospitals for an immigration-enforcement spending spree he could put in a press release.

Notice the pattern: every Wittman immigration vote is maximalist on enforcement, minimalist on solutions. He votes for detention. He votes for deportation funding. He has never once voted for a comprehensive bill that would clear the asylum backlog, expand legal pathways, modernize work visas for the agriculture and seafood employers in our own district, or protect the Dreamers who have lived here their entire conscious lives.

That isn’t an immigration policy. That’s a brand.

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3. Wittman’s rhetoric is engineered to mislead

Wittman doesn’t just vote for political-theater bills. He talks about immigration in ways calibrated to create fear and confusion.

In April 2022, Wittman went on Richmond radio and told listeners that the Biden administration was going to give smartphones to people crossing the border — implying lavish freebies for migrants on the public dime. The reality: ICE issues stripped-down devices for the specific purpose of tracking migrants released from detention. The phones cannot make personal calls, browse the internet, or open social media. They run a single app, SmartLINK, used to monitor non-detained migrants awaiting hearings. They are surveillance tools, not perks.

A serious legislator would have known this. Wittman either did know and said it anyway, or he didn’t bother to learn before going on radio. Take your pick — neither is good.

In March 2026, after the tragic killing of Fairfax County mother Stephanie Minter by an illegal immigrant, Wittman issued a joint Republican-delegation statement attacking Governor Abigail Spanberger for ending Virginia’s participation in the federal 287(g) program, which deputized state and local officers to enforce federal civil immigration law. Wittman framed it as a public-safety failure.

Wittman twisted the facts to suit his attack on Spanberger. First, the murderer was first arrested in 2018 and had a court order for deportation in 2020 – but ICE never picked him up, not even during Glenn Youngkin’s governorship of Virginia, and neither ICE nor Fairfax County law enforcement can explain why. Wittman completely ignored this history to cast Spanberger’s policy as the cause of Ms. Minter’s murder.

Second, Wittman twisted Spanberger’s policy to suit his attack. What Spanberger actually said was that state law enforcement should focus on investigating and solving crimes, not on civil immigration paperwork. Her directive explicitly preserves cooperation with federal authorities when there’s a valid judicial warrant. The reform is about resources and trust: when immigrant communities fear that calling 911 will get a relative deported, they stop calling. Crimes go unreported, witnesses go silent, and predators take advantage. Police chiefs across the country have warned about this for years.

Wittman knows this. He doesn’t care. He used the family’s grief to score a political point against the Governor.

4. Real enforcement doesn’t look like political theater

Here’s the part Wittman never wants to discuss: legitimate immigration enforcement and the spectacle currently unfolding under the Trump administration are not the same thing.

Legitimate enforcement is the prosecution of cartels and human traffickers, the orderly processing of asylum claims, work-authorization audits of employers, and the targeted detention of individuals convicted of serious crimes. Most Virginians support this. The bipartisan deal Wittman let die would have funded it.

What is happening now is something else. Masked federal agents are seizing people at courthouses — people who followed the rules and showed up for their own immigration hearings. Border Patrol agents are being deployed to U.S. cities far from any border. People with active legal status (Temporary Protected Status holders, asylum seekers with pending cases, green-card holders) are being swept up. Children are being separated from parents. Due process is being routed around as a matter of policy.

This isn’t law enforcement. It’s a performance of toughness designed to be filmed, posted, and used in campaign ads. It is, almost literally, theater — performance without policy.

What does Wittman say about any of this? Almost nothing. He has not held an in-person town hall to answer constituent questions about it — his constituents had to host a town hall in his absence at the Twin Hickory Library, with an empty chair where their congressman should have been. About 150 VA-01 residents showed up. Many spoke directly to the chair.

Wittman has not introduced legislation to require judicial oversight of ICE operations. He has not signed letters demanding accountability for due-process violations. He has not asked the hard questions about masked agents in our communities. That’s silent complicity.

What Democrats actually proposed — and what Wittman could still do

One more myth worth dispatching: the lazy claim that Democrats “want open borders” or “have no plan.”

Democrats worked with their Republican colleagues and tried to pass the most conservative border security overhaul in 40 years — the Lankford-Sinema-Murphy bill. The Biden administration endorsed it and pledged to sign it. House Democrats have repeatedly proposed bills to expand legal pathways, modernize agricultural visas, and protect Dreamers. Senate Democrats voted for the bipartisan deal not once but twice. Virginia’s senators — Mark Warner and Tim Kaine — voted yes both times.

Senate Republicans voted no. And in the House, Wittman and his Republican colleagues refused to allow a vote at all..

So when Wittman tells you Democrats are responsible for the “broken system,” ask him: Why did your party kill the only serious bipartisan fix in a generation?

If Wittman wanted to lead, here’s what he could do tomorrow:

• Co-sponsor a House version of the Lankford-Sinema-Murphy framework

• Demand judicial oversight of ICE detention and deportation operations

• Withhold funding for ICE until sufficient reforms are in place to protect the innocent

• Support a Dreamer protection bill — most of these young people have never known another country, and must not be held accountable for decisions they didn’t make

• Modernize agricultural and seafood worker visas so the Northern Neck farmers and Hampton Roads watermen who employ them can hire legally

• Hold an actual in-person town hall in VA-01 and answer questions about ICE tactics in our state

• Tell the truth about what immigrants contribute to Virginia, even when it complicates a campaign mailer

Wittman is choosing fear over facts, and politics over people

Strip away the press releases and the folksy emails, and Rob Wittman’s actual record on immigration is this: he stood by as his party killed the most conservative border deal in 40 years, voted for stunts that don’t fix anything, parroted false claims when it served the campaign narrative, exploited a family’s grief and twisted the facts to attack a Virginia governor doing serious work, and stayed silent when masked federal agents started disappearing his neighbors at courthouses.

We deserve a member of Congress who can hold two thoughts in their head at once: that immigration policy genuinely needs reform, and that the people affected by that policy are human beings — our neighbors, our coworkers, our kids’ classmates. We deserve a representative who will tell the truth instead of peddling fear. That is not who Rob Wittman is, so it’s time for him to go.

We can do better… and we will! Find out about eight better options to represent VA-01. We’ll continue to bring you updates on what we can all do to make sure we replace Wittman this November.

What do you think Wittman should do — or stop doing — on immigration? Let us know what you think by posting comments here or on any of our social media channels: Facebook, Instagram, BlueSky, or Reddit.

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Groceries cost more than they did last year. Rent, electricity, and gas also cost more; childcare, too. And if you’re one of the roughly 23,000 VA-01 residents expected to lose Medicaid coverage under the law Rob Wittman voted for, your healthcare is about to cost a lot more, or possibly even disappear.

This is the affordability and healthcare crunch every VA-01 family is feeling. Affordability is a bigger problem today than in 2024, when Donald Trump promised to bring prices down “on day one.” Every candidate on the August 4 Democratic Party primary ballot is running on affordability. But what differentiates them?

We’ve read every campaign website. We scrolled their Facebook, Instagram, X, and Bluesky accounts. The good news for VA-01 voters is that you have real choices. Each of the eight Democratic candidates brings different priorities, different experience, and different ideas about how to represent us. In this newsletter we’ll help you choose wisely.

What they have in common

Across the eight Democratic challengers, the consensus is broad. All of them want to lower prescription drug prices. All want to protect Medicaid. All want billionaires and large corporations to pay higher effective tax rates than teachers and firefighters currently do. All want reproductive rights protected in federal law. All of them understand that rural hospitals (most specifically Rappahannock General) are at risk because of the cuts Wittman enthusiastically supported.

The candidates’ differences are in approach, background, and emphasis. Below is a comparison built around the issues voters care about most.

The comparison

First, here are three tables (each with three issues) that show the candidates’ approaches. The issues are ordered by voters’ priority, and Rob Wittman’s perspective on each is included to help you compare the incumbent against his opponents.

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Get to know your candidates

Now let’s review what each candidate emphasizes most strongly, in their own framing:

Salaam Bhatti — public-interest attorney, child of immigrants who relied on WIC and free school meals, refuses corporate PAC and AIPAC money.

• Centerpiece: Medicare for All, tax billionaires, restore trust in government.

• Distinctive: guaranteed income, uncapping the U.S. House so each member represents fewer constituents.

Tim Cywinski — community organizer, Sierra Club veteran, gun violence prevention advocate, refuses corporate PAC money. Calls himself a “Reformist Democrat.”

• Centerpiece: the “Fair Shot Agenda” of campaign finance reform, $500 “Democracy Dollars” for every citizen, and lower middle-class taxes.

• Distinctive: the only candidate making Big Tech data center build-out a flagship issue, with detailed proposals to stop projects from raising your electric bill or draining water supplies.

Elizabeth Dempsey-Beggs — Army veteran and former Tank Commander, foster parent, mother of four, William & Mary MBA student, rejects AIPAC money.

• Centerpiece: a “New Deal Democrat” platform of family stability, affordable childcare, public schools, veterans’ care, and reproductive rights.

• Distinctive: foster youth advocacy and military-family TRICARE focus.

Jason Knapp — 21-year Navy F/A-18 pilot, NATO veteran, energy policy expert, grew up on SNAP and Medicaid, refuses corporate PAC money.

• Centerpiece: economic security from the ground up, democracy that works, real support for veterans.

• Distinctive: national-security Democrat profile and discipline.

Ericka Kopp — healthcare attorney, caregiver to her disabled veteran husband, biracial, bisexual and bilingual.

• Centerpiece: a comprehensive universal healthcare system that includes dental, vision, and hearing.

• Distinctive: the most expansive progressive platform in the field, including abolishing ICE, releasing the full Epstein files, raising the minimum wage to $30/hour, and impeaching Trump on day one.

Lewis Littlepage — retired attorney and retired Air Force officer, former federal prosecutor, current Poquoson Electoral Board chair.

• Centerpiece: secure borders with constitutional rights, fiscal responsibility, equal justice.

• Distinctive: the most district-specific accountability document in the field — a dedicated farmer-focused page enumerating specific harms Wittman’s votes have done to Virginia farmers and how a different representative would respond.

Shannon Taylor — three-term Henrico Commonwealth’s Attorney, first woman elected to that office, with a 90% homicide conviction rate.

• Centerpiece: prosecutorial credibility, protect Medicaid, lower costs, defend reproductive freedom, hold Wittman accountable.

• Distinctive: pledged as commonwealth’s attorney never to prosecute women or doctors for abortion care; took on the KKK and the NRA.

Mel Tull — Army veteran and business attorney, former Henrico Democrats treasurer, Fortune 500 corporate counsel turned small-firm practitioner.

• Centerpiece: protect Medicaid and reduce the deficit, lower drug costs without “stifling innovation.”

• Distinctive: the most centrist framing in the field, including an “all of the above” energy approach and explicit emphasis on bipartisan cooperation.

Where Wittman has waffled

There are some specific, notable gaps between what Wittman tells you and what he has actually done.

On healthcare. Wittman’s campaign website still talks about “transparency in healthcare,” “ending surprise billing,” and protecting “current Social Security and Medicare beneficiaries.” Then he voted for a law that the Kaiser Family Foundation estimates will strip coverage from roughly 350,000 Virginians, including more than 23,000 of your neighbors in VA-01. Vote Smart shows him rated 0% by the Alliance for Retired Americans and 0% by the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare.

On the Medicaid promise specifically. He signed a letter to House leadership saying he opposed the version of the One Big Beautiful Bill that would gut Medicaid. Then he betrayed us all and voted yes anyway. The cuts total roughly $1 trillion. Rappahannock General Hospital — the closest hospital for many Northern Neck residents — is among the rural hospitals at risk of closing as a result.

On affordability. He campaigned on “lowering costs.” He then voted for tariffs that have raised consumer prices and squeezed Virginia farmers; for a tax-and-spending package that adds trillions to the federal debt; and against the Affordable Care Act provisions that help the very middle-class families he claims to represent. This was all under the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which he now refers to as the “Working Families Tax Cut Act.” That bill doesn’t reference “working families” even once, and the permanent tax cuts are for the wealthy and corporations. His insistence on calling it this name is a sick, deeply unfunny joke.

On democracy. Wittman joined the Texas v. Pennsylvania amicus brief in December 2020, a lawsuit attempting to overturn the results of a presidential election. The lawsuit failed, so he then voted against certifying the 2020 election results on January 6, 2021. His campaign rhetoric emphasizes “constitutional values.” Wittman’s votes — as usual — don’t match his words; he cannot be trusted.

What’s at stake

The Cook Political Report rated VA-01 as “Leans Republican” before the Virginia Supreme Court’s redistricting ruling reinstated the old map. VA-01 was one of only 19 districts nationally that moved left at the presidential level in 2024. The most recent polling of the existing VA-01 — from a Republican firm in April 2026 — showed Trump underwater in the district at 42% favorable, 50% unfavorable. Wittman himself registered just 35% favorable. In a head-to-head matchup earlier in the campaign, the race polled dead even.

A Democrat can win the VA-01 race. Whichever Democrat emerges from August 4 will face a vulnerable Rob Wittman in a district that’s tilting away from him. In 18 years, he’s never had to compete for our seat like this. He’s not prepared for it. His lies are catching up with him. More of us see what Wittman has become: a silently complicit MAGA politician who serves wealthy donors and sells our rights, liberties, and opportunities to please them. We don’t have to suffer more years of this. America can’t afford to suffer the likes of Wittman.

The choice you make in the primary matters.

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How to vote in the Democratic primary

• June 19: Early voting begins

• July 13: Voter registration deadline

• August 4, 2026: Election Day

✅ You can register, check your status, or request an absentee ballot at elections.virginia.gov.

Read the candidates’ websites. Follow them on your favorite platforms. If you can, donate to their campaigns. Here’s how you can find them:

Show up at candidate forums. Ask them questions. They are running to represent you. Make them earn it.

We’ll continue tracking each candidate’s promises against their actions through August and into November. Subscribe for updates, and tell us your thoughts about the candidate field in the comments here or on any of our social media channels: BlueSky, Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit.

• Last week we brought you an update on the State of the Race.

• Tuesday’s Myth of the Week addressed whether Wittman is good for small business. (No.)

• Our social channels have been abuzz this week with lots of spirited debate. Join us on Substack, Facebook, BlueSky, Instagram, or Reddit.

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Data centers are “the information backbone of an increasingly digital world.” These specialized, industrial facilities enable the digital services upon which we’re increasingly reliant. Inside these monolithic buildings are rows upon rows of servers, a sea of switches and cables, and the hardware needed to keep them functioning.

The construction and operation of data centers strains Virginia’s resources while also negatively affecting our health, pocketbooks, and quality of life — especially for rural residents. To address the issue, Virginia’s General Assembly legislators introduced dozens of bills in 2026 to rein in data center growth before it becomes unmanageable. Governor Spanberger signed most of the energy and data center legislation and responded with amendments to others. On 4/23/26, lawmakers “accepted amendments to bills that reallocated distribution costs for data centers to rein in residential power bills, but rejected amendments that would have lowered the return on equity for Dominion Energy.”

Data centers are necessary, but we must have regulations and oversight to minimize their harmful effects and their indiscriminate sprawl. We’d have less to worry about if not for Congressman Rob Wittman, who bends the knee to the wealthy donors, PACS, and fossil fuel companies behind data center proliferation. In particular, Wittman’s one “little” vote for H. R. 1 has huge consequences for our district.

A brief history of data centers in Virginia

Virginia is already home to more than 300 data centers, thus earning the nickname “Data Center Alley.” 80% of them are situated in Northern Virginia; the rest are clustered in Henrico and Mecklenburg counties. Over the past 20 years or so, a significant amount of Virginia farmland has evolved into a technology hub. Major infrastructure investment, access to a high-tech workforce, and compelling tax incentives have made Virginia the data center capital of the world.

For example, White Oak Technology Park in eastern Henrico, owned by Meta, spans 130 acres and provides computing power for Meta’s platforms including Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram. As of 2023, Amazon Web Services planned to invest $35 billion in Virginia to build more data centers across the Commonwealth by 2040.

The Data Center Coalition claims that data centers are an “economic powerhouse” for our state because of the tax revenue, job creation, and investment opportunities they create:

• Meeting the rampant demand for cloud computing services

• Tax revenue supports other projects (for instance, the Affordable Housing Trust Fund)

• Job growth

• Business-to-business purchases (e.g., security and HVAC services)

• Data companies provide grants to schools and community organizations

• Local economy diversification

• Higher economic output for Virginia ($15.3 billion in 2021)

Tax exemptions spurred 90% of data center investment and growth. But these tax exemptions also mean that data center construction is being subsidized by Virginia’s taxpayers, to the tune of $1.9 billion a year. That breaks down to “a taxpayer cost of more than $1.2 million” for each new job generated by data centers.

The explosive proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) and its data-intensive needs will continue to require increasing amounts of massive processing power. While data centers may be indispensable, their effects and consequences also require examination and regulation — and, so far, Rob Wittman has not spoken up to protect our district.

At what cost?

Data centers create significant environmental and resource costs.

• Unsustainable increases in water and energy usage, and land depletion

• Health risks from Perfluoroalkyl and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS)

• Insufficient buffers between data centers and residential areas

• Environmental injustice and data center concentration in low-income/historically marginalized communities

• Threats to historical sites and family cemeteries

The weight of these burdens falls heavily on surrounding communities, especially rural and low-income areas, while the majority of economic benefits apply to entities outside these communities. There is a significant imbalance of needs between local, state and federal levels.

Data center campuses, which include server warehouses, electrical substations and backup diesel generators, far surpass the carbon footprint of business developments like factories and stadiums. Some data centers “need more power than a small city, more than any utility has ever supplied to a single user.” Virginia’s data centers are in the coal-heavy grid region of the mid-Atlantic. Most electrical grids currently rely on fossil fuels, so there’s a huge climate cost attached to powering data centers — unless and until renewable energy sources replace fossil fuels on a massive scale.

Wittman opened a Pandora’s Box of data center problems

How has Wittman’s support of the Trump administration’s energy policies impacted data center development in VA-01? Should we be worried?

Wittman’s H. R. 1 vote spurred hyperscale data center construction, along with the promise of tax credits for the companies who built them.

Wittman’s track record of awarding tax cuts to billionaires while his constituents suffer financially plays a role here. Tech billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk demand ever-increasing amounts of energy for data centers, in service of goals that don’t necessarily align with those of Virginia’s residents. Thanks to Wittman’s enabling of their exploding net worth, billionaires have even more to spend on lobbying for and constructing data centers as well as the pollution-gushing power plants that fuel them.

Tech companies claim that more nuclear power will solve the fossil fuel problem. Meta, Google, and Amazon want to triple global nuclear capacity by 2050 (it’s currently at 20%; over 50% of Virginia’s electricity is powered by natural gas). They’re targeting counties like Goochland for their heavy industry development. During a meeting of the Goochland Planning Commission on 9/25/25, Supervisor Lyle noted that “Goochland County will newly receive $1.5 million in annual tax revenue from Amazon, and another $93 million from Eli Lilly over the next 20 years.”

Wittman regularly touts nuclear energy on his website. But nuclear power plants like Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) are unproven technology that will take years to build. Virginians subsidize data centers with our taxpayer money, but it doesn’t seem to be paying off — for us regular folks, at least. The office of former Governor Glenn Youngkin called Amazon’s forthcoming data center expansion “the largest capital investment in Virginia’s history” — but Virginia lost $1.6 billion in “sales and tax use revenue in FY 2025 to data centers.” That money could have funded teacher raises, health insurance assistance, infrastructure, childcare, and a vast number of other benefits for VA-01.

That loss is why, as of this writing, the General Assembly House and Senate chambers are in a heated state budget proposal disagreement over data center tax breaks. The Senate wants to end the “$1.6B sales tax exemption” for data center companies and restore a 5.3% data center sales tax. But House Democrats want to maintain the tax breaks, and Governor Spanberger hesitates to renege on “Virginia’s commitments to businesses that have invested in the Commonwealth.” The 2026 legislative session ended without a budget deal because of the data center issue; a special session on 4/23/26 also resulted in a budget deal impasse for the same reason. If the House prevails, we’ll have to keep subsidizing data centers while the companies behind them rake in profits. And Wittman has already profited from data center proliferation (which we’ll return to in a moment).

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A recent computer component supply problem caused by AI and data centers is affecting consumers directly. A sudden, severe DRAM memory shortage is sending prices of computer components like RAM and graphics cards soaring. A predicted year-over-year 23% rise in DRAM bit growth indicates that consumer products reliant on DRAM (such as computers, phones, and other consumer devices) will become scarcer and more expensive.

Another issue is that data centers need to operate 24/7. Reliable wind and solar power, partnered with battery technologies, could provide enough consistent energy, but Wittman does nothing whenever Trump blocks renewable energy projects such as Virginia’s offshore wind project (CVOW). In response to the Trump administration’s policies that limit affordable, clean energy, The Environmental Defense Fund stated that “[b]locking cheap, clean energy while doubling down on outdated fossil fuels makes no economic or environmental sense.” But it has definitely increased our utility bills.

While we scramble to find enough money to pay our bills, Wittman profits from utility rate hikes driven by companies like NextEra in which he owns stock. When confronted about his “financial entanglement,” he blamed data centers for rising energy costs. That blame-game strategy is undermined by his vote for H. R. 1, “which accelerated the construction of data centers nationwide.” Wittman cannot have it both ways when data center proliferation and spiking energy costs are helping to line his own pockets..

H. R. 1 also gutted green energy tax credits. By voting for it, Wittman slowed clean energy development and sabotaged the development of new projects, including the jobs they would have generated for Virginians.

Rural residents exploited

Data center problems are state- and district-wide, but they’ve disproportionally impacted Virginia’s rural residents. Rural communities’ sparser populations and shrinking tax bases make them vulnerable. These areas often have insufficient funds for schools, services, and infrastructure. To rural communities, data center tax revenue and job creation can look appealing, perhaps even lifesaving. A study revealed that data center companies promise they’ll deliver “numerous tech jobs” to rural communities. In fact, they’re targeting rural areas for the “lower construction costs, abundant land… network connectivity and access to reliable, affordable electricity.”

Goochland County is one example of a rural community that wants to bolster economic growth through data center tax revenue. Residents have raised concerns as “local governments rush to join what looks like a stampede of unchecked development in central Virginia.”

In Warren County, citizens are sounding the alarm about “what’s really happening” with data centers. The main concerns are water and electricity usage, environmental risks (such as “what happens if 30,000 gallons of glycol [from a data center] leaks into the aquifer”), and health impacts. When dangling the tax revenue carrot, data center companies are playing games of bait and switch:

A lack of transparency from elected officials in charge of the data center approval process is another problem for rural Virginians:

Despite the potential advantages of data centers, rural residents have been mounting numerous efforts to stop them, such as when Hanover residents fought a data center development in Mountain Road Technology Park. The proposal before the Hanover County Planning commission would have rezoned “nearly 430 acres into a data center campus.” Residents didn’t want that “nightmare” in their backyards, citing noise and pollution as deterrents.

Data centers aren’t good neighbors

Data centers generate round-the-clock industrial noise pollution. Documented examples of the nightmare effects of living near a data center include:

• Spiking blood pressure and chest pain

• Migraines

• Sleep deprivation

• Hearing loss and tinnitus

• Motion sickness and nausea

• Fatigue

• Pets having seizures

Then there’s the possible decrease in property values. Who wants to buy a house with a data center behind it?

All of these problems have been driving resistance to data centers in multiple Virginia counties. The Neighbors For Change Data Centers page is a testament to this hot-button issue.

Rob Wittman is an environmental catastrophe with a poor track record in protecting Virginia’s environment and people. His lack of concern about the impact of data centers on our daily lives and health is abhorrent, especially considering the fact that he helped sabotage the Affordable Care Act and voted for H. R. 1 — both of which make it harder for many thousands of his constituents to access affordable healthcare. So, as the data center health threat looms and we are yet to discover the long-term effects of exposure, Wittman fails to protect us while blocking the discovery and deployment of viable solutions.

Mitigating data center harm

Per Inside Climate News, what was once quiet infrastructure is now a national flashpoint. Some $900 million in data center projects in Virginia have been blocked, and $45.8 billion in projects have been delayed due to increased engagement by citizens and environmental organizations demanding answers and better oversight.

From Michigan to Maine, and from Wisconsin to Virginia — where polls revealed “the public had turned sharply against data centers” — 70% of people now believe the costs of data centers outweighs the benefits. Regardless of their ideology or identity, they’re concerned about noise pollution, higher utility bills, wildlife impacts, and even effects on fertility. At a time when Iran struck “data center infrastructure in the Persian Gulf,” some worry that data centers here could also turn into a national security risk.

Bipartisan opposition to data centers has been eroding political divides. It has inadvertently built a bridge of solidarity between unlikely bedfellows, such as Tea Party residents and progressives who have found common purpose to oppose data center development in Hanover County. Joining forces engenders more trust between residents, empowers ordinary citizens, and highlights common goals in fighting oppressive tech companies and unregulated A.I.

No one denies that we need data centers — but tech billionaires, Wittman, and Trump insist it must be unconstrained by anything other than their anticipated profits. That’s shamefully reckless. Mitigating the harm of data center expansion includes guiding business development with smart growth principles, including:

• Balancing economic development with conservation strategies that benefit our health and communities

• Regulating construction at the state level

• Limiting the number and concentration of data centers

• Distributing more tax revenue to the districts most impacted by data centers

• Giving local government more oversight and enforcement over issues like water usage and sound ordinance

• Diversifying with businesses (e.g., light manufacturing, cold food processing, startups) that nurture jobs and revenue

Responsible legislators and communities are moving towards viable solutions to address data center harms. Virginia’s General Assembly is working on legislative solutions so Virginians can continue to benefit from data centers without being at the mercy of Big Tech— and of Wittman and his congressional cronies.

Another great step in the right direction? Vote Rob Wittman out in November! Here’s everything you need to know about the State of the Race: Virginia’s 2026 Elections.

What steps should Rob Wittman, Congress, and the state legislature take to minimize data center harms? Let us know what you think by posting comments here or on any of our social media channels: Facebook, Instagram, BlueSky, or Reddit.

MYTH:

Wittman is good for small business.

REALITY:

Wittman talks like a small business champion, but votes to cut economic growth and make small businesses more vulnerable.

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It’s National Small Business Week, and Rob Wittman and his allies want voters in his district to believe he is a practical, pro-small-business conservative. That story works if the audience only sees awards, roundtables, and tax-cut talking points. It falls apart when his full record comes into view.

For independent voters — and for Republicans and center-right voters who are uneasy with the current Trump-era direction of the country — the real question is whether Wittman’s choices have made it easier for ordinary people to run a business, keep workers insured, manage costs, and survive economic shocks. On that test, his record points in exactly the wrong direction.

Where Wittman deserves credit

Wittman has done some good for small business owners, and we’re happy to give him credit where it’s due. He supported extending the Section 199A pass-through deduction, a real tax benefit for LLCs, S-corporations, sole proprietors, and partnerships. His office says more than 59,000 VA-01 businesses file this way, and preserving that deduction prevented a significant tax increase for many of them.

Wittman is a co-sponsor of the Veterans Member Business Loan Act, which would make it easier for veteran-owned small businesses to access credit through credit unions — important in a district with a large military and veteran population. Notably, this bill hasn’t passed and might not ever pass. So while we acknowledge that it has Wittman’s support, we can’t count it as an achievement.

Why that’s not the whole story

The problem is that small-business policy is not just about tax treatment for pass-through income. It is also about whether owners and workers can afford health insurance; whether input costs are rising because of tariff policy; whether local contractors can count on the federal work that sustains Hampton Roads; and whether entrepreneurs can still access public infrastructure intended to help them start and grow.

Those broader tests matter much more than an award from a trade group or a lobbying group roundtable. Many voters of all stripes understand this instinctively. They do not want ideological branding. They want competence, stability, lower costs, and a government that does not add pressures to ordinary life. On those measures, Wittman’s record looks much less like practical conservatism and much more like reflexive loyalty to the Trump agenda — while ignoring the real needs of Virginians, whether or not they own small businesses.

Healthcare is where Wittman’s damage hurts most

Small businesses do not operate in the same universe as large corporations. They usually cannot self-insure, negotiate from scale, or absorb major benefit-cost shocks. Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families found that 58% of small businesses have owners, employees, or family members who rely on Medicaid or CHIP, and 56% have stakeholders who depend on ACA Marketplace plans with premium tax credits.

That makes healthcare affordability a core small-business issue. Wittman failed to act for months on extending the enhanced ACA premium tax credits that kept coverage affordable for self-employed workers and small businesses. In Virginia, benchmark ACA premiums rose an average of 21.6% for 2026, with reporting and rate filings tying much of that increase to the expiration of those tax credits. Cardinal News reported that Virginians buying coverage on the marketplace were hit with massive increases, a burden that lands especially hard on self-employed people and small business owners.

This was not abstract. A Lancaster County small-business owner, Charlotte Hollings, said her premiums doubled after the credits were allowed to expire. Wittman eventually voted to extend the credits and was one of only 17 House Republicans to do so, which deserves notice. But that too-little-too-late vote — which came only after premiums had already spiked — could not erase the months of inaction that allowed the damage to happen in the first place.

Then came Medicaid. Wittman signed onto a letter urging House leadership to protect vulnerable people from harmful Medicaid cuts, only to turn around and vote for a bill that enacted those cuts. Wittman’s vote slashed Medicaid by approximately $863 billion over 10 years, and the CBO estimated that 10.3 million people would lose Medicaid or CHIP coverage. For Virginia alone, that’s an estimated 260,000 people projected to lose coverage — including over 20,000 in VA-01.

The Virginian-Pilot editorial board was blunt: Wittman and Rep. Kiggans “sold out their constituents.” The board called their reversal “a betrayal were it not so predictable.”

For an independent voter who values honesty and steadiness, this is the kind of record that raises a basic question: if a politician says one thing and votes the other way when party leadership calls, is there any value in their promises, pledges, and nice words?

Tariffs don’t help small businesses

Many voters (and especially independent voters) are skeptical of old ideological talking points from both parties, and rightly so. But the economics here are straightforward. When tariffs raise the cost of inputs and inventory, smaller firms with thinner margins get squeezed first.

Wittman has voted three times to protect Trump’s tariff regime from congressional oversight. That matters because those tariffs have real downstream effects. The Tax Foundation estimated that Trump’s tariffs cost the average household about $1,000 in 2025, rising to about $1,300 in 2026 if they remained in place. The Federal Reserve found substantial pass-through from tariffs into consumer prices in 2025, including an 8.5% year-over-year increase in prices for China-origin goods by December.

Small firms are less able than large corporations to hedge, stockpile, or negotiate supplier terms. A MetLife/U.S. Chamber of Commerce Small Business Index found that 75% of small businesses said rising prices had significantly affected them, and 46% called inflation their biggest challenge.

If a lawmaker campaigns on lowering costs and then votes to avoid scrutiny for cost-raising tariff policy, that is not pragmatic leadership. It is partisan compliance dressed up as economic toughness, and it’s protecting the tariffs themselves over American businesses.

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DOGE cuts hit the local economy

Ours is not an ordinary district when it comes to federal spending and defense-linked employment. Hampton Roads depends on a broad network of contractors, subcontractors, service firms, and veteran-owned businesses tied directly or indirectly to federal activity. That means ideologically-branded cuts to government do not just land on nameless bureaucracies. They ripple outward through the private economy, into our towns, Main Streets, and neighborhoods.

Research from GovWin IQ found that more than half of DOGE-cancelled contracts were held by small businesses. Veteran-owned and service-disabled veteran-owned small firms were hit especially hard. Politico reported on veteran-owned businesses that furloughed staff or shut down after contract cancellations.

Virginia lost a net 23,500 civilian federal jobs in 2025, wiping out six years of federal job gains in less than a year. Old Dominion University economist Bob McNab estimates that this equals approximately 47,000 private sector job equivalents in economic impact. Small businesses serving federal workers in Hampton Roads and elsewhere in VA-01 felt that directly. CNBC removed Virginia from its list of top states for business, in part because of DOGE’s economic impact.

Wittman directly backed DOGE during a telephone town hall when his own constituents expressed concerns. When the rescissions package came to the floor to codify DOGE cuts, passing 214–212, Wittman provided a key vote in favor. Here’s what we said at the time:

Virginia has more than 234,000 federal workers, and polling showed DOGE was deeply underwater with Virginia voters - only 39% of people supported the DOGE cuts — including within VA-01. And Wittman voted for it anyway!

This is Wittman’s clear pattern: expressions of concern in his words, party loyalty in his voting record.

The SBA and business support infrastructure also matter

People trying to start or grow their businesses need access to practical support, and we want them to have it; when new businesses thrive, more jobs and opportunities exist for all of us. Small Business Development Centers, Women’s Business Centers, SCORE mentoring, and SBA-backed loan programs are key to building more and better small businesses. SBA also the National Small Business Week, which the administration is observing - or would be if President Trump could keep on topic for more than five seconds.

Wittman apparently wants to ensure that entrepreneurs don’t get help to start small businesses, grow, and compete. The White House’s FY2027 budget proposal - which Wittman has not opposed - calls for a 67% reduction in SBA funding, slashing the agency from roughly $1 billion to $329 million. This would eliminate $309 million from entrepreneurial development programs, including Small Business Development Centers (SBDCs), Women’s Business Centers, and SCORE mentoring services. The National Small Business Association (NSBA) flagged this budget as a serious threat to the infrastructure that helps small businesses start, grow, and compete.

A lawmaker who truly sees small business as the backbone of the economy should be standing up to defend this support structure, not siding with an agenda that weakens or removes it.

The NFIB award is real, but it is not a full performance review

Wittman’s supporters will continue to cite his NFIB “Guardian of Small Business” award, and indeed he did receive it. But to understand what it means, we voters need to know what it does and does not measure.

The award is based on how often a member votes with NFIB on a selected set of key votes, with a 70% threshold for recognition. Those votes reflect the priorities of one single influential trade group. They do not analyze or provide a complete picture of whether a member’s overall record lowers healthcare costs, moderates tariffs, protects local contractors, or preserves the public business-support infrastructure that many smaller firms rely on.

That distinction is important. An interest-group award is not proof that Wittman’s votes have improved outcomes for small business owners.

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Voters should ask who benefits most

One of the most politically-revealing details in this debate is that the tax policy Wittman cites as proof of his small-business credentials appears to benefit him personally in a significant way. Analysis from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found that Wittman could personally save roughly $19,900 to $60,000 annually from the extended pass-through deduction, largely because of income from his North Carolina rental property.

That does not make the deduction illegitimate, nor does it negate any positive outcomes for others. But it does undermine the moral simplicity of the sales pitch. If the centerpiece of a politician’s “small business” case also produces a major personal windfall while average families receive very modest benefits, independent voters are right to be skeptical.

What this says about the larger choice ahead

The argument for candidates other than Wittman is strongest when it’s grounded in practical outcomes. Progressive candidates tend to start from a simple premise: healthcare is economic policy, wages are economic policy, affordable child care is economic policy, infrastructure is economic policy, and stable democratic governance is economic policy. For small businesses and working families, that framework is often closer to real life than the narrower Wittman/Republican formula of tax cuts plus culture-war messaging.

A pro-worker, pro-healthcare, pro-stability agenda is also a pro-small-business agenda. Small businesses have the best chance of success when workers can see a doctor; when self-employed people can afford insurance; when tariffs are not randomly driving up input costs; when local contractors are not wiped out by ideological contract cancellations; and when startup support systems exist. Those are not fringe or abstract values, nor are they partisan ideas. They are the building blocks of a durable local economy.

If you’re an independent voter or someone who once voted for Wittman, ask yourself which candidate is more likely to protect healthcare access, reduce chaos, defend government accountability, and invest in the conditions that let ordinary people build a decent life. In today’s Republican Party, too many elected officials have shown that they will stomp on those goals for the sake of Trump-era party discipline — and Rob Wittman is a prime example of exactly that calculated betrayal.

The choice is not between perfect and imperfect, but between honest priorities

Wittman can fairly claim he supported one meaningful tax break for some business owners. But across the bigger questions that shape daily economic life — healthcare costs, tariffs, federal contracting stability, and business-support infrastructure — his record has been weaker, more partisan, and less honest than he’d like you to understand.

For voters who are tired of the chaos, tired of politicians saying one thing and voting another, and tired of being told to ignore the obvious in order to stay loyal to a particular party, that matters. The lesson of Wittman’s record is that he and his cronies too often protect the powerful, reward insider interests, and leave ordinary business owners and working families to absorb the fallout.

The better alternative is to support candidates whose policies line up with economic stability, healthcare security, accountability, and broad-based opportunity. If the goal is to vote for the people most likely to make daily life more affordable, more predictable, and more workable for ordinary Virginians, that case points away from Trump-aligned Republicans like Rob Wittman and toward candidates who are willing and able to govern from the ground up.

What do YOU think? Let us know in the comments here, or on any of our social media channels: BlueSky, Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit.

• Last week we had a post-referendum review.

• For our Tuesday Myth of the Week, we asked: is Wittman good for rural Virginians?

• Our social channels have been abuzz this week with lots of spirited debate. Join us on Substack, Facebook, BlueSky, Instagram, or Reddit.

Since our last “State of the Race” in February, we’ve had new candidates, a referendum, and more news to consume than is healthy, so it’s time for an update.

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Until the Virginia Supreme Court rules on the validity of the referendum, we won’t know exactly what the road ahead looks like. (About that case: it should be noted that the questions are not on the outcome of the referendum. Republicans are trying to negate the referendum by complaining that the legal process that created it was flawed and not valid. 51.68% of Virginia approved the referendum — a slight increase from the numbers available to us on Tuesday — so it’ll take some moxie plus a whole lot of overturned precedent for the court to declare it invalid.)

Today we’ll review what new maps under the referendum may look like; what each candidate has said so far about their intentions on running under new maps; and what we can discern from the Wittman campaign’s first quarter of 2026 financial results.

You’ll need a map to find your representative

Whether or not we have a clear and accurate map today, we’ve never been able to find Rob Wittman in VA-01 because his public appearances are brief, secretive, and always disappointing (66% similar to his term in office). If the referendum is struck down, VA-01 will stay as it is. If the referendum holds, a whole lotta change will happen.

Courtesy of our wonderful friends at VPAP, here’s how the new maps will look, together with their partisan lean (deep red being more Republican, dark blue more Democratic). The current VA-01 will be split between the new VA-01, VA-04, and VA-08. To see where you will be in the new maps, scroll to the bottom of this VPAP page and enter your address.

Whither Will Wittman Wander, and With Whom?

Under the new maps, where will Rob Wittman and all the current VA-01 candidates end up, and against whom will they each likely run?

Rob Wittman, VA-01 incumbent

Wittman has not announced in which district he will run under the new maps, only that he has “complete confidence that this amendment [on the referendum] will be struck down by the courts.” We think that sounds pretty desperate.

His refusal to commit to running under the new map may be strategically wise; as other candidates rush to get started in those districts, he can bide his time and hoard his funds for a later, laser-targeted campaign launch. Or it may be an early admission that he intends to simply retire rather than run in a competitive district — something he has never had to do before. Remember, Wittman won our seat in a special election in 2007, and the district has never before been considered truly competitive by the Democratic Party. But this year is a different story.

And it gets worse for Rob: a recent, Republican-run poll that investigated VA-01 voters’ opinions on Wittman was not encouraging for him.

• They cast Shannon Taylor as his imaginary opponent and, even without strong name recognition, she’s just 2 points behind Wittman on the generic ballot.

• 23% of voters had never heard of Wittman, and 20% had no opinion - and he’s had 18 years in office!

Given this, we can understand why he might consider quitting. The poll listed several campaign messages that Wittman could run on — all gaslighting nonsense, naturally — and after reviewing those, the gap between him and Taylor was 12 points. So if Wittman runs, expect a deluge of misinformation, disinformation, and lies about his “achievements” on healthcare, taxes, energy, affordability, and expanding home ownership.

Wittman lives in Montross, which is squarely in the new VA-08. Candidates don’t have to live in the district in which they live — you can be a resident in any part of Virginia and run in any district in the state — but the Northern Neck has historically voted along Republican lines. If he’s going to have a shot at winning a seat anywhere under the new map, VA-08 is likely it, however remote that chance may be. VA-08 connects the Northern Neck and Middle Peninsula to Alexandria in Northern Virginia, where Rep. Don Beyer is a well-liked incumbent. But he’s not the only well-qualified candidate Wittman may need to think about.

Current-Map VA-01 Candidates

Among all the analysis on the referendum, BlueVirginia has been doing an outstanding job tracking the impacts across the state. Note that BlueVirginia is most definitely a Democratic-leaning resource, and their content reflects that fact. Nonetheless, so far they have compiled the best lists of candidates who may run in each district. Here’s a summary of where the (current-map) VA-01 candidates are headed.

• VA-01: Tim Cywinski (unconfirmed), Ericka Kopp (unconfirmed)

• VA-05: Salaam Bhatti, Shannon Taylor, Mell Tull

• VA-08: Elizabeth Dempsey Beggs, Jason Knapp, Lewis Littlepage

Notably, no one has elected to run against Jennifer McClellan in the new VA-04. And also note that BlueVirginia doesn’t even include Wittman on their list of candidates in any district. Hmmm!

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Money makes Wittman’s world go ’round

The FEC recently released the campaign finance data reports for the first quarter of 2026. While the referendum has made things mighty complicated (as candidates shift from one district to another), we can identify a few interesting trends, especially in Rob Wittman’s report.

This quarter Wittman raised $265,820 from individual donations, $307,500 from PACs, and $321,429 from other committees. Considering expenses and other incoming funds, his overall cash position improved by $680,796, leaving him with $3,859,790 cash on hand at the end of the quarter.

When we reported on Wittman’s 2025 fundraising, we noted how he “serves big donors, not you,” and this quarter is no different. Virtually NONE of Rob Wittman’s Q1 2026 fundraising came from small donors giving $200 or less; his Q1 fundraising was overwhelmingly powered by donors who give high‑dollar contributors and max out the annual donation limits. Wittman continues to serve big donors, not you.

Those big donors are clustered in certain industries, and most aren’t even based in Virginia:

• Real estate brokers / developers: Donors come from Bailey Properties (California), The Baldwin Companies (North Carolina), ERA Wilder Realty (South Carolina), Brindley Beach Vacations (North Carolina), Chandler Group (North Carolina), Jacksonville Board of Realtors (North Carolina), ERA Kings Bay Realty (Georgia), and others.

• Defense and shipbuilding: Executives from companies such as Palantir (California, part-owned by Peter Thiel), Anduril (California, also part-owned by Peter Thiel), EURPAC Service Inc. (a Connecticut defense marketing/logistics), BWX Technologies (a Virginia major nuclear components and services supplier for the Navy), Lockheed Martin (Maryland), and many others.

Look at those real estate companies up and down nearby coastal regions — notably none in Virginia! — and remember that Wittman receives significant annual income from his beach rental house in North Carolina. Is it a coincidence that last year he voted to pass a tax cut on rental property income that enriches himself and other rental property owners, who are the clients of rental real estate brokers?

Donations from defense contractors is no surprise; Wittman’s position as Vice Chair on the House Armed Services Committee gives him sway over the annual National Defense Authorization Act, and these companies rely upon it. But can anyone possibly argue that Wittman addresses his constituents’ needs before the desires of the companies funding his campaigns? And doesn’t it make most of us nauseous to know that Wittman is funded by Palantir, a company at the center of the Trump administration’s compiling data on American citizens, supporting DOGE’s likely-illegal mining of IRS data, and who were also responsible for the deaths of 180 Iranian school children?

Real Virginians prefer real candidates who really want to work for them

The Democrats in the field can’t match Wittman’s cash-in-hand. That’s no surprise: Wittman has had 18 years to build his treasury while most of his opponents just started their campaigns in 2025. Add to that the fact that fundraising is spread across all candidates until after the primary, and that the new maps aren’t even settled yet, and it’s clear why none of them match Wittman’s totals… yet. But the momentum is undeniable!

Let’s look at Shannon Taylor, the Democrat who raised the most money in 2025, to see how she’s performing in comparison to Wittman. This quarter Taylor raised $420,290 from individuals, $101,315 from PACs, and $12,000 from other committees. She has $822,256 cash right now. Pay attention to the donation sources! Taylor raised 58% more than Wittman from individuals, and almost the same amount as Wittman overall. Jason Knapp, Salaam Bhatti, Elizabeth Dempsey Beggs, and others have all ramped up their fundraising this year and, like Taylor, most of their money is coming from individual donors.

So it turns out that real people in our district are eager to donate to Wittman’s opponents.

The data verifies what we found in our last campaign finance report: Wittman’s fundraising among regular voters is poor, and he relies on PACs and other committees to make up the ground. Our bet is that, once we get past the Democratic primary, more individuals will pour more money to the campaign of Wittman’s nominated opponent — in whatever district he runs — and his cash advantage will start to dwindle.

Speaking of which…

Early voting in the Democratic primary will begin on June 18th, and Election Day is August 4th. Make a note in your calendar now to register or confirm your registration, request your mail-in ballot, go vote early in-person, or arrange to get to the polls on August 4th.

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Mo’ maps, mo’ money, no Wittman

Our area’s electoral situation is in something of a limbo state until:

1. The Supreme Court rules on the new maps.

2. Wittman declares where (if) he’ll run.

3. The Democratic Party decides on its candidates.

That doesn’t mean you can’t make progress now! Here are our suggestions for what you can do to advance things.

1. Confirm what district you will be in under the new maps.

2. Attend campaign events to get to know all the candidates (including Wittman). We announce all the events we know about on our social channels.

3. Donate to the candidate(s) you feel best reflect your priorities. Links to the current VA-01 candidates’ campaign sites are here.

4. Stay engaged with Wittman Watch and participate in our active conversations across social channels.

Rob Wittman is holding on to his seat by a thread. His fundraising is reliant on his position. Real Virginians don’t care for him as much as they do his opponents. His party is on an unprecedented losing streak across the country. Americans think his boss is literally the worst president in history. The new maps are not favorable to Wittman’s future electoral prospects and may even persuade him to retire. He has never had to defend his seat from such a weak position, nor against such a strong field of highly qualified, motivated, and supported candidates.

What a time to be a Virginian!

MYTH:

Wittman is good for rural Virginians.

REALITY:

We’ve already established that Virginia’s farmers aren’t better off with Wittman. All rural residents deserve a representative who has a deep understanding of their unique healthcare needs, voting challenges, and sub-optimal broadband service. Wittman hasn’t delivered.

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Disastrous healthcare

Rural health disparities are a serious, ongoing problem that many have attempted to solve, but few have succeeded. Rural residents face lots of specific healthcare challenges, including:

• Lengthy travel times for preventative and emergency care

• Limited access to specialists

• Maternal health deserts

• Heavy dependence on Medicaid

• Medicaid cuts from H. R. 1

• Free clinics overwhelmed by influx of patients who lost Medicaid

• The closure of three rural healthcare clinics

• The threat of rural hospitals losing funding or closing

As the First District’s representative, you’d think Wittman would have jumped at the chance to resolve these problems during his 18 years in Congress. Instead, he has dropped the ball too many times to count.

In 2025, Wittman flip-flopped on healthcare coverage like it was going out of style. First, he signed a letter stating that protecting Medicaid was so important that he couldn’t “support a final [reconciliation] bill that threatens access to coverage or jeopardizes the stability of our hospitals and providers.” Then he turned around and voted for those exact cuts in H.R. 1, gutting $50.4 billion from rural hospitals.

When a $189 million healthcare grant band-aid came from the federal government to help offset Medicaid cuts, Wittman supported it — but the grant falls far short of the $1 billion needed for the state’s proposed “VA Rural Vitality” plan, which would have addressed rural healthcare access challenges across Virginia. Instead of making up the shortfall from the H. R. 1 cuts, the optimistically named “Rural Health Transformation Fund” has been called “a $50 billion plug for a $300 billion hole.”

Here’s some of what rural residents stand to lose because of underfunding:

• Updates of outdated medical technology

• Modernizing electronic health records

• Reduction of provider shortages and travel time to treat chronic disease

• Expansion of remote care options

• Support for health technology startups

• Funding for medical residencies at rural hospitals

• More healthcare apprenticeships

• Community college investments

• Increased opportunities for high school students to enter healthcare professions

• Telehealth and mobile health clinics

• Wearable tech for management of chronic diseases

• Nutrition and fitness initiatives

The fate of such programs now hangs by a thread. While rural residents want and deserve a robust healthcare system, Wittman makes them settle for crumbs while telling them they’re getting a three-course meal — and there are not nearly enough crumbs to go around. Instead of being a healthcare hero for rural Virginians, Congressman Wittman keeps choosing to be a zero.

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The SAVE Act: an attempt to disenfranchise rural voters

Wittman voted to pass the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (H. R. 7296). While we’re thankful that this bill failed to advance in the Senate, it’s worth examining what Wittman supported here. If passed, the SAVE Act would have introduced obstacles to American voting in two key ways: all Americans would have to 1) prove U.S. citizenship when registering to vote, and 2) show a specific form of ID when voting in person or by mail.

Even though elections are more secure than ever, and even though voter fraud is vanishingly rare, Wittman voted (the irony!) to punish his rural constituents by making voting less accessible, more strenuous, and more costly. He contributed to the potential disenfranchisement of over 30% of VA-01 (and to 60 million rural Americans in total).

The SAVE Act masqueraded as “election security” when in fact it was a solution in search of a problem. It was also a poll tax, because anyone who lacked the required documents would have had to pay fees to obtain them. For example, people who changed their names upon marrying would have to pay for copies of their birth certificates and marriage certificates to prove identity continuity. Or they’d need to pay for a passport (at a current cost of $165 for a new passport book). Either way, it’d be a burden in terms of time, money, and effort. It’s estimated that 21 million voters lack easy access to the documents that the SAVE Act would have demanded.

Here are some of the ways the SAVE Act would have harmed rural voters:

• Loss of access to remote voting services

• Loss of easy, secure access to their ballot box

• Jeopardization of online voting services (further wasting taxpayer money)

• An hours-long drive (possibly including interstate trips) to register to vote in person, or to update a registration in person

• Absentee mail ballot voters would have to obtain and present photocopies of their ID

• Hardship for disabled/senior voters

The SAVE Act was intended to deprive thousands of rural VA-01 voters of the accessible voter registration methods that they’ve been using for years, if not decades. It would have forced them to “pay to play” if they wanted to participate in elections. Inexcusable!

But Wittman didn’t hesitate to suppress their participation in the voting process and make them suffer while trying to fulfill their civic responsibility. By voting for the SAVE Act, he revealed his lack of conscience as well as his failure to uphold his constitutional oath to ensure his rural constituents could make their voices heard — even if they wanted to vote for him.

The rural broadband disconnect

Rural broadband has lagged behind its urban counterpart, but every American deserves the quality of life that a digital lifeline allows. As of 2021, “[o]ver a quarter of Virginia’s rural population doesn’t have access to broadband internet, and that has become a pressing issue for unserved communities, as vital services like healthcare and education increasingly depend upon high-speed internet connections.”

2023 data revealed that approximately “800,000 Virginia households still don’t have wireline broadband internet.” The broadband gap between rural and urban is stark because only 2.6% of urban areas lack coverage. The disparity is real, and causes real economic harm to rural Virginians.

Rural residents need broadband for all the activities we all do online: banking, entertainment, work (which might mean a “dairy farmer coordinating automatic milking machines”). In rural areas, good internet access is especially important for telehealth, remote work, and online education. Rural residents particularly need healthcare infrastructure like the Virginia Rural Health Association, through which “doctors, nurses and hospital administrators across the state are using… fiber networks to deliver specialized care to rural patients.” This type of “transformational healthcare delivery” requires terrestrial, fiber broadband for the most dependability and impact.

Broadband coverage for rural Virginia can be challenging because of low incomes, inaccurate coverage maps, and greedy railroad companies who “block critical infrastructure deployment” by charging enormous fees for running fiber alongside railroad tracks. Broadband relies on both state and federal funding, so disruptions to either can slow progress.

Virginia is a “nationwide leader in deploying broadband access,” but still has 133,000 addresses yet to be connected. And here’s the rub: the Trump administration wants to rely on satellite technology to provide internet access. Satellite internet is less reliable than fiber cables, but it would create yet more wealth for people like Trump-supporting billionaire Elon Musk and his Starlink company. Wittman seems happy to allow that consideration to override the broadband needs of rural Virginians.

Wittman talks a big game in his press releases about how “[h]igh speed broadband has the potential to revolutionize the way rural populations live their lives” — but how does his legislative action measure up, while he claims to have been working on this issue for 20 years? What do his rural constituents have to show for these alleged efforts? It’s not entirely clear what kind of legislative success he’s achieved for rural broadband, even though, after 20 years, it should be readily apparent. Rob “Do-The-Bare-Minimum” Wittman drafts broadband-related legislation, puts out misleading statements about his impact on the issue, claims to support closing the digital divide, discusses the ins and outs of broadband in articles and press releases, joined the bipartisan Congressional Rural Broadband Caucus, and has co-sponsored broadband legislation aimed at helping rural residents. That’s great. Where are the results? Wittman points his finger at “burdensome regulations” for the lack of progress on rural broadband access. His lack of measurable results suggests that either he doesn’t try hard enough to achieve real rural broadband gains, or he lacks the Congressional power he thinks he has — and probably both. When Wittman’s rural constituents need him to push for real progress on broadband, he poses for photo ops.

Virginia’s rural residents need reliable healthcare, accessible voting, and dependable broadband. Wittman has either actively voted to undermine those resources, or he has made token efforts that show little to no progress for all his years in office. His (in)actions do not convey a real commitment to his rural constituents. We ALL deserve better.

How can Congressman Rob Wittman do better by his rural constituents? Let us know what you think in the comments.

Wittman spoke to the Virginia Mercury about the Lowering Health Care Premiums for All Americans Act (H. R. 6703), introduced by a Republican from Iowa, and — as usual — his strategy is to wildly mislead anyone who’s not paying close attention. This is more of Wittman’s performative politics; yet again, he’s playing with your healthcare and that of everyone you love.

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“Association health plans” will solve little and make healthcare more expensive

The core of the proposal is to “expand association health plans by allowing small businesses and self-employed people to band together to purchase insurance.” Wittman says:

“Anything that you buy in bulk or in mass or in quantity, you get a reduction in price,” he added. “And that’s what the idea is here.”

and

“We don’t do enough to encourage patients to pursue preventive care and healthier lifestyles,” Wittman said. “It’s about a system based on reimbursement for treatment, not trying to put resources out there for healthy behaviors.”

That doesn’t sound awful, right? But pay attention to that phrase: “association health plans.” In January we wrote about how Wittman broke healthcare and said this about his attempts to “reform” healthcare:

The reality is that Wittman’s “solutions” only address symptoms of his party’s interference and calculated undermining of the ACA, not the root causes of spiraling healthcare costs and unequal access. He suggests short-term insurance plans and association health plans. These types of plans evade ACA consumer protections and cherry-pick healthy enrollees. That then raises premiums for everyone with comprehensive health insurance plans by 2-3%. [Our emphasis.]

So these plans are not a solution to spiraling healthcare costs or getting more people covered. Put simply, association health plans (AHPs) are not the same as regular health insurance.

• Market segmentation and “cherry-picking” is the biggest danger of AHPs. These plans attract younger, healthier enrollees with lower premiums by sidestepping ACA risk-pooling requirements. When those healthy people exit the ACA’s small-group and individual markets in large numbers, the remaining pool skews sicker, driving premiums higher for everyone who stays.

• Weaker consumer protections are another major risk. Before the ACA, AHPs could legally deny coverage or charge higher premiums based on pre-existing conditions like cancer or chronic illness. Expanding AHPs effectively recreates that two-tier system: good, cheap coverage for the healthy; expensive or denied coverage for anyone who actually needs care.

• Fraud and insolvency have historically plagued AHPs. Georgetown University researchers found that exempting AHPs from state oversight “would create a regulatory vacuum” that allows scam operators to flourish, leaving consumers with “bankruptcy, delayed or foregone medical care, and loss of coverage”.

• Skimpier benefits compound all these risks. AHPs are not required to cover the ACA’s essential health benefits — like maternity care or mental health services — particularly when operating across state lines. This means enrollees may discover their coverage is inadequate precisely when they need it most.

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Our area — the one Wittman claims to represent — is at particular risk

This bill (H. R. 6703) would intensify the healthcare strain our area is already experiencing thanks to Wittman’s support of last year’s H. R. 1 (the “One Big Beautiful [Horrible] Bill”, a.k.a. “The Working Families Tax Cut Act”, a.k.a. whatever name Republican Propaganda Central next deems a winner):

• 33,000 Virginians have already dropped coverage

• Virginia clinics have closed and hospitals have scaled back services

• Medicaid cuts have harmed the Tidewater and Central Virginia economies

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) says that H. R. 6703 will reduce the number of insured Americans by 100,000 people every year through 2035. Further, as people move to AHPs, the costs for everyone else on regular health insurance plans via their employers or the ACA will skyrocket.

Our rural neighbors, who are disproportionately older, less wealthy, and more likely to have chronic conditions, are the least likely to qualify for or benefit from AHP coverage at all. That means they’re most likely to be left behind in a destabilized ACA market with rapidly increasing prices. So of course fewer people will get health insurance. As uninsured rates rise, hospitals will have to absorb more uncompensated care, negotiate higher rates with remaining private insurers, and may reduce or close services. The feedback loop is particularly vicious in rural districts with fewer healthcare providers to absorb the shock.

So to sum up, here’s what Wittman says about H. R. 6703 (and remember they’re calling this the “Lowering Health Care Costs for All Americans Act”) versus the actual evidence:

Wittman wants to assure your vote, not your healthcare

This bill, and Wittman’s support for it, are wildly dangerous for our district and our families. Healthinsurance.org analyst Louise Norris acknowledges that while some healthier consumers might see lower premiums with H. R. 6703, “the issue is it harms enrollees over time,” and anyone “could suddenly be in need of six-figure medical care next week”.

More seriously, Wittman is again failing to address the ACA tax credit expiration already costing thousands of Virginians their coverage - a crisis that H.R. 6703 sidesteps entirely. Of course, this is Wittman’s intention: to appear to be doing something while actually doing nothing. He is ignoring our needs, feeding us this empty, dangerous nonsense while he and his Republican colleagues in Congress continue to enrich themselves while failing to serve their districts.

Rob Wittman may seem harmless. He is not harmless. Wittman’s support for life-threatening legislation like H. R. 6703 demonstrates his feckless complicity with a deteriorating administration that — if we let it — will bring America to its knees for generations to come.

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Despite Congressman Rob Wittman’s hypocritical and somewhat desperate efforts to persuade Virginians to vote against the 2026 redistricting referendum (HB1384), on Tuesday Virginia voted to approve it by a 3% margin.

This constitutional amendment allows Virginia to respond to other states’ mid-decade redistricting by temporarily bypassing the bipartisan independent commission to redraw its congressional maps.

Voters turned out in big numbers for this election. The early vote surpassed one million. And no wonder, because Virginia’s redistricting referendum was one of the most-watched political issues of 2025-26, given its implications for the House of Representatives. Its passing helps cancel out the gains Republicans thought they would achieve via their own mid-decade redistricting in several states, giving Democrats a potential gain of four Virginian seats in the midterm elections.

The result means lots of changes in Virginia as we approach the November midterm elections, and especially for incumbents like Wittman.

According to Democratic state House Speaker Don Scott: “Virginia just changed the trajectory of the 2026 midterms… At a moment when Trump and his allies are trying to lock in power before voters have a say, Virginians stepped up and leveled the playing field for the entire country.”

But Virginia traveled a rocky road on the way to passing HB1384. Aggressive campaigning for and against the bill began immediately. President Trump railed against it. Dark money groups, one reportedly backed by billionaire and Palantir owner Peter Thiel, flooded Virginia with mailers and ads filled with disinformation, leaving some voters confused or misled. Collectively, the referendum campaigns raised about $85 million, making HB1384 “Virginia’s most expensive ballot question” (see also the Virginia Public Access Project). VA-01 Congressman Rob Wittman and VA-05 Congressman John McGuire filed a lawsuit against state election officials to challenge redistricting and muddied the waters. And chaos agent Steve Bannon called Democrats “demonic” for pursuing redistricting, even though the redistricting battle began with Texas Republicans taking up the president’s demand.

Many who generally oppose gerrymandering — including state representatives like Senator Schuyler VanValkenburg (SD 16) and plenty of everyday Virginians — supported the referendum because other states were “skewing their Congressional districts to favor the Republican Party.” The outcome shows once again how out of step Wittman is with Virginia voters who want free and fair elections across America.

The redistricting ball is now in the hands of the Virginia Supreme Court

On April 27, the Virginia Supreme Court will consider legal challenges to the amendment from the Republican National Committee and allied plaintiffs (which includes Rob Wittman). This is because “a Tazewell County judge ruled that Democrats’ redistricting push was improperly done and temporarily blocked it.”

Circuit Court Judge Jack Hurley Jr. ruled that

• “Lawmakers failed to follow their own rules for adding the redistricting amendment to a special session”

• Lawmakers’ “initial vote failed to occur before the public began casting ballots in last year’s general election and thus didn’t count toward the two-step process”

• “The state failed to publish the amendment three months before that election, as required by law”

In response, the state Supreme Court ordered the referendum to go forward. Now that the referendum has passed, the justices will rule on the merits of the case.

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What’s next?

The first item is procedural: the Virginia State Board of Elections needs to certify the election results. If the legal hurdles are overcome and the election result certified, the new maps will shift the balance of Virginia’s congressional seats to favor Democrats. Projections range from 6-5 to 9-2 and even to 10–1. Across Virginia, new configurations of Democratic primaries will shape up, a mix of incumbents and candidates shifting to new districts based on the new maps. See what redistricting means for you (via the non-partisan VPAP).

Officially redrawing the congressional maps means the dissolution of the current First District. That means Wittman, who says he’s running for re-election, will have to choose a new district in which to run. If he wants to retire, he won’t get any argument from us. So far it appears he’s hoping that the Supreme Court will rule against the amendment entirely, and the map will not change at all. If the maps do change, our bet is that he’ll run in the probable new VA-08, where Wittman’s home is located and where Congressman Don Beyer is effectively the incumbent.

The 2026 Democratic candidates who are challenging Wittman for his seat in the current VA-01 must also decide where to run if the maps change, and can do so in any district they choose. Some of the candidates have already decided:

• First District: Elizabeth Dempsey Beggs (press release) and Tim Cywinski (press release)

• Fifth District: Salaam Bhatti (article), Shannon Taylor, and Mel Tull

• Eighth District: Jason Knapp (press release)

Ericka Kopp’s press release indicated that “I respect the decision of the people…Should Virginians approve redistricting, the campaign will issue an additional statement.” Lewis Littlepage’s press release about the referendum election indicated that if redistricting happens, he’ll live “three miles outside the new District 8,” but didn’t conclusively say where he might run.

If you’re in any of the above districts, learn more about the Democratic primary candidates running in them as well as their legislative agendas.

If redistricting happens, it will be a political sea change in Virginia. Time will tell what its long-term impact will be.

How do you feel about the redistricting referendum passing? Let us know by posting comments here or on any of our social media channels: Facebook, Instagram, BlueSky, or Reddit.

Quick links

• Find your polling place

• Accepted forms of ID

• Curbside voting

• About the referendum

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You already know that April 21st is the last day to vote in the Virginia referendum on whether to allow the legislature to redraw Congressional district maps for the midterm elections in November.

If the referendum passes, a lot may change: VA-01 will be reshaped entirely, and all candidates — including Rob Wittman — will need to decide in which new district they will run. On Thursday we’ll have a round-up of all the post-referendum results and changes, including any info about Wittman’s intentions.

This is the first of three elections in Virginia this year:

• Tomorrow, April 21 — Special statewide referendum

• August 4 — Virginia Democratic Party primary (there is no Republican primary because no other Republican is running against Wittman)

• November 3 — U.S. federal elections for the House of Representatives and Senate

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We’ll get to the August and November elections in a minute. First, let’s make sure you know how to vote tomorrow!

Very exciting referendum voting instructions

We hope you’ve already registered to vote, and encouraged your family and friends to do the same. If not, all is not lost! If you’re an eligible voter, you can register and vote at your polling place. (Remember that in Virginia, 17-year-old U.S. citizens who’ll be 18 by November 3rd are eligible to vote in this referendum as well as the August primary!)

If you need to register at the polls, you’ll follow the “provisional ballot” process, which means you’ll finalize your registration within a certain time period after Election Day. The volunteers at the polling place will walk you through it.

If you haven’t already voted early or submitted a mail-in ballot, you’ll want to head to your local polling place between 6am and 7pm on April 21st. As long as you’re in line by 7pm, you’ll be able to cast your vote. Note that your polling place is NOT the same as the early-voting location. You can find your polling place right here.

Once you know where to go, make sure you have an acceptable form of ID to take with you. This does NOT have to be a photo ID; check the list to see what forms are permitted. Then remember to take your ID with you! You will be required to present your ID at the polling place.

Before you head out, take a minute to understand the background on the referendum, so you can vote the way you believe is correct.

If you have space in your car, ask your neighbors if they’d like a ride to the polling place with you. Then head on out! The volunteers at the polling place will help you cast your vote. If you have accessibility needs, they’ll help you use curbside voting. You’ll get an “I voted!” sticker and an internal glow of pride, knowing you’ve done your part to guide the future of the commonwealth.

Seems like a pretty sweet deal, right?

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The fun doesn’t stop on April 21st!

After the referendum results are tallied, the midterm election campaigning can start. Here are the dates for the Democratic Party primary and the midterm elections:

To prepare for those, here’s what you need to do.

Register to vote!

If you didn’t register for the referendum vote (or if you don’t register and vote tomorrow), you can still register for the two remaining elections. All the instructions are here. You can do it online or at multiple convenient locations across the state. Remember that 17-year-olds who’ll be 18 by November 3rd can register to vote now, and can vote in any elections between now and the November general election.

Encourage your family and friends to register to vote!

Make it a party - have a coffee or hardier beverage, grab your laptops/phones, and get it done. Or go do it in person, together. Get prepped to exercise your democratic rights as U.S. citizens!

Help get candidates on the ballot!

Candidates can’t just ask to be on electoral ballots. They need to get signatures on petitions to show the community supports their candidacy. There have been, and will continue to be, multiple petition-signing events - so look out for those and ensure a strong field of candidates are on the ballots. (This only applies to the Democratic primary this year.)

Vote early - in person!

Early in-person voting is tremendously convenient. All the info is here. You can vote early at many locations across the state (generally a central location that is not your Election Day polling place). These elections are run by your local registrar, and this site lets you find contact details for those excellent people if you have any questions.

Vote early - by mail!

Won’t be in town on Election Day, or just want to get this done now? No problem: request your absentee ballot and submit it early. You can request your absentee ballot right here.

Find out where to vote in person!

The polling place finder makes this simple. Enter your details and it’ll tell you exactly where to go on Election Day.

Vote on Election Day!

If you haven’t voted early in-person or by mail, you can stroll up (or drive up and use curbside voting if you have accessibility concerns) to your local polling place on Election Day and cast your vote. As long as you’re in line by 7pm, you’ll be able to cast your vote. You’ll get a sticker, a glow of satisfaction, and the knowledge that you’ve done your part and exercised your right as an American citizen.

Remain watchful on your voting rights

There are moves afoot to make voting more complicated via the so-called “SAVE America Act” and “Make Elections Great Again (MEGA) Act.” We analyzed the whole situation in February. Wittman has already voted for the SAVE America Act, and he’ll likely do the same for the MEGA Act, because they each skew the Republican Party’s chances of winning to a possibly insurmountable degree. These costly and unnecessary acts address a nonexistent voter fraud problem. They’d eliminate mail-in voting, and would jeopardize the votes of the military, married women, and elderly, disabled, rural, and overseas Americans. The SAVE America and MEGA Acts should not be passed by Congress because they rip away people’s voting rights for no reason. Tell your representatives that!

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Now go vote! 💪

Voting is vital to the health of our democracy. Forgoing the right to vote may sometimes be unavoidable (for time, money, or health reasons - though, for now, there are options to vote more easily in all of these circumstances). Choosing not to vote means you are allowing other Americans to decide how your life will be governed. Not voting is like letting random strangers order your meal at a restaurant: you may end up with a tasty meal, but it most likely won’t be at all what you’d prefer - and if you have specific needs, it might even kill you.

Vote in the referendum, and post your “I voted!” sticker pictures in our comments!

• Last week we wrote about the rise and fall of Rob Wittman.

• For our Tuesday Myth of the Week, we asked: has Wittman has been good for VA-01, or has VA-01 been good for Wittman?

• Remember to vote in the Virginia referendum by April 21st! (Last day of early in-person voting is April 18th.)

In an 1825 letter to Henry Lee, Thomas Jefferson wrote that “the object of the Declaration of Independence” was “not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of, not merely to say things which had never been said before; but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independent stand we are compelled to take.”

And so today, we bring you:

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When in the Course of political events, it becomes necessary for constituents to dissolve the bonds which have connected them with their Representative, a decent respect to the opinions of their neighbors requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all people deserve a Representative who actually represents them; that Congressman Rob Wittman has, by a long train of abuses, evasions, and performative press releases, proven himself unworthy of that title. What began as quiet neglect has metastasized into active, measurable harm. The history of his tenure is a history of repeated injuries to the people of VA-01.

To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

I. On Healthcare: Voting Against Our Survival

He has repeatedly voted against the Affordable Care Act and then published five principles for its replacement - none of which became law.

When the ACA offered coverage to hundreds of thousands of Virginians, Wittman declared his commitment to repeal the ACA as a career-defining mission. His five principles produced zero replacement legislation, only higher anxiety for VA-01 residents who just wanted to see a doctor. His office website continues to celebrate this track record of failure as principled leadership.

He swore on a stack of press releases that he would protect Medicaid - and then voted for the largest Medicaid cut in American history.

In April 2025, Wittman co-signed an official letter to Speaker Johnson vowing that he “cannot and will not support a final reconciliation bill that includes any reduction in Medicaid coverage for vulnerable populations.” Weeks later, he cast the deciding vote for the Big Beautiful Bill - which the CBO estimates will strip health coverage from 16 million Americans, including up to 262,000 Virginians. The Virginian-Pilot Editorial Board called it a direct betrayal of his constituents.

He threatened rural hospitals — including those in VA-01 — in order to score points with leadership.

In the very letter he signed, Wittman acknowledged that Medicaid cuts “threaten the viability of hospitals, nursing homes, and safety-net providers nationwide” and that rural providers “are especially at risk of closure.” He then voted for the bill anyway. Rappahannock General Hospital, which serves Virginia’s First Congressional District, was specifically named as “at risk” by the CBO.

He voted against extending ACA tax credits as premiums skyrocketed - then claimed he cared about costs.

For months in late 2025, Wittman resisted extending ACA tax credits, allowing them to expire and driving up premiums for over 388,000 Virginians. He finally voted for an extension in January 2026 - months after the damage was already done and with enrollment already down 10,000 statewide. Constituents report their premiums have doubled.

He gutted SNAP benefits alongside healthcare, ensuring families couldn’t afford food either.

H.R. 1 (the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill”) Wittman helped pass also cut food assistance for Virginia SNAP recipients. The bill’s reach extended from doctor’s offices to kitchen tables. Wittman’s own op-ed in the Virginian-Pilot defending the bill did not mention the hunger cuts once. Working families are unlikely to share his oversight.

II. On Immigration: Enforcement Without Justice

He has embraced ICE detention, “mass processing facilities” in our own backyard, and enforcement without due process.

When ICE sought to convert a Hanover County warehouse into a mass immigrant processing facility (which meet the definition of concentration camps) - right here in Virginia’s First District - Wittman offered no opposition, only platitudes about “public safety and the rule of law.” He eyed the same district where families live, work, and pay taxes as a detention corridor.

He has cheered enforcement policies that mandate detention without individual assessment.

Wittman backed the Laken Riley Act, which requires mandatory detention without individualized assessment, stripping due process protections from immigrants regardless of their individual circumstances. The broader ICE enforcement expansion he has supported comes with a budget Wittman voted for that allocates $175 billion to immigration enforcement: more than the U.S. Marine Corps.

He has silently enabled the lawless militarism of Pete Hegseth while posting about Small Business Saturday.

While the Defense Secretary reportedly ordered the military to “kill them all” in what military lawyers and peers described as potential war crimes, Wittman — Vice Chair of the House Armed Services Committee — said nothing. His silence is not harmless. It’s complicity.

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III. On Energy: Fossils Over the Future

He voted to gut clean energy investments worth $18.2 billion and nearly 11,000 jobs in Virginia - all to please fossil fuel donors.

Wittman’s vote for H. R. 1 eliminated clean energy tax credits actively funding 70 projects across Virginia’s Republican congressional districts, worth $18.2 billion in investment and nearly 11,000 jobs, according to independent analysis of Clean Investment Monitor data. The Virginia League of Conservation Voters called the impact “unquestionable” and immediate. Wittman calls it “the Working Families Tax Cut.”

He made H.R. 1 explicitly fossil-fuel friendly while raising energy costs on Virginians.

Beyond killing clean energy tax credits, H. R. 1 expanded federal oil, gas, and coal leasing while adding costs for renewable development - a direct assault on Virginians already paying higher energy prices. In 2025, Trump’s tariffs cost the average Virginia household $1,700 to $2,100; Wittman’s energy votes compound those costs further. Virginia’s own climate assessment warns of rising heat, worsening flooding, and economic losses. Wittman voted to accelerate all of it.

He has a decades-long record of defunding renewable energy to subsidize oil and gas.

Wittman has voted against wind and solar research while supporting fossil fuel subsidies - a consistent pattern across his career documented by the League of Conservation Voters. He has never met an offshore drilling amendment he didn’t like. His LCV score reflects the consequences.

IV. On Accountability: The (Questionable) Art of the Dodge

He has not held a verifiable in-person town hall since at least 2019, preferring telephone town halls where questions are screened and follow-up is impossible.

Wittman Watch documents that Wittman’s last verifiable in-person town hall was March 2019. Instead, he retreats to Facebook tele-town halls requiring advance registration; many constituents who registered found they could not even join. When furious voters did get through, a Raw Story report described him as “reamed” by the questions he faced, and his answers were evasive at best.

He canceled his mobile office hours after 200 constituents showed up to confront him.

A 200-person protest outside his offices prompted Wittman to quietly cancel the mobile office hours in Williamsburg and Midlothian that were his last pretense of constituent access. Rather than show up and answer questions, he doubled down on hiding.

Virginians held cardboard-cutout town halls in his absence - because even a cardboard Rob Wittman was more responsive than the real one.

Back in 2017, citizens in Nokesville held a mock town hall complete with a cardboard cutout of their Congressman. The tradition continues: in 2025 (more than once!), volunteer-organized constituent town halls under names like “Where’s Wittman?” and “Rob ‘Runaway’ Wittman Constituents’ Town Hall” met the need he refused to fill.

V. On DOGE: Cheering the Dismantling of Virginia’s Economy

He backed DOGE cuts that devastated Virginia federal workers, then declined to answer whether he supported mass firings.

During his tele-town hall, Wittman expressed support for DOGE, saying it could “bring some value.” He then voted to codify DOGE cuts into law. When asked directly whether he supported mass federal worker firings, he declined to answer. The VA alone faced the prospect of 80,000 firings, and veteran-serving Republicans on Capitol Hill called it “political malpractice.”

He watched AmeriCorps, community programs, and federal jobs disappear from Virginia without meaningful objection.

DOGE’s cuts ended Virginia community service grants affecting more than 155 AmeriCorps members. Local nonprofits came to his office asking for help. He took the meeting. He took no action.

He voted for a budget that hands most of Virginia’s tax cuts to the wealthiest 10% of earners, and insists on calling it “relief” for working families.

Wittman Watch’s independent analysis of H.R. 1 found that 90% of Virginians will be worse off once tariff costs, higher insurance premiums, fewer jobs, and resulting state tax hikes are factored in. The top 10% of Virginia earners save $13,600. Everyone else saves less than their losses. Wittman named the bill “the Working Families Tax Cut.” He knows — and we know — what he did.

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VI. On War: Conflict Abroad While Ignoring Crisis at Home

He has cheered the Iran strikes and provided rhetorical cover for a war Congress never authorized.

When the Trump administration launched strikes on Iran without congressional authorization, Wittman told national media the U.S. had “significantly degraded” Iran’s nuclear capabilities and offered his full approval. Virginia’s congressional delegation was split; members noted this was a war of choice that bypassed Congress entirely. Wittman was not among those raising Constitutional concerns.

He has supported further cutting healthcare to fund the Iran war.

Reports indicate that Wittman and GOP colleagues discussed using additional healthcare cuts to pay for the Iran conflict, further slashing the Medicaid and ACA funds that Virginians rely on. The people of VA-01 are apparently expected to sacrifice their insulin and basic healthcare for the sake of illegal and unnecessary foreign wars.

VII. On Personal Enrichment: From Public Servant to $5.5 Million Man

He has more than tripled his net worth during his time in Congress - on the $174,000 salary we pay him.

After nearly two decades in Congress, Wittman’s estimated net worth has ballooned from $109,000 to $5.6 million today. He now pays more in property tax in North Carolina than in Virginia. The Daily Mail reported his eight-bedroom Outer Banks beach house — 150 miles from his district — generates up to $1 million annually in rental income.

He voted to give himself up to $60,000 per year in personal tax cuts through H.R. 1, while the average Virginian gets $50.

Analysis by the nonprofit Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found that Wittman’s vote for H. R. 1 will save him between $19,900 and $59,300 annually on his rental income. For the average middle-class Virginian, the tax break amounts to roughly $40 to $50 a year.

He traded millions in stocks, including defense stocks, while sitting on the House Armed Services Committee.

Business Insider reported that Wittman purchased shares in defense contractors including Lockheed Martin and Honeywell while sitting on the very committee that oversees their contracts. He has traded up to $4.7 million in tracked stock transactions since 2015. This is the very definition of the Washington swamp, and Wittman built it himself.

VIII. On Performative Politics: All Press Release, No Policy

He issues press releases praising legislation he gutted, hoping no one reads the CBO score.

After voting for H.R. 1 that will strip coverage from up to 262,000 Virginians, Wittman issued a double-speak headline statement: “Wittman Votes to Protect Medicaid.” His op-ed in the Virginian-Pilot claims he “kept his word” to constituents. The Virginian-Pilot Editorial Board said he had done the opposite. The results are starting to be clear: so far, 44,000 Virginians have lost ACA coverage. Medicaid losses will start once federal funding streams end. Once fully implemented, up to 310,000 Virginians will lose either ACA or Medicaid healthcare access. And Wittman enthusiastically voted for it.

He has made accountability theater into a governing philosophy.

The more Wittman frets about losing his seat, the more he floods constituents with press releases and misleading emails claiming achievements with which he had little involvement. His Christmas message was described as “a lump of coal he says is a diamond.” His “meaningful wins” email for 2026 listed benefits that independent analysis found would leave most Virginians worse off once all costs are counted.

He worked only 87 days in Congress in a recent session - and still asks for your vote.

Wittman worked just 87 legislative days in a recent congressional session. Most Virginians’ employers would have strong feelings about that attendance record. Wittman has no comment.

IX. On Taking Credit: Voting No, Then Taking the Dough

He voted against the bipartisan infrastructure bill, then claimed credit for the Port of Virginia funding it delivered.

In November 2021, Wittman voted against the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, calling it “the Green New Deal in disguise.” Days after passage, he claimed credit for $70 million in Port of Virginia funding that came directly from that bill. The post was deleted. NBC News reported that Republicans who had voted against the bill were “touting parts of the infrastructure package” they opposed.

He has made a habit of opposing legislation and then claiming its benefits as personal achievements.

President Biden called out this pattern publicly, saying Republicans who voted no were claiming credit “with no shame.” Multiple national outlets documented the pattern. Like a carnival barker, Wittman hypes alleged achievements he had little or nothing to do with, and quietly deletes the evidence when challenged.

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X. On Workers and Retirees: Abandoning the People Who Built VA-01

He has voted against workers’ rights so consistently that the AFL-CIO gave him a 5% score in 2024, and just 13% over his entire Congressional career.

The AFL-CIO scorecard documents Wittman’s record on worker protections going back to 2009. He voted to overturn the NLRB’s pro-worker joint employer rule, opposed collective bargaining protections, and has sided with corporations over workers at virtually every opportunity. He is not a moderate. He is hard-right MAGA on every labor vote that has come before him.

He has earned a 0% score from the Alliance for Retired Americans and the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare: a perfect zero.

The Alliance for Retired Americans and the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare both give Wittman a zero percent lifetime score. Zero. The farmers, shipyard workers, and federal retirees of Virginia’s First District have a Representative who has voted against their retirement security every single time he had the chance.

He has failed VA-01’s farmers by enabling tariffs that destroyed their markets.

Virginia agriculture contributes some $70 billion to the state economy and employs over 300,000 people. Wittman’s greenlighting of tariffs that triggered retaliatory action from China, Canada, and the EU has put VA-01 farmers directly in the crosshairs. Wittman has not organized a single hearing or held a single in-person meeting to address it.

XI. On Voting and Reproductive Rights: Restricting Who Gets to Choose

He has backed legislation that would make it harder for 140 million Americans without passports to vote, in a district full of working families who don’t have $165 for a passport.

Wittman co-sponsored previous versions of the SAVE Act, which would require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections, potentially disenfranchising tens of millions of citizens who lack ready access to passports or birth certificates. The Brennan Center at NYU Law called it “one of the worst pieces of voting legislation in American history.”

He has signed amicus briefs to overturn Roe v. Wade, co-sponsored legislation to criminalize abortion care, and voted against the Right to Contraception Act.

EMILY’s List documents that Wittman signed the amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, voted against the Women’s Health Protection Act twice, and voted against the Right to Contraception Act in 2022. He holds an A+ rating from SBA Pro-Life America, an organization whose explicit goal is to end abortion in America. He calls himself a moderate.

Declaration

We, therefore, the constituents of Virginia’s First Congressional District, appealing to our neighbors and to common sense, do solemnly declare:

That we are, and of right ought to be, free from the political patronage, performative governance, and constituent neglect of Congressman Rob Wittman;

That any Representative who votes to strip our healthcare, welcomes detention centers in our backyard, hides from our questions, enriches himself through legislation he passes for the wealthy, takes credit for bills he opposed, cheers undeclared wars, abandons our farmers and workers, restricts our rights, and earns a perfect zero on protecting Social Security has forfeited his claim to our votes and our trust;

And that we will work, organize, publish, and vote accordingly - this November, and every November thereafter.

Signed,
The constituents Rob Wittman forgot he worked for.

MYTH:

Wittman has been good for VA-01.

REALITY:

Wittman coasts along in a comfortable seat while VA-01 suffers from his performative politics.

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Some say that we at Wittman Watch are unreasonably demanding and unfairly critical of Rob Wittman, our Congressional representative in VA-01. He claims to have delivered significant achievements to VA-01 since he was elected in 2007. To ensure we weren’t missing anything, we examined the nature of those accomplishments and his role in making them happen, and we found a very telling pattern. Let’s get into it!

Federal Recognition of Six Virginia Indian Tribes

What Rob wants you to know:
Wittman authored and shepherded H. R. 984, the Thomasina E. Jordan Indian Tribes of Virginia Federal Recognition Act, which was signed into law on January 29, 2018. The bill granted federal recognition to the Chickahominy, Eastern Chickahominy, Upper Mattaponi, Rappahannock, Monacan, and Nansemond tribes. Federal recognition grants them sovereign legal standing, the right to repatriate ancestral remains from the Smithsonian, and eligibility for federal grants.

What Rob wants you to ignore:
The bill passed unanimously in both chambers — after Senators Warner and Kaine surprised the Senate by demanding a vote on it — with broad bipartisan acceptance.

VERDICT:
Wittman deserves credit for authoring and shepherding the bill through Congress. He faced few obstacles, as it had wide bipartisan support and little to no opposition. The whole Virginia delegation was behind it. This was an easy win that anyone in our seat could and should have delivered.

America’s Conservation Enhancement (ACE) Act and Its Reauthorization

What Rob wants you to know:
Wittman sponsored the 2025 renewal of the ACE Act (originally signed into law in October 2020) in the House, which reauthorized the EPA’s Chesapeake Bay Program, the Chesapeake WILD Program, and the North American Wetlands Conservation Act (NAWCA). The Bay defines VA-01’s economy, culture, and ecology; our watermen, tourism operators, and communities are dependent on healthy fisheries and water quality. These programs fund oyster restoration, habitat conservation, and pollution reduction directly benefiting district waterways.

What Rob wants you to ignore:
The ACE Act was a national program started in 2020, and was not just focused on the Bay. The bill was introduced by Sen. John Barrasso (R‑WY) and Sen. Tom Carper (D‑DE). Wittman voted on it in 2020 — and so did the majority of Congress, as it passed with broad bipartisan support. Wittman did lead the reauthorization in the House in 2025 and, again, it had massive bipartisan support.

Significantly, environmental advocates noted in March 2026 that the Trump administration (which Wittman unquestioningly supports) has proposed significant rollbacks to EPA funding and regulatory enforcement for Bay cleanup. So while Wittman helped keep the ACT Act alive, the administration he unwaveringly supports is working to kill the agency responsible for enforcing its provisions.

VERDICT:
Once again, Wittman didn’t fight for anything here, but he rode others’ coattails to get funding for the Bay. And now his silent complicity threatens the entire endeavor.

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Shipbuilding and Naval Infrastructure: FY26 NDAA and Defense Appropriations

What Rob wants you to know:
As vice chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and chairman of the Tactical Air and Land Forces Subcommittee, Wittman voted for the FY26 NDAA (signed into law in December 2025). It authorized over $1.6 billion in military construction projects across 12 Virginia sites, advanced Virginia-class submarine and Ford-class carrier procurement, and included servicemember pay improvements. He also voted for the FY26 Defense Appropriations Act in January 2026, which included $1.5 billion for the Navy’s Shipyard Infrastructure Optimization program.

What Rob wants you to ignore:
The FY26 NDAA was approved by a strong bipartisan vote in both chambers. Wittman voted for it; so did the rest of the Virginia delegation in the House except for Bob Good (formerly R, VA-05, who always voted against “compromise” bills). Warner and Kaine (both Democrats) also voted yes in the Senate.

VERDICT:
Bipartisan cooperation is a good thing, and this is a good bill to have passed. But once more, Wittman rode the coattails of bipartisan government to deliver this funding to VA-01. It was an easy win, requiring zero statecraft to persuade or compromise. Any representative of either party in our seat could have delivered it.

Rural Broadband Expansion Efforts

What Rob wants you to know:
As co-chair of the bipartisan House Rural Broadband Caucus, Wittman introduced the Serving Rural America Act (authorizing $500 million over five years for broadband grants), helped draft the Broadband DATA Act (requiring more accurate coverage mapping), and has supported Virginia’s VATI broadband grant program through letters of support for VA-01 counties including Caroline, Essex, Fauquier, Hanover, James City, and King George. The Serving Rural America Act model was incorporated into the NTIA Broadband Infrastructure Program, a $288 million funding mechanism. In 2023, over $59.5 million in broadband grants were awarded to Essex and Caroline counties in VA-01.

What Rob wants you to ignore:
Wittman voted against the Bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (2021), which included the largest single broadband investment in U.S. history ($65 billion), calling it the “Green New Deal in disguise.” He then publicly touted infrastructure projects (including Port of Virginia funding) that resulted from the law he voted against. He deleted a tweet after criticism and being cited in ABC News and CNN reports about Republicans “voting no and taking the dough”. Wittman’s supposed broadband advocacy has not been fully matched by his votes on major legislation that would have accelerated deployment.

VERDICT:
Wittman eagerly voted against the legislation that accelerated broadband deployment across VA-01. Then he claimed credit for delivering the same funding through the same mechanism that he had voted against. This is simple hypocrisy.

Shore Power Infrastructure at NWS Yorktown

What Rob wants you to know:
Wittman secured $2.2 million through Community Project Funding to construct a shore power loading and unloading substation at Naval Weapons Station Yorktown, specifically to support Virginia-class submarines. The funding was signed into law on November 12, 2025, as part of the Appropriations Extension Act.

What Rob wants you to ignore:
This Community Project Funding (which is the new name for “earmarks” that Wittman once railed against) was jammed in the Continuing Appropriations and Extensions Act, 2026, the law that reopened the government after the prior shutdown. That bill had to pass to reopen the government.

VERDICT:
Wittman sneaked this funding into a bill that had to pass to reopen the government. It seems he didn’t negotiate to make this happen, but used procedure to get it over the line, even though it had a lot of support already. That’s not a bad maneuver, but it doesn’t scream “master dealmaker” either — especially as he’s Vice Chair of the House Armed Services Committee!

Freedom to Invest in Tomorrow’s Workforce Act

What Rob wants you to know:
Wittman authored this bipartisan bill to expand 529 education savings plans to cover post-secondary credentialing, professional certifications, licensing fees, apprenticeships, and related testing costs. It was enacted as part of H. R. 1 (the “One Big Beautiful Bill”) on July 4, 2025.

What Rob wants you to ignore:
We’ve critiqued this before. The biggest benefits of this law accrue to the already-wealthy, and those with enough income to sock away for a long time. Even more pertinent to the question of Wittman’s ability to stand alone and fight for VA-01, this bill was co-sponsored by Virginia Democrats Jennifer McClellan and Suhas Subramanyam. And even more concerning is that the provision was enacted inside H. R. 1, the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which the CBO estimated cuts roughly $1 trillion from Medicaid over a decade. This is projected to strip coverage from more than 300,000 Virginians, including an estimated 250,000 who had coverage under the pre-existing program. Wittman himself stands to personally save between $19,900 and $59,300 annually in tax cuts from the same legislation. The vehicle that delivered this (apparently helpful and benign) workforce benefit imposes substantial healthcare costs on some of the same constituents it purports to help. In many cases, those health costs will dramatically outstrip educational savings.

VERDICT:
Wittman sponsored a measure that mostly helps the wealthy, and it was part of the biggest-ever giveaway to America’s wealthiest families, funded by stripping healthcare from over 300,000 Virginians. That is FAR from being a good deal for VA-01.

Norris Bridge Replacement

What Rob wants you to know:
Wittman says he was a persistent advocate for replacement of the Robert O. Norris Jr. Bridge, a 1.9-mile span connecting the Northern Neck and Middle Peninsula across the Rappahannock River. The bridge carries 7,500+ vehicles daily, far exceeding its 1957 design capacity. It has been classified as “fracture critical” by VDOT. The detour if the bridge closes is 85 miles. Wittman claims that his engagement with federal and state officials contributed to the project being accelerated to begin construction in 2028 — eight years ahead of the previously planned 2036 groundbreaking.

What Rob wants you to ignore:
Local and state coverage (e.g., Rappahannock Record, Southside Sentinel, VDOT video, and Youngkin’s ceremonial bill‑signing events) focus on the state law and VDOT financing plan, and repeatedly emphasize that the Commonwealth Transportation Special Structures Program Revenue Bond Act of 2025, championed by state Sen. Ryan McDougle and signed by Governor Youngkin, is what actually accelerated the bridge replacement to a 2028 start date. The primary documentation of Wittman’s “years of advocacy” comes from his own office and statements, while state law and VDOT financing decisions are evidently what drove the schedule change.

VERDICT:
There’s no concrete evidence that Wittman’s efforts had any impact on this project timeline. He may have written some letters and had a chat with a few folks at USDOT over multiple sessions, but is that “years of advocacy”? It appears Wittman is claiming credit for something he did very little to support.

SHARKED Act
(Awaiting Senate Floor Vote as of April 2026)

What Rob wants you to know:
With Representatives Darren Soto (D-Florida), Daniel Webster (R-Florida), and Marc Veasey (D-Texas), Wittman co-authored the SHARKED Act, directing NOAA to establish a task force addressing shark depredation. This is when sharks consume hooked fish before anglers can land them. Shark depredation affects the $230 billion U.S. recreational sportfishing industry. The bill has endorsements from 15 sportfishing and conservation organizations, including the American Sportfishing Association and Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership.

What Rob wants you to ignore:
This bill has not been enacted into law since Wittman introduced it in 2024. Some people argue that sharks eating hooked fish is normal behavior (we agree!). Shark Stewards and other marine conservation groups have warned that the legislation risks being used to justify shark population management (i.e., targeted removals of species that may still be recovering from overfishing).

VERDICT:
Wittman’s proposed legislation threatens recovering shark populations because… they eat fish. This seems like a phenomenally silly thing to legislate about, with very troubling potential consequences. Wittman has a wall of dead fish in his DC office as he’s an avid fisherman himself, and members of his family work in fishing industries. We’re not saying this flimsy bill panders to his self-interests, but we are saying it seems strange to keep boasting about a bill that hasn’t passed.

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Dull Rob ain’t so harmless

Taken as a body of work, Wittman’s biggest achievements seem pretty… tepid. When viewed in contrast to many of the other dangerous and damaging things Wittman has enthusiastically supported, often as the key vote in the House, his “delivery” to VA-01 is disgracefully weak.

H. R. 1 / One Big Beautiful Bill / Medicaid
Wittman voted for the final House passage (215–214), despite having previously signed a letter with Rep. Kiggans opposing elements of the Senate version. The CBO estimated the final law cuts roughly $1 trillion from Medicaid nationally, with projections of 300,000+ Virginians losing coverage. Wittman publicly stated the bill “protects Medicaid for vulnerable Virginians,” which is simply a lie. We’ve documented the full horror of Wittman’s support for H.R. 1 elsewhere; it’s essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the economic and healthcare tsunami that’s about to hit the country.

DOGE Rescissions Package (June 2025)
Wittman cast a key vote (214–212 margin) to codify DOGE-related spending cuts. Virginia has more than 234,000 federal workers, and polling showed DOGE was deeply underwater with Virginia voters - only 39% of people supported the DOGE cuts — including within VA-01. And Wittman voted for it anyway!

2025 Government Shutdown (43 Days)
A federal government shutdown began October 1, 2025, and lasted approximately 43 days before Wittman voted to reopen the government. He publicly condemned the shutdown as “unnecessary and harmful” and noted its direct impact on federal employees and VA benefits recipients in VA-01. The cause for the shutdown was Democrats’ demands for reforms to ICE, following the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Democrats offered paths forward, but Mike Johnson (Republican leader of the House) refused to engage and adjourned the House entirely. Eventually Johnson accepted the Democrats’ proposal, and Wittman then voted along. Wittman never demanded Johnson keep the House open to fix the problem. But he did crow about his proposed “budget responsibility” legislation that he knows for a fact will never, ever get out of committee, let alone pass. He just let the situation play out until he was told how to vote — his usual cosplaying of a Congressperson.

Benefits from bipartisanship but then claims all credit for himself
The biggest “wins” in Wittman’s history came from bipartisan legislation. He fails to note that fact when he talks about them, and never gives credit to Democratic members of the Virginia delegation, even when they support the legislation for which he takes whole credit for himself. A true statesman could be justifiably proud of passing legislation with full bipartisan support, and of successful cross-party cooperation that results in real progress, but Wittman never mentions it. He often claims he is a bipartisan politician, but it’s simply untrue. He votes with his party consistently; as of September 2025, he had NEVER voted against Trump’s positions, and the Heritage Foundation gives him a 74% lifetime score, indicating he rarely votes against the positions they prefer.

Has Wittman been good for VA-01?

Rob Wittman has a very comfortable seat. VA-01 benefits from many assets: defense industry, military presence, natural resources, proximity to Washington, D.C., strong home ownership, and much more. Wittman seems to believe that the district does not require a strong, purposeful advocate who will serve its constituents and fight for their needs because… he hasn’t tried to do that. He’s just coasted along, hoping we won’t notice.

Well, we have noticed. We’ve noticed a lot!

He’s supporting everything the Republican Party is doing in Washington, which is already damaging our families, our neighbors, our communities, our district, our nation, and the world. By literally every measure — the economy, national security, global standing, treasury, health, education, and so on — the administration that Wittman refuses to hold accountable for anything is making everything — everything! — worse.

And Wittman’s personal net worth has risen by 5,138% since he took office: from $109,000 in 2007 to almost $5.6 million today. Has your net worth increased that much in that time? We’re guessing probably not.

It’s simple: Wittman has been on cruise control for 18 years.

• He’s introduced almost no legislation, and what he has introduced has been pitiful — or at best, unchallenged and undemanding.

• He claims individual glory for legislation and initiatives passed on a broad bipartisan basis.

• He benefits from money coming into the district for defense, but compared to other members of Congress, has done little to secure a better share — even though he’s Vice Chair of the House Armed Services Committee.

• He votes against legislation that will help VA-01 and, if it’s subsequently passed without his support, he still claims the credit for himself.

• He has profited nicely from his time in our seat in Congress, while too many people in VA-01 are struggling to afford basic household bills, healthcare coverage, and so much more.

VA-01 has been good for Wittman, but Wittman has NOT been good for VA-01. We deserve a real representative in our seat in Congress.

• We’re back from our Substack break!

• On Tuesday, we did some myth-busting about the Virginia referendum on April 21st. Read it, share it, and tell us what you think in the comments!

• Scroll down to see this week’s social media roundup.

Let’s talk about our representative, shall we?

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Virginia’s First Congressional District is a place rich in history, culture, and community, with a geography as varied as its people. We hail from rural countryside to bustling suburban hubs, coastal cities, and everything in between. We are farmers, parents, federal employees, military service members, and shipyard workers.

Yet one major thing is missing from our lives: a congressional representative who cares about us. Congressman Rob Wittman has been our representative since 2007, but he’s far more interested in serving billionaires and big donors than being a public servant for his constituents.

And in November 2026 — this November! — VA-01 has a chance to vote Wittman out, and vote in a representative who will uphold their prescribed Constitutional duties and hold the Trump administration accountable for its crimes, corruption, chaos, and cruelty. (That’s assuming redistricting doesn’t put Wittman out to pasture first.)

But how did we get here? The battle for representation of Virginia’s First District is a saga you maybe never heard about—until now. You’re about to read the story of a political movement full of villains and heroes, plot twists, wild cards, and most importantly, the grit and heart of the folks who care about giving VA-01 its best chance to thrive.

When VA-01 became “in play”

Congressman Rob Wittman is currently serving his tenth term. Let’s review his path to Congress. A Henrico County native, he has a history of public service. After obtaining a master’s degree in public health, he worked for twenty years at the Virginia Department of Health.

Then he went from serving on the Montross Town Council to mayor of Montross. While mayor, his main initiatives resulted in a sewage system overhaul and new software for tax billing. As a member of the Westmoreland Board of Supervisors, he advocated for teacher raises and building libraries. After serving as a delegate in the Virginia General Assembly (2005), he was chosen in a special election for the U.S. House of Representatives in 2007.

Wittman’s career paints a picture of a typical Republican politician: he was no rockstar legislator, but neither was his track record particularly objectionable. He showed up and did his job in a quiet, predictable manner. One can understand why so many people voted for him over the years.

But Wittman’s political career took a dark turn when he pulled a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Through Donald Trump’s first term, culminating in the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol and Wittman’s vote to object to the count of Pennsylvania’s elections in an attempt to throw the election to Trump, Wittman has become a partisan MAGA extremist. He fully supports Trump in all policies, however antithetical to the “practical conservative” image he tries to project.

These days, Wittman is actively causing real harm to the people of the First District: breaking our healthcare, hurting military families, jacking up the cost of living, supporting violations of international law, trying to curtail reproductive rights, courting environmental catastrophe, and threatening election integrity. His notorious vote for H.R. 1 caused many families to lose Medicaid and SNAP benefits. We don’t know if he’s driven by money, power, or dogma, but the evidence shows Wittman positions himself against the very people he’s supposed to serve.

Wittman handily won reelection every two years until 2018. That year, he earned 55% of the vote, a lower proportion than any of his earlier races. Against the backdrop of President Trump’s reelection, constituent exasperation with Wittman spiked in part because he voted against the Inflation Reduction Act and wanted to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. That’s why lawyer Leslie Mehta challenged Wittman in 2024 for his congressional seat—a feat she attempted against all odds. But the election of President Joe Biden, unpopular lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, and Glenn Youngkin’s well-financed campaign for Virginia’s governorship favored Wittman. He held onto his seat, but Mehta’s efforts chipped away at his stranglehold on VA-01.

Then came the blue wave in the 2025 state elections, when support for Democrats surged across VA-01. Governor-elect Spanberger overperformed Mehta, picking up multiple percentage points in deep-red areas like Poquoson.

Across the First District, a host of factors are contributing to massive discontent with Wittman’s failings, increasing the likelihood that VA-01 will slip from his grasp, whether or not redistricting happens:

• Geographic trends (e.g., population growth in the Richmond suburbs) improved Democratic performance in elections

• Neither Republicans nor President Trump showed up for Republican gubernatorial candidate Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, compared to their support for former governor Glenn Youngkin

• Lack of voter interest in extreme “cultural wedge issues”

• Rising cost of living (e.g., gas, utilities, healthcare, and housing)

• Cuts to the federal workforce, which disproportionally affect Virginians

• Federal funding reductions, such as the devastating DOGE cuts

• Concerns about threats to democracy

• Wittman’s support of the Iran War, ICE, and other destructive federal policies

All of this leads to an inevitable conclusion: Wittman has made our lives worse, not better. The slow erosion of his monopoly on VA-01 is becoming a landslide. And that’s when a well-prepared opposition saw their opening.

The Democratic challengers

Where there’s a villain, there’s a hero. Or in the case of VA-01, thirteen heroes—the total number of candidates (past and present) who have stepped into the ring to challenge Congressman Wittman for his seat. That’s how flippable the First District has become, and likely also a sign of how much Wittman has neglected his constituents.

Here are their names (roughly in the order they entered the race; asterisk indicates the current eight candidates):

• Amanda Pohl

• *Salaam Bhatti

• *Mel Tull

• Lisa Vedernikova Khanna

• James Shea

• Andrew Lucchetti

• Sean Sublette

• *Ericka Kopp

• *Tim Cywinski

• *Shannon Taylor

• *Jason Knapp

• *Elizabeth Dempsey Beggs

• *Lewis Littlepage

The official number of candidates is now eight: Beggs, Bhatti, Cywinski, Knapp, Kopp, Littlepage, Taylor, and Tull. Many of these challengers bring real underdog energy to their campaigns because they aren’t swanky-steakhouse-lover-millionaires like Wittman, nor do most of them have connections to big donors. Some don’t take corporate PAC money at all. These candidates are running for Congress not to enrich themselves, but to empower us.

While each candidate is unique in their own way, they share several key goals they’ll fight for on our behalf: affordable healthcare, strengthening the economy, reproductive freedom, lowering the cost of living, protecting the environment, and holding the Trump administration accountable.

Nearly 400 people registered for the VA-01 Candidate “Speed Dating” Event, courtesy of Historic Triangle Democrats. The high interest shows how much attention voters are paying to the Democratic primary scheduled for August, as well as how ready they are for change. Visit our candidate information page for all the ways you can connect with and see information from all the candidates for VA-01.

More people watching Wittman

Where there’s an evil empire, there are rebels trying to stop it. If you’re new to Wittman Watch, we’re one part of the broad resistance to Rob Wittman’s abysmal record as a public servant. We’re all volunteers and residents of Virginia’s First District, and we’ve seen how Wittman’s feckless representation has degraded us to the point of harm. So, since August 2025 we’ve been keeping a close eye on Wittman

Wittman Watch exists to:

• Hold Wittman to account for his words and actions

• Show First District Virginians how they’re being willfully misled through lies, omissions, and misdirection in Wittman’s communications

• Help everyone understand how VA-01 can secure better representation in Congress, and who’s running to deliver it

• Create opportunities for conversation on the issues and priorities in our district

• Illuminate the ways in which the silent complicity of Trump’s enablers works in practice, so other House districts across the country can benefit from our work

Our 2026 #WittmanValentine event sent the message that VA-01 constituents are more than ready to break up with Rob Wittman. But our discontent went far beyond Valentine’s Day. We’ve highlighted his failures in all sorts of ways.

You can find us on Substack, BlueSky, Instagram, and Facebook. If you’re already a follower, thank you, and please encourage everyone you know to do the same! Otherwise hit Subscribe or follow us on whichever social media channel you prefer. Our content is always free and 100% guaranteed to brighten or enlighten your days.

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Anti-Wittman protests and constituent town halls

That’s the message multiple protesters across 2025-26 delivered to Wittman at or near his district and satellite offices. Protesters brought their energy, their voices, and their dedication to these spirited events. Participants included suburban moms, Boomers, members of the disabled community, longtime activists, first-time activists, elected officials, Democratic candidate challengers, party committee members, college students, and many others from different backgrounds and groups.

The protests had names like “Rob Wittman’s “Big Ugly Betrayal,” “Where’s Wittman?” and “Wittman Robbed Us.” Protesters got creative, too, such as with the Halloween protest named “Nightmare on Wittman Street,” and when members of the Williamsburg Area Chapter of Virginia Organizing delivered in December “a stocking full of coal to Wittman’s Yorktown office” to protest his support for the OBBBA and healthcare cuts.

A protest of 200 people was so powerful it prompted Wittman to cancel his mobile office hours events. That decision showed he grasped the consequences of refusing to engage with his constituents, and revealed he didn’t hesitate to double down by hiding in his comfy office even more.

Wittman has a habit of avoiding in-person town halls, so some constituents organized them in his absence. Back in 2017, “in Nokesville, Virginia, citizens held a mock town hall to discuss the congressman’s voting record”—complete with a cardboard cutout of Wittman.

Other events included the “Where Is Wittman?” Town Hall with Senator (now Lieutenant Governor) Ghazala Hashmi, the Democracy Circle RVA library town hall (which drew 150 people), and Democracy Circle RVA’s healthcare town hall. Williamsburg JCC Indivisible got in on the action by hosting a “Rob “Runaway” Wittman Constituents’ Town Hall.”

Despite Wittman’s best efforts to hide from us, we’ve been finding him anyway. During one of his 2025 telephone town halls, he was “Reamed by Furious Voters” who were angry about his refusal to stand up for us.

If the protests, town halls, and other efforts to hold Wittman accountable tell us anything, it’s that the tide has been rising against him for some time. And that leads us to the efforts by grassroots groups and ordinary folks who have worked diligently to inform their fellow VA-01 voters about why it’s important to replace Wittman.

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Grassroots groups fighting for a better VA-01

Grassroots groups have been informing and engaging with voters to both warn them about Wittman and to empower them to act. These groups include (but are not limited to) Democracy Circle RVA (the brain child of Dr. Jenny Pribble), Neighbors For Change, Wittman Watch, RVA Indivisible, WJCC Indivisible, and 50501 Virginia. These groups have been sending out informative newsletters, publishing candidate interviews, organizing protests, highlighting the Democratic primary on social media, holding petition signing events for the Democratic challengers, and hosting town halls. And a group called Protect Our Care released a video urging Wittman to reverse the healthcare cuts.

Democratic party committees such as Henrico Dems and Historic Triangle Dems helped raise the visibility of the Democratic candidates by hosting petition drives and giving the candidates opportunities to tell voters about their campaigns. They’ve also been organizing anti-Wittman protests and offering VA-01 residents multiple chances to participate in the democratic process.

Then there are the folks who are using their social media to pump up excitement for unseating Wittman (hats off to the First District Bluesky Dems and to our Facebook and Instagram followers!). They’re also volunteering at the polls, calling Wittman’s office to share their concerns, writing emails and letters to the editor, attending protests and town halls, joining pro-democracy groups, and volunteering with the campaigns of the Democratic challengers. And the comments on Wittman’s official Facebook page and his campaign Facebook page are full of VA-01 residents demanding that he do better.

As they say, where there’s a will, there’s a way—and collectively, we’re forging a path towards true congressional representation.

Scared witless

This is the part of the story when we discover that the wizard is nothing but a mere mortal behind his curtain. Rob “Take My Survey” Wittman tries hard to highlight the “wonderful” things he’s done for us, when in fact he’s clearly worried about keeping his seat. The more Wittman frets about his chances of being re-elected, the more he vomits press releases, emails, and social media posts onto his constituents.

Like a shameless carnival barker, Wittman hypes his alleged achievements when he had little or nothing to do with them, or when they’re not actually things he should be bragging about. He also makes transparently false claims, such as how the OBBB is going to help people. He lies about the redistricting referendum, flip-flops on earmark funding, sends out flyers with misinformation, blows hot air about lowering housing costs, and generates smoke and mirrors about the GOP healthcare plan.

Plot twist! Wittman is flailing.

Wittman needs to go

It’s not just Virginia’s First District that needs better, more professional representation; it’s all of America. The time is now—and urgently so!— because the longer Wittman fails to do his job (which includes holding the Trump administration accountable), the worse our lives will become.

Between the Iran War, ICE abuses, Trump’s “big beautiful bill,” Trump and his cronies enriching themselves and self-dealing, Wittman and Trump’s disregard for the Constitution, the dismantling of federal agencies, expensive groceries, healthcare cuts, the war on science, and the toxic MAHA movement, the stakes are sky-high both domestically and abroad.

The redistricting referendum wildcard plays an important role as well. If voters opt for it and it passes, Wittman will have an even more difficult time holding onto his seat than he does now. Regardless of the method, we need to give Wittman the boot. He’s an empty suit who no longer understands the meaning of public service—if he ever did.

Instead of Wittman sending our hard-earned tax money to billionaires, we need a representative who will aim that firehose of money in the other direction, from the billionaires to We the People of Virginia’s First Congressional district.

We need representatives who are fighters, not failures

When we put people dedicated to public service in charge of the government, we get great stuff. It’s that simple. Republicans currently in office have demonstrated countless times that they aren’t interested in governance or serving the public; rather, they’re intent on putting “America Last” by gutting our social services and serving themselves.

When elected officials put the American people first, we gain benefits like affordable housing, accessible healthcare, renewable energy that keeps our utility bills low, a quality public education system, plentiful jobs, dependable infrastructure, a robust economy, billionaires who will pay their fair share of taxes, and much, much more. The sky’s the limit, but only if we have the political will to elect representatives who understand that they serve us and not Trump, billionaires, big donors, or special interests.

The last chapter of Virginia’s First District saga is about to be written. How do you want the story to end?

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As seen on our socials

Our social media channels respond quickest to whatever Wittman does or says. Here’s a selection from the past week. Click on each post to see them on BlueSky (no account necessary). Follow us on BlueSky, Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit to get immediate updates each time we post.

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This November, we’ll make sure our seat is filled by someone who’ll work for us.

Today we’re covering the topic on every Virginian’s mind: the redistricting referendum. On Thursday we’ll chart the rise and fall of a certain Congressional representative.

As always, make sure you click the Subscribe or Share buttons to give yourself and your friends the gift of Wittman Watch, and follow us on BlueSky, Facebook, or Instagram for in-the-moment updates on all things Rob Wittman.

Now, about that referendum…

What’s it all about?

There is a referendum in Virginia on April 21st. The question is whether we, the people of Virginia, will permit the legislature to redraw our Congressional district maps and use them in elections from November 2026 through 2030. The referendum is happening because other U.S. states have already done their own mid-decade redistricting, skewing their Congressional districts to favor the Republican Party. Consequently the referendum is important both for the future of Virginia and for America’s democracy.

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A YES vote will grant legislative authority to draw a new map now, outside of the usual once-per-decade redistricting. The legislature has published a proposed map, but the referendum itself is not a vote on the proposed map — only on permission for temporary redistricting to happen now.

Redistricting is a big deal, and VA-01 will likely change significantly under any new maps. Some of us would remain in the new VA-01 and others would be in VA-03, VA-04, VA-05, or VA-08. (Plug in your address on this page to find your likely new district.) In the run-up to the referendum, we’ve observed many misconceptions, deliberate disinformation, and outright lies — some of which has come directly from Rob Wittman.

What’s gerrymandering?

The USA is a representative democracy. In a government “by the people, for the people,” we elect individuals to represent our interests in Congress. The maps are intended to define contiguous, compact geographic areas in which people share broadly common concerns. Consequently, the maps are extremely important to the health of American democracy.

At least since the term “gerrymandering” was coined in 1812 when Elbridge Gerry manipulated Massachusetts districts, many politicians have tried to create districts that are favorable to them personally or that create partisan advantage.

How does gerrymandering actually work? Using census, voting, demographic, and other data, districts can be drawn so they’re “packed” full of people whose interests and voices are limited to a single district. Alternatively, groups can be “cracked” such that minority interest groups are broken up and spread out across districts to dilute their influence as much as possible. Gerrymandering means that some specifically-selected voters can be ignored. Our democracy becomes less representative and more skewed to the ambitions of specific politicians and political parties. In short, it’s a cancer that can kill what we hold most dear: American democracy itself could die.

With so much at stake, it’s time for some myth-busting!

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Myth: “Republicans are against gerrymandering.”

Let’s be clear: both major parties engage in gerrymandering across the nation. It’s not a strategy consistent with the ideas of democracy and representation. And yet, 14 of the 20 most gerrymandered states benefit the Republican Party. Why is this number so high?

Project REDMAP was the beginning of the Republican Party’s concerted campaign to weaponize gerrymandering across the country. REDMAP had one clear goal: “flipping Democratic-majority state legislatures and Democrat-held state governorships for the express purpose of controlling redistricting.” And it worked.

Many argue that our current political situation is directly related to Project REDMAP. Without it, we may not have had Trump as president at all. The Republican Party evidently isn’t against gerrymandering as a practice; it deployed the most sophisticated attempt ever to use gerrymandering to lock in power at the state level. But Republicans are against it when it does not favor them!

For his part, Rob Wittman has been forthright in the past about gerrymandering. He says it’s bad… when it works against Republicans. (Wittman is always aligned with his party’s perspectives, no matter how morally bankrupt they are.) In 2016, he unsuccessfully argued that VA-03 was not drawn correctly because it disfavored the Republican Party. The Supreme Court told him to take a hike. But he’s said precisely nothing about gerrymandering where it favors Republicans, including the recent redistricting in Texas and North Carolina that pre-empted Virginia’s referendum. Are you shocked? No, neither are we.

Myth: “Obama and Spanberger say to vote NO.”

This myth is a product of a disinformation campaign that’s using images of Barack Obama and Governor Spanberger and out-of-context quotes to suggest they oppose the referendum. They have both explicitly released videos and messages urging a YES vote. Here’s Obama’s:

Here’s a report on Spanberger’s YES vote. The NAACP Virginia State Conference has held press conferences specifically to counter the disinformation campaign about Obama, and similar mailers targeting Black voters.

Sadly, disinformation campaigns are business-as-usual for Republican Party operatives nowadays. Rob Wittman continually publishes disinformation across his social media and repetitive emails, and billionaires such as Peter Thiel are actively funding lies/disinformation campaigns right now on the referendum.

It is true that Obama and Spanberger, and most Democratic politicians in Virginia, have campaigned against gerrymandering. The OneVirginia2021 campaign ran through 2021 and aimed to make gerrymandering impossible in Virginia. Obama and Spanberger (and several Wittman Watch volunteers!) supported that campaign. The independent redistricting commission was a product of OneVirginia2021’s efforts.

With the independent commission, Virginia’s Democrats and Republicans had declared a truce on gerrymandering. But then President Trump demanded that Republican-led states “find” more Republican seats in Congress. This clearly has changed everyone’s perspective on gerrymandering in Virginia. Obama, Spanberger, and others have seen that the truce has been violated, and the effects will blow back on all of us. They strongly urge all Virginians to vote YES.

Myth: “Redistricting is not something I need to care about.”

District maps are supposed to be drawn after every U.S. Census, which happens every 10 years. The Census shows who lives where in every state, and district maps should represent coherent communities based on that data. Mid-decade redistricting is extremely rare in U.S. history, but it has happened before: successfully in Texas in 2003, unsuccessfully in Colorado in 2003 (their state Supreme Court struck it down), and successfully in Georgia in 2005. In all three cases, the Republican Party initiated the mid-decade redistricting specifically to create partisan advantage in their states. And it worked: over 20 years later, the Republican Party maintains advantages in Texas and Georgia.

And now they’ve done it again, in Texas and North Carolina, with Florida and Missouri actively working on it too.

Myth: “Democrats started the redistricting war.”

Every state decides how to draw its own Congressional district maps. But NO state decided to redistrict at this time on its own. This latest mid-decade redistricting battle all started because President Trump demanded that Texas redistrict “to help keep [the] House majority.”

North Carolina has joined Texas in this effort, and they both did it without any referendum. Those state legislatures redrew their maps to skew more Congressional seats to the Republican Party without any consultation with their voters. Florida and Missouri are also working on their own redistricting efforts to skew their states toward Republican candidates.

Virginia’s Democratic legislators were watching this all unfold, even before the November 2025 elections. They noted that if any state pursued mid-decade redistricting to gerrymander their states, Virginia could counteract it. They went so far as to warn legislators across the country of Virginia’s ability to do so and, after winning majorities in the state, wrote it into a bill: “the General Assembly shall be authorized to modify one or more congressional districts … in the event that any State of the United States of America conducts a redistricting of such state’s congressional districts.” In other words: Virginia could redistrict its maps only if another U.S. state conducted a mid-decade redistricting of its own first. And of course that’s what has happened in Texas and North Carolina.

The bottom line is this: President Trump started this redistricting fight, and Virginia is not letting it go uncontested.

And Virginia isn’t alone in that response: California has preceded us, obtaining 64% approval for their new map. (Notice again how a Democratic Party led state went about redistricting only after getting permission from its voters to do so!)

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Myth: “The independent bipartisan commission works fine.” / “The bipartisan commission will be permanently eliminated by a YES vote in the referendum.”

In 2020, to avoid partisan gerrymandering in our state, Virginia voted to establish an independent commission for redistricting. It was first put to work in 2021, following the 2020 Census, but it didn’t quite go according to plan. Due to partisan bickering and COVID delays, the commission ended up in complete deadlock and the Virginia Supreme Court had to draw the maps. The idea that what we had was working fine is simply wrong. The kinks could be worked out in 2031 (for the next scheduled redistricting).

In any case, the April referendum would not change the bipartisan commission or the redistricting process after 2030. It would only authorize an adjustment for the next 4 years, until the next Census in 2030. Once that data is available, the state will turn to the independent commission to draw updated maps, which should be in place by the elections in 2031.

Myth: “Courts have found the referendum unconstitutional.”

No final ruling has been issued. The Virginia Supreme Court has twice allowed voting to proceed while reserving the constitutional question. It’s possible that they will rule the referendum unconstitutional after the election itself, but for now, the courts have specifically allowed the process to unfold.

Ultimately, the constitutionality of the referendum is for the courts to decide. The referendum itself is for the voters to decide.

Myth: “It’s not really about restoring fairness.”

“Finding” more red seats in Texas and North Carolina, and potentially Florida and Missouri, means that those states, Donald Trump, and the Republican Party will have more votes and power in Congress than they otherwise would. So, if Trump’s effort to claw back seats in Texas and other states works, and the House retains a Republican majority after the November elections, every Virginia voter will be impacted adversely. Even Virginians who vote Republican will be worse off because Texas, North Carolina, Florida, and Missouri may all have skewed representation in Congress.

During budget deliberations, for example, those states who have already gerrymandered their districts will have more voices in the House majority and will be able to send more federal dollars to their own states as a result. Allowing redistricting elsewhere to go unanswered means everyone in Virginia will lose out, while states who are willing to rig the rules will gain more dollars, influence, and power.

Trump’s redistricting demand also creates a dangerous precedent of presidents requesting more seats in Congress to cement a larger majority, and being “gifted” those seats by compliant state legislatures who redistrict on an as-needed basis. That’s not representative democracy at work; it’s subverting the will of the voting public.

So the referendum is absolutely about restoring fairness. A YES vote will allow new maps that will counteract the gerrymandering by the Republican Party in other states, somewhat restoring balance and fairness at the national level.

There is another aspect to the question of “fairness.” In gerrymandered states, it is always true that some votes count for less, by design. This is true for Democratic and Independent voters in Texas and North Carolina — and, should new maps be implemented in Virginia, Republican voters will also be sidelined. Gerrymandering always creates victors and victims. And this is why President Trump’s demands of Republican-led states are so pernicious and corrupt. He is effectively daring Democrat majority states to retaliate. Trump and his party appear to be preying on those who have a moral backbone, who don’t operate purely for political and power advantage, who really do care about our neighbors.

We must remember the national context in which this referendum is happening, and remind ourselves that all voters who are disenfranchised because of this mid-decade redistricting will suffer that consequence because of the greed, lust for power, and immorality of Donald J. Trump and his complicit collaborators like Rob Wittman.

In the future, it will be extremely important to put in place measures that prevent this kind of situation. A federal law defining and banning gerrymandering is needed. In its absence, we must use the tools we have.

Myth: “Virginia shouldn’t change because of events in other states.”

E pluribus unum. “Out of many, one.” This is the traditional motto of the United States, appearing on our Great Seal. And never has it been more appropriate to cite.

It’s tempting to think that we can limit our concerns to our state’s borders, that Virginians should only care about Virginia. But that’s simply a comforting fantasy. We need to care about ourselves first but not stop there, imagining that our fate is insulated from what happens in Washington D.C. or in other statehouses. We are part of a federal government system; we are purposefully linked to our neighboring states and every other U.S. state through our national economy and the policies that govern our freedoms, safety, and prosperity. We are subject to federal laws enacted by a Congress that draws its power from representatives of every state. What happens elsewhere impacts our own futures. And we must remember that, according to the Constitution, federal law supersedes state law.

We must think about redistricting from a national perspective. And when we do that, we must acknowledge that redistricting is about America as a whole, and Virginia’s part in that whole.

Myth: “Two wrongs don’t make a right” / “Both parties are as bad as each other.”

This isn’t a schoolyard game. Politics impacts our freedoms, our livelihoods, our safety, our protection, and almost every other thing we rely on in our country. Reliance on such a simple statement as “two wrongs don’t make a right” ignores the significance of what’s at stake. We believe gerrymandering should be illegal. But it’s not, and it’s been weaponized.

We must operate in the world that actually exists, not an idealized one in which only some people are subject to constraints of principled behavior. The fact is that one party has already broken the norm by redrawing maps mid-decade. Should we stand by and leave voters in some states with a dangerous advantage over the rest of us? Our choice now is to let one side lock in an advantage, or to try to offset it so the playing field is level. “Two wrongs don’t make a right” is morally laudable in a vacuum, but it’s strategically naive if someone has already changed the rules for themselves.

Finally, there is no principled neutrality if the alternative is asymmetric power. If Virginia refuses to respond to actions taken elsewhere, it only helps the side that is willing to move first; a blanket “two wrongs” objection can end up protecting the first wrongdoer’s advantage. That doesn’t make retaliatory redistricting ideal or desirable, but it does explain why it’s the least-bad, necessary option.

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What does Wittman Watch think about all this?

Wittman Watch is run by a group of volunteers, and we all live in VA-01. Some of us volunteered for the OneVirginia2021 campaign that resulted in the independent commission on redistricting. We know the arguments inside and out. This referendum raises difficult ethical and political questions for all of us and all Virginians, and that’s why this myth-busting article is so important.

All of us believe that, whether or not there’s a referendum, Rob Wittman will lose in November. We also acknowledge that gerrymandering has already happened in Texas and North Carolina, and Florida and Missouri are likely to follow. The President has demanded that these states stack the deck in his favor and, allowed to go unchallenged, American democracy is at risk of permanent and irreversible damage. The aggressor was not Virginia. Even if Virginia redraws its maps, it likely won’t entirely counterbalance the gerrymandering of other states.

We love our fellow Virginians. Wittman Watch was founded on the principle that, ultimately, all Virginians share more values and priorities than might otherwise seem apparent. Our state seal illustrates our obligation to each other:

The seal shows the female figure of Virtue standing victorious over Tyranny, and our motto: “Sic Semper Tyrannis” which means “Thus always to tyrants.” As Wikipedia notes:

This is a derived quote from the famous event in Roman history, attributed to Brutus upon his participation in the slaying of Caesar. (Caesar had been named perpetual dictator of Rome in the same year, and some senators believed he had ambitions to abolish the Roman Republic and establish himself as a monarch.)

President Trump is trying to corrupt our republic, and keep power for himself and his collaborators. This is tyranny. We believe that, as Virginians, no matter how difficult it may be, it is our obligation to stand up to such tyranny. Each of us will vote YES on the referendum — not happily, gleefully, or enthusiastically, but because it’s necessary.

And yet, more than anything, we believe this: how you vote is your decision to make.

Go and vote by April 21st!

We hope you feel and are more informed and empowered to go and vote in the referendum, and to discuss it with your friends and neighbors (and trolls?) online. Here are the key dates for all the upcoming elections in Virginia. The first column here shows all the dates for the referendum, and you can get an overview of it all from our February 17 post.

Remember you can share all our content for free. Invite your friends to subscribe to our feeds, so they are as informed and clear-of-mind as you!

How are YOU thinking about the referendum? Are you going to vote YES, or NO, or are you undecided? What factors are you considering or (if you voted already) what did you consider? Post in our comments and let’s have a conversation about it!

• Last week we wrote about the real threats to election integrity: the SAVE Act in its several iterations.

• On Tuesday, our Myth of the Week series continued: Is Wittman helping farmers? (Surprise: he is not.)

• Scroll down to see this week’s social media roundup.

• The Wittman Watch newsletter (but not social media) is taking a break for a few weeks. See you in April!
  Can’t wait? Take a look through our Archive.

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I do not believe Washington knows better than patients, families, and doctors how health care decisions should be made. Americans deserve the freedom to choose the care that works best for them — not a one-size-fits-all system dictated by federal bureaucrats.
- Congressman Rob Wittman

Think Rob Wittman believes that you’re entitled to control your own body and make your own medical decisions? Think again.

A key factor in reproductive rights is the concept of bodily autonomy: the freedom to make decisions about our own bodies and do with them as we see fit. In reproductive healthcare, this freedom relates to a range of procedures and tests like vasectomies, cervical cancer screenings, and in-vitro fertilization (IVF).

Science has produced more tools for supporting our reproductive health than ever before, including obstetric and gynecological care, treatment for sexually transmitted diseases, and birth control, which allows us the freedom to choose when and how we grow our families.

But Wittman’s anti-reproductive freedom votes over the years paint a grim picture of how much he opposes our access to the full range of reproductive rights to which we’re entitled. He claims to be a champion of healthcare freedom, infant rights, and families — but all of that is a shield he uses to wage attacks on the health and freedom of pregnant people.

He also communicates in coded and anti-choice language such as “fetal personhood” and “born alive” to make it appear he’s protecting fetuses and infants, when in fact his true goal is to control every aspect of our reproductive lives.

Let’s examine his voting record on reproductive healthcare and rights in more detail.

Extreme personhood bills

Congressman Wittman prioritizes collections of cells above living human beings. How do we know this?

Between 2007-2021, he co-sponsored NINE extreme personhood bills, collectively called the Sanctity of Human Life Act. These bills allege that from the moment of conception or cloning, an embryo or even a fertilized egg has the same rights as any born person, including federal and state Constitutional rights. If any one of these bills passed, there would be catastrophic consequences.

By supporting extreme personhood bills, Wittman tells us he rejects the bodily autonomy of pregnant people — and by extension, the rest of us. His endorsement of these bills speaks to a thirst for control over the bodies of pregnant people, most of whom are cisgender women. Even more broadly, we can understand that Wittman somehow believes that medical decisions — specifically when they relate to the lives and bodies of women and of pregnant people — are best made by legislators with no insight into specifics or circumstances and with zero medical knowledge.

Wittman’s obsession with extreme personhood bills tells us he believes people with uteruses aren’t entitled to the same bodily freedoms and protections as everyone else, and that women especially are nothing more than vessels for breeding, with fewer rights and entitlements than the embryos they might carry. And if they experience pregnancy complications that could kill them? Wittman’s answer: tough luck.

That’s not reproductive freedom; that’s enslavement.

Abortion rights under attack

Pregnancy involves a multitude of complications and risks. Sometimes abortion is needed to save the life of the pregnant person, especially if that person is a child who became pregnant from incest or rape.

Constraints on abortion endanger pregnant people’s lives and health and can lead to forced births, sometimes under the most inhumane circumstances. There are multiple reasons people need safe, reliable, affordable, and timely access to abortion.

But as Wittman’s voting record reveals, he’s a staunch believer in forced birth and other cruel abortion restrictions. Here are a few examples of the many, many anti-abortion bills he voted for, signed, and/or co-sponsored:

• H. R. 3 (5/2011) - bans federal health coverage that includes abortion

• H. R. 5939 (7/2010) - bars funding for abortion under federal ACA plans

• H. R. 00003 (5/2011) - prohibits federal funding for abortion

• H. R. 1122 (3/2013) - prohibits school health centers from providing information about abortion

• H. R. 0217 (1/2013) - forbids family planning assistance that includes abortion

• H. R. 0036 (5/2015) - bans abortion after twenty weeks’ gestation, with a life of the mother exception

• H. R. 962 (2/2019) - to prevent infanticide, which is already illegal

• H.Con.Res.3 (2023) - resolution condemning violence against “crisis pregnancy centers” (CPCs)

“Crisis pregnancy centers” (CPCs) are not-for-profit centers with a specifically anti-choice agenda that deceptively target people who are suffering because of unplanned pregnancies. CPCs are not health care providers; they have an ideological mission to prevent people from accessing abortion care. Virginia’s CPCs outnumber actual reproductive healthcare providers by a ratio of 4:1. And as we saw in his voting record, Wittman voted to support them.

All the anti-abortion bills wholeheartedly embraced by Wittman have serious, life-threatening consequences. Imagine being pregnant while sick with cancer and having to choose between your health and bankruptcy (H. R. 3). H. R. 962 promotes a false narrative because federal and state infanticide laws already make it illegal to intentionally end an infant’s life. It’s designed to punish a pregnant person and their healthcare providers. The real goal of H. R. 962 is to “make abortion illegal, criminalizing patients and providers in the process.”

When asked on video about women being jailed for pregnancy outcomes, Wittman responded, “Protect those infants. Protect the infants that are born alive.” When further pressed, he added, “We’re protecting the women by protecting their infants that are born alive.”

His statement demands pushback because an “infant” is, by definition, a baby in the first stage of their childhood. A fetus who has not yet been born is not an infant. A pregnant person is never gestating an infant. By the time an infant exists, there is no pregnancy. Wittman’s claim of “protecting the women by protecting their infants” is completely nonsensical; there’s no universe in which penalizing women for pregnancy outcomes equates to protecting them. Perhaps he intentionally muddies the issue to hide the reproductive healthcare threat lurking beneath his deceptive language.

Wittman’s robotic repetition of anti-abortion and anti-reproductive-freedom talking points speaks volumes: he deems pregnant people less worthy of healthcare and support compared to the fetuses they gestate.

Here’s a better idea: let’s build a better nation and a more thriving economy by protecting the adults who are doing the work of nurturing new humans. That can be accomplished by ensuring they get the best medical care for their own health and the health of their children, during and after pregnancy. Let’s protect them with paid family leave, robust social safety nets, and other wraparound services that help them to navigate the complexity of pregnancy and its aftermath, and to thrive in family life.

Threats to our reproductive freedom

Reproductive freedom means we have the right to:

• Bodily autonomy

• Contraception, fertility treatment, and abortion

• Quality maternal and prenatal care

• Information about our bodies and reproductive systems

• The right to grow our families at a time of our choosing

Wittman doesn’t believe we should have those rights — or at least not many of them. Reproductive Freedom for All gave him a score of 0% in 2024. In that year, he voted:

• to rescind Title IX Protections

• to ban payment or reimbursement for service members who incurred abortion care-related expenses

• to stigmatize pregnant students and spread disinformation about abortion, and

• to fund anti-abortion centers.

In 2022, he voted against the Right to Contraception Act and the Ensuring Women’s Right to Reproductive Freedom Act. This threat to bodily autonomy cuts both ways: what’s to stop Wittman from going after men who want vasectomies? After all, men need reproductive healthcare, too.

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Wittman’s anti-reproductive healthcare votes cause ripple effects. For example, Virginia is the only Southern state without an abortion ban. State lawmakers introduced a constitutional amendment for reproductive freedom in 2025 in part because Wittman and other legislators refuse to help enshrine abortion rights at the federal level.

Medical abortions are safe and effective, but Wittman ignored the science and voted to penalize the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for expanding access to mifepristone in 2023. That was another vote to endanger pregnant people. There’s a pattern here: why is he so preoccupied with punishing and criminalizing people’s reproductive health choices? Why does he believe it is his right or his job to make healthcare decisions, even on matters of life and death? Remember, he said: “I do not believe Washington knows better than patients, families, and doctors how health care decisions should be made. Americans deserve the freedom to choose the care that works best for them — not a one-size-fits-all system dictated by federal bureaucrats.” Wittman is a self-righteous hypocrite.

Ripping away healthcare, reproductive and otherwise

People of all genders need reproductive healthcare. Wittman has both sabotaged our reproductive healthcare access and voted to raise healthcare costs.

He voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA) more than 40 times. Then he broke the ACA and caused devastating cuts to Medicaid by voting for H. R.1, which sabotaged the healthcare coverage many VA-01 residents rely on to access reproductive care and all other medical care. 300,000 Virginians risk losing their healthcare coverage thanks to Wittman.

The $50.4 billion cuts from H. R. 1 put rural hospitals in VA-01 at risk of closing, endangering pregnant people who lack any other options for obstetric care. So much can go medically wrong surrounding a birth. If hospitals close, what can people do in the event of pregnancy complications or needing to give birth? Does Wittman have a plan to help, or will pregnant people bleed out or die during the hours-long drive to a distant hospital?

Wittman voted to defund Planned Parenthood (H. R. 3762; 2015). It’s worth noting that Planned Parenthood provides all sorts of preventive care services that extend way beyond abortion services and reproductive healthcare. The latest attack on Planned Parenthood is H. R.271 - Defund Planned Parenthood Act of 2025, which would prevent people from accessing care and would cost taxpayers $52 million over 10 years. The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior, so no doubt Wittman will be the first in line to vote “Yea.”

Adoption pressure

Wittman supports cruel family separation over financially supporting pregnant people when they’re in crisis. His Adoption Information Act, if passed, would force family planning services “to provide pamphlets containing contact information for adoption centers to anyone receiving family planning services.” If the family services providers refused to share the pamphlets, they’d lose federal funding.

This draconian tactic would pressure economically disadvantaged pregnant people into relinquishing their children. By introducing and promoting this bill, Wittman fails to prioritize keeping families intact by giving them the necessary financial assistance to help them raise their own children. Instead, it signals his preference for family separation and traumatizing children who are removed from their birth families due to financial hardship.

If his bill passed and some pregnant people chose adoption under duress as a result, it would mean they would lose their child and their right to grow their family at a time of their choosing. Wittman’s “pro-family” claims aren’t about family at all; they are about transferring control and autonomy from families to legislators.

Why does Wittman oppose reproductive freedom?

By voting against reproductive freedom time and time again, Wittman has inserted himself between patients and their doctors, wrestling for control over their reproductive healthcare and rights. He is anti-bodily autonomy, anti-abortion, and anti-reproductive freedom.

His motivation may not be money; in 2024, he only took a $500 donation from National Pro-Life Alliance, a Christian anti-abortion group. It seems that Wittman’s anti-reproductive freedom stance is both ideologically and politically motivated, to keep forced-birth voters on his side. His actions and voting record reveal he’ll only allow reproductive healthcare on his terms — terms so cruel they endanger lives and threaten everyone’s core freedom of bodily autonomy. There is no clause in the Constitution that gives him the right to make those decisions.

Whether it’s extreme personhood bills, forced birth, or denying accessible and affordable reproductive care to pregnant people, Wittman’s hypocrisy on reproductive healthcare and rights knows no bounds.

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MYTH:

Farmers are better off with Wittman.

REALITY:

Wittman’s votes create chaos and risks for farmers.

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Farmers are the lifeblood of VA-01, but economic pressures over the past year have been squeezing them dry. Is their way of life on the brink of extinction in our district?

Congressman Rob Wittman claims he has “consistently supported efforts to put more money back in the pockets of Virginians.” That doesn’t seem to be working for Virginia’s farmers, as rural residents of VA-01 fight to make ends meet and describe themselves as “just struggling and doing whatever we can…to survive.”

Farmers across America have been experiencing tough times for years, only to suffer even more under Trump’s chaotic federal policies, which Wittman unhesitatingly votes to support. And there doesn’t seem to be a light at the end of the tunnel.

The Trump administration routinely produces instability and uncertainty for farmers and rural communities. While tariffs and rising healthcare costs are the primary sources of turbulence for farmers, the sources of chaos for farmers are everywhere in Wittman’s votes:

• Shrinking export markets as America’s relationships are damaged and retaliatory boycotts ensue, making prices drop

• Dismantling of federal agencies that once bought over $5 billion from US farmers, and unpredictable federal aid relief for farmers

• Sinking dollar exchange rates

• Continuing inflation and increasing costs of supplies and materials

• Spiraling business and weather insurance costs

• Intimidation and reduction of the migrant workforce farmers rely on

• Attacks on federal economic guardrails and institutions, such as the Federal Reserve, that create instability across the whole economy

Farmers are wondering if it’s worth staying in business as the federal government is weaponized against them in President Trump’s manufactured trade wars.

To see what Wittman has done to help farmers overcome the challenges, we looked at the biggest sources of chaos: tariffs and healthcare costs.

Tariff terrors threaten to sink farms

Agriculture is Virginia’s top industry, employing about 300,000 people. In VA-01, soybeans and grains are among the most-farmed crops. That makes VA-01 particularly vulnerable to chaotic economic and international trade policies. Trump’s tariffs have devastated once-healthy agricultural profits, transforming them into steep losses almost overnight.

Vague promises of federal subsidies can’t compensate for an unpredictable market, and farmers are skeptical of federal assurances of financial relief in the form of bridge payments that materialize too late or not at all. (And even if the payments appear, input costs will rise in response, reducing the effectiveness of those same payments!) At this point, many VA-01 farmers may have no choice but to liquidate their assets.

Wittman has failed to act to keep farmers from drowning. In 2025, some Congressional Republicans introduced or supported bills that would have provided relief for farmers in VA-01 by ending tariffs and/or requiring their explicit approval by Congress. Wittman was not among them.

Healthcare cuts hit farmers hard

Farming is extremely dangerous work by any measure. Farmers die at a rate of seven times the national average. They die by suicide at about twice the rate of the general population. They sustain injuries from toxic chemicals, exposure to the elements, and heavy machinery accidents, all of which result in steep costs from lost work in addition to medical expenses. Farmers’ very lives and livelihoods depend on having affordable, comprehensive health insurance.

27% of the agricultural workforce relies on the Affordable Care Act for health insurance, but then Wittman broke the ACA. Now those same agricultural workers are overwhelmed by crippling medical debt and skyrocketing premiums that, in some cases, have quadrupled.

H. R. 1 also dictates that Marketplace enrollees must pay back health care subsidies at tax time if their farms do sufficiently well during the year. This places farmers in an impossible bind, forcing them to choose between a profitable farm business and essential healthcare subsidies.

Farmers need and deserve a representative who ensures access to reliable, affordable healthcare so they can focus their energy on their business instead of worrying about how they’re going to pay for their expensive premiums. Instead of ensuring stability, Wittman stirs the chaos pot. His H. R. 1 vote slashed Medicaid and increased health insurance costs, creating an untenable situation for rural hospitals and clinics — which stand to lose billions of dollars annually and could be forced to close — while simultaneously swelling the ranks of uninsured patients. Wittman knew multiple rural health facilities would be at risk of closing from Medicaid cuts, yet he still voted for H. R. 1.

Wittman also did not object to Trump’s illegal five-state funding freeze of childcare subsidies and family assistance funds in Democratic-run states. Now that Virginia has elected a Democratic governor, it’s not a stretch to expect that Virginia could be next.

A farming bust would lead to catastrophic job losses, closure of rural hospitals, and slashed social services, making it difficult or impossible for farmers and rural residents to survive tough times. Unfortunately for those farmers, Wittman is in no hurry to mitigate or in any way address the damage caused by his votes on healthcare bills.

Wittman’s “Farmageddon” is upon us

Wittman says, “Our nation’s farmers work tirelessly to keep the world fueled and fed.” But his words ring hollow. Instead he turns his back on farmers again and again as they are relentlessly pummeled by tariffs; the end of USAID; shrinking earnings; healthcare cuts; chaotic federal policies; rising costs; mental health crises; and government shutdowns. Wittman stands idly by, occasionally chatting with farmers and posing for photo ops, as all of the turmoil he’s voted for shatters the lives of farmers in VA-01.

How can Rob Wittman actually help Virginia’s farmers and rural communities? Let us know what you think by posting comments here or on any of our social media channels: Facebook, Instagram, BlueSky, or Reddit.

• Last week we wrote about how Wittman is an environmental catastrophe.

• On Tuesday we returned to our Myth of the Week series: Is Wittman a moderate? (Nope.)

• Scroll down to see this week’s social media roundup.

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“Fraud, waste, and abuse” is a go-to phrase for Republicans, including Rob Wittman, when they’re trying to justify attacks on the foundations of our country. Accusations of fraud — even when they have no merit — serve to undercut trust in institutions, and open the door to “reforms” that the public would otherwise reject. Under President Trump (and with Rob Wittman’s support), Medicaid, SNAP, the ACA, USAID, the Education Department, and many other programs and agencies have been accused of rampant “fraud, waste, and abuse,” and consequently shredded — with no evidence to support the pretext that supposedly justified their destruction.

For those who aim to accumulate and hold onto power, our system of elections is an inconvenient complication. People who have worked to destroy the values, principles, policies, and institutions that voters hold dear cannot tolerate the possibility (or probability!) of those same voters ejecting them from office. In that context, rigging the voting system becomes an essential tactic to retain power.

Lest there be any doubt about the Trump administration’s goals for the upcoming elections, just read what Kristi Noem, Secretary of Homeland Security, said earlier this month:

“When it gets to Election Day, we’ve been proactive to make sure that we have the right people voting, electing the right leaders to lead this country.”

— Kristi Noem, Secretary of Homeland Security, February 13, 2026

Donald Trump has baselessly asserted that our voting systems are full of fraud. This isn’t new; the accusations began during his first term. The violent insurrection of January 6th, 2021 was the direct result of his disproven complaints that he lost because the election was somehow rigged. Since being re-elected in 2024 (via that same, supposedly fraud-ridden system), Trump has further amplified the accusations, and a complicit Republican majority in both houses of Congress has played along. The threat to our system of elections grows as Congress considers two new bills that will “reform” elections - with the same pattern of destruction in aid of the wealthy and powerful, at the grave expense of everyone else.

Voter fraud is a lie

If you’re at least 18 years old and a U.S. citizen, you’re eligible to vote. Each state has its own laws that govern its local, state, and federal elections. Most states require voters to register as residents in their states. Some states prevent individuals who are incarcerated, have been convicted of a felony, or have been determined to have a “mental incapacity” from voting. Otherwise, if you meet the requirements, you are an eligible voter. It is your right (and indeed your duty) to vote, because voting is the most vital and direct way in which we participate in and perpetuate our republic.

Trump and Rob Wittman have actively promoted the lie of “voter fraud” for years, with particular focus on alleged voting by non-citizens, and especially by immigrants who have entered the country illegally. In 2018 Wittman sent out a poll asking constituents if “citizenship should be required to vote,” even though U.S. citizenship is and has always been a requirement to vote in federal elections. He consistently supports “voter integrity” measures such as requiring documentary proof of citizenship, which U.S. states already handle effectively using existing processes. When Wittman voted for the Big Ugly Bill (H. R. 1), he stated that removing “deceased, ineligible, and non-citizen beneficiaries” from the voter rolls would “strengthen integrity.”

The facts are clear: accusations of rampant voter fraud are lies. The Brennan Center found only about 30 cases of voter inconsistencies — mainly resulting from confusion, not malice — out of 158 million votes cast in 2024. This is an error rate of 0.00001%. Even the conservative Heritage Foundation finds that voter fraud is an exceptionally rare phenomenon, affecting 0.001% of submitted ballots. Their voter fraud database found only 68 cases of undocumented immigrants voting since the 1980s. The existing system of shared responsibilities among federal, state, and local election officials assures multiple registration and voter roll checks to prevent illegal voting — which, by all measures, are working exactly as they should. An error rate of 0.00001% can be expressed another way: voting integrity measures are effective 99.99999% of the time — as close to perfect as can reasonably be managed. Illegal votes have never swayed elections one way or another. In other words: voter fraud is a lie.

Regardless, in March 2025, Trump signed an executive order to “nationalize” elections. He tried to walk it back, but the damage was done; Wittman and the Republican majority in the House validated his desires by proposing and passing legislation to disenfranchise voters, purge voter rolls, and make voting more difficult — all disguised as solutions to voter fraud problems that did not and do not exist.

Voter suppression in three Acts

Voter suppression attacks the two major steps of voting: how people register to vote, and how they cast their ballots. Three different bills are in play: the SAVE Act, the SAVE America Act, and the MEGA Act. The House and Senate have added amendments to each one to add more restrictions and fewer options for registration and voting. Here’s a summary of how the provisions of these bills compare and relate to one another.

Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act
(S. 128, passed the House in April 2025)

The SAVE Act focuses on voter registration. It introduces significant challenges, burdens, and confusion for voters and election officials. It also destroys the Constitutionally-mandated line between federal and state responsibilities.

• Requires in-person documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote

  • Birth certificate, U.S. passport, Consular Report of Birth Abroad, Certificate of Citizenship, or Naturalization Certificate

  • Online and mail registration become effectively impossible, since they still require in-person presentation of documents

• Requires in-person documentary proof of citizenship for any changes to registration, such as a change of address

  • Frequent movers must repeatedly locate and present original documents

• Married women who have taken their spouse’s name, and anyone who has had a legal name change, will face a major documentation mismatch problem when their birth certificate (or other citizenship document) does not match their married or changed name

The Brennan Center identifies the SAVE Act as the “worst voting law passed by Congress in recent memory.” A bipartisan group of 60 elected officials noted:

“The SAVE Act places an unfunded, unworkable, and legally risky burden on election administrators without offering the necessary resources of implementation support.”

In requiring changes to federal registration requirements, the Act would necessitate two separate sets of required paperwork: one for federal elections and another for state elections. That change would double the work for election officials, confuse voters, and lead to unwarranted delays and/or removal of eligible voters from the rolls.

The SAVE Act places new, unnecessarily stringent requirements on voters to provide official proof of citizenship in person.

• Many voters, especially rural voters and seniors, do not have access to paper copies of their birth certificates, or the means to acquire them.

• First-time voters would require official documentary proof of citizenship in addition to an approved ID in order to register to vote.

• Rural voters and voters with disabilities might have to travel long distances to present their proof of citizenship in person, since online or mail-in registration is prohibited.

• Voters who move even within the same state will be required to present documentation again when they update the address on their registrations. Approximately 9% of voters move within a state during the year, and may not update their driver’s licenses (which requires a fee) until they expire.

• Passports can be used but, according to the State Department, 52% of voters do not have a passport. Since new passports cost $165 (and a renewal costs $130), this provision is in effect a return to Jim Crow-era poll taxes.

• Any woman who has changed her name upon marriage will be unable to meet the requirement for her current legal name to match the name on her birth certificate. Pew Research suggests that 79-80% of married women in opposite-sex marriages take their spouses’ last names. This issue will affect approximately 69 million married women nationwide, and is a misogynistic encroachment on the voting rights of a huge segment of the population.

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And remember: these new requirements, new costs for citizens, and new inconveniences do not solve any real problem. It makes no sense to make registration harder when only 65% of eligible Americans voted in the last election. If anything, this low level of participation is an argument for making registration easier and simpler for eligible voters.

While the SAVE Act passed the House in 2025, it didn’t pass the Senate, so it was effectively dead. But then along came…

SAVE America Act (a.k.a. “the new SAVE Act”)
(S. 3752, passed the House in February 2026)

The SAVE America Act originated in the Senate in February. It builds on the framework of the original SAVE Act and adds even more layers of registration requirements, as well as complications to the voting process itself.

• Effectively eliminates online, mail‑in, and automatic registration

• Adds civil and criminal penalties for election officials who err in collecting all required documents, even if the person is in fact a citizen and eligible to vote

• Married women who face documentation mismatch would need a marriage certificate, divorce decree, or court order to connect their proof-of-citizenship document to their current legal name for registration

  • If unavailable, a married woman may present “an affidavit signed by the applicant attesting that the name on the documentation is a previous name of the applicant”; the Act says nothing about what form this “affidavit” might take, burdening the states with another unfunded mandate

  • Provides exceptions for absent military service members and their families

• Additional nationwide requirement to show government-issued photo ID when voting

  • Passport, driver’s license or state ID, military ID, some tribal IDs

  • If no photo ID, may vote via provisional ballot

• Voters who face the greatest registration and documentation challenges include Native Americans, naturalized citizens, low-income and rural voters, voters of color, and voters with disabilities

The SAVE America Act requires primary citizenship evidence to be presented upon registration: a birth certificate, a U.S. passport, a Consular Report of Birth Abroad, a Certificate of Citizenship, or a Naturalization Certificate. The big difference between the SAVE Act and the SAVE America Act is the additional requirement to present photo ID at the polls — but not just any photo ID. Acceptable photo IDs include a driver’s license that explicitly states U.S. citizenship (not a universal feature); a passport; a state ID; a military ID; or a tribal ID (but only if it contains a photo, an expiration date, and states U.S. citizenship, which most do not). A student ID — even one issued by a state university — is not valid for in-person voting in the state where the student attends school, nor is it valid for voting by mail in the state where the student permanently resides.

The final destructive blow is that the House version of this bill directs states to run their voter rolls through the Department of Homeland Security, forcing states to violate federal law that blocks sharing private information. Thus far, Virginia has refused to hand over unredacted voter rolls and is currently being sued by the Department of Justice.

The SAVE America Act takes what was awful about the SAVE Act and turns it up to 11.

Make Elections Great Again (MEGA) Act
(H. R. 7300; introduced in the House January 2026)

This focuses on the act of voting itself, while overlapping with the SAVE America Act’s registration requirements.

• Requires proof of citizenship at the polls, at the time of voting

  • Government-issued photo ID required

• Imposes national rules on mail ballots (received by close of polls on Election Day)

• Bans ballot harvesting

• Bans universal vote‑by‑mail

• Bans ranked‑choice voting in federal elections

• Mandates paper ballots

• Expanded enforcement mechanisms, including civil and criminal penalties for election officials

• Mandates centralized, official statewide voter registration databases as the controlling list for federal elections

• Ends the 90-day quiet period before elections, which was designed to protect voters from being thrown off the rolls shortly before an election

The radical and un-American MEGA Act imposes unfunded and burdensome mandates on state and local election officials. With drastically reduced personnel and reduced funding, local officials would be required to purge voter rolls every 30 days — a huge administrative hurdle. Meanwhile, the Trump administration cut $60 million from the 2025-2026 budget designated for election security and administrative support at the federal and state levels. In the U.S., there are about 10,000 voting districts and one million election officials. There has been a massive exodus of election officials since the Trump turmoil of the 2020 election. According to media sources, 36-39% of voting districts have lost local chiefs or directors of elections, 50% of Western states have lost local chiefs, and 50% of all election sites have lost volunteer workers. The 30-day voter purge is consequently entirely unworkable, even if it were necessary — which it most assuredly is not!

Local election officials deciding whether to accept or reject a voter’s documentation would open themselves and their offices up to lawsuits and dire consequences for honest mistakes, effectively incentivizing the rejection of legitimate documentation. Officials could be prosecuted for failure to collect, verify, and retain appropriate documentation from voters. Voters could sue for undue delay in processing registration materials. The act would impose unfunded mandates in that state and local officials would need to provide additional personnel and financial resources to verify and complete the registration and voting procedures.

The MEGA bill prohibits universal mail-in voting; states would no longer be permitted to send ballots automatically to all active registered voters. This would immediately affect eight states and Washington DC, which routinely mail ballots to registered voters. Military voters and those living abroad might not have a practical way to present in-person documentary proof of citizenship, particularly if they need to register or re-register as a voter. Also, the MEGA bill tightens restrictions on who is allowed to return a filled-out ballot, which would prevent civic and community organizations from collecting and delivering voters’ completed ballots.

The MEGA Act requires that ballots be received (not mailed) by the close of polls on Election Day. The U.S. Post Office’s aggressive cutting of mail service, along with the new policy that mail will no longer be postmarked the same day it is received by USPS, threatens the disenfranchisement of rural and low-income voters as well as citizens with disabilities.

The MEGA Act would ban ranked choice voting (RCV) in federal elections. RCV is a method by which voters rank candidates in order of preference. RCV was used in New York City for their latest mayoral race, and Maine and Alaska have used it for federal elections since 2018 and 2022 respectively. RCV offers voters greater representation of their views because it doesn’t limit voters to a two-party system. And this is likely why Republicans want to ban it: greater variety of choices would dilute their chances of a majority, even after suppressing votes.

Passing these bills would SAVE nothing and be a MEGA disaster for election integrity

If any of the suite of SAVE/MEGA bills were to pass, they would become law for the 2026 election — just a few months from now. This haphazard, ill-conceived, and dangerous legislation would unleash chaos on election offices nationwide, and impose burdens that many would-be voters will be unable to resolve in such a short time. And this is, of course, the point.

In his endorsement of the SAVE Act and its rotten tendrils, Wittman demonstrates his craven willingness to prevent legal and eligible voters from casting a ballot. He has consistently supported voter fraud and “election integrity” legislation, endorsed unneeded expansion of citizenship checks, and overemphasized election security. In 2021, he voted to void Pennsylvania’s electors and reluctantly accepted Biden’s win. He has voted in favor of the SAVE Act and SAVE America Acts, and regularly touts these votes to his constituents. His actions are mirrored by scores of Republican members of Congress nationwide.

In special elections and state races across the country, Republicans are being booted out of office by angry constituents. Voter suppression is the last-ditch strategy of a desperate party and administration — so fearful of voters that their only hope is to prevent millions of citizens from exercising their Constitutional right to vote. Trump said ominously in 2024 that “You won’t have to vote anymore.” Now the complicit Wittman stands ready to make these words a reality. In supporting these Acts, Wittman will permanently install an autocrat in the White House and give himself a paycheck for life — at the cost of your vote, our democracy, and the American republic.

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MYTH:

Rob Wittman is a moderate, common-sense conservative.

REALITY:

Wittman is hard-right MAGA.

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Rob Wittman wants us to see him as a steady, practical conservative, above partisan extremes. But when independent organizations and advocacy groups score his actual votes, he lands far to the right among his fellow members of Congress.

Wittman repeatedly sides with anti-worker rights groups, anti-LGBTQ organizations, absolutist anti-abortion activists, and extreme deregulation advocates. He is currently backing the SAVE America Act and MEGA Act, which aim to significantly restrict our voting rights and facilitate a federal takeover of elections. Wittman is not a reliable ally to the VA-01 farmers he represents, with his passive greenlighting of tariffs that destroyed their markets. Nor is he willing to protect older Americans’ Social Security or the Medicare that many families rely on. And he’s been complicit with the gutting of Medicaid, affordable healthcare, and access to hospitals.

The AFL‑CIO gave him a 5% score for 2024, and just 13% over the course of his career for his votes against workers’ rights and protections. The Alliance for Retired Americans and the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare both give him a 0% score. That’s ZERO. The GovTrack project funded by the independent Civic Impulse puts Wittman in the top 6.7% of right-leaning representatives in the House.

There is nothing moderate about Wittman’s record. While he portrays himself as a moderate, he lines up obediently with the far-right policy agenda of Trump and Project 2025.

Voting to gut protections for workers

The AFL-CIO scorecard tracks Wittman’s abysmal voting record on worker protections going back to 2009, and all we have to do is look at a few recent votes to see that whenever workers’ rights conflict with corporate power, Wittman’s loyalties are with monied corporations, not the majority of people in VA-01. In the last two years alone, he has repeatedly voted for measures that weaken worker protections and empower large corporations.

Wittman backed the CHOICE Arrangement Act, which pushes bare-bones health plans that skip essential benefits like emergency care, maternity coverage, and prescription drugs. That’s the opposite of what we’d expect from a “family-focused” representative who wants the best for his constituents. These radical omissions from our healthcare coverage expose all of us to financial disaster when emergencies occur or babies arrive.

The Separation of Powers Restoration Act got Wittman’s support. This Act is designed to destroy the 1984 Chevron deference principle which mandates that when judges don’t fully understand a statute, they defer to the experts in the relevant agency. Federal agencies (are supposed to) employ scientists, engineers, and health experts to advise them on things like worker safety standards and consumer protections. This “Restoration” Act allows corporations to ignore the experts and find a sympathetic judge who will simply rule in their favor, essentially allowing corporations to cut corners on our safety to maximize their profits.

Wittman also voted for the REINS Act, which would block agencies from implementing protections for workers and regular citizens without rapid congressional approval — a subtle but super important move. It means that rules on things like our exposure to toxic chemicals, extreme heat, and toxic air and water pollution are subject to an automatic veto if both chambers of Congress don’t explicitly approve them. This is a sinister way to use the dysfunction of Congress to avoid the implementation of worker and citizen protections. It’s also a convenient way for lobbyists of powerful industries — some of whom might be among Wittman’s big donors — to stall protections.

Hard-line economic and social policy votes

On economic and social issues, Wittman’s voting record follows the same hard line. He has backed aggressive attempts to roll back health coverage, social supports, and reproductive rights — even when those efforts demonstrably threaten our health and wellbeing. He has repeatedly supported efforts to undo or undermine the Affordable Care Act — he voted against it 40 times! — despite the fact that it expanded coverage and consumer protections for millions, including over 34,300 in VA-01.

Wittman also voted for the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, which advances a sweeping anti-abortion agenda and moves federal law toward the frighteningly absolutist stance of the religious right.​ This would preclude medical intervention even when pregnancies go horribly wrong for mother and fetus, and would put the lives and safety of pregnant people at extreme risk. If you have any doubt he means business, just look at the NINE times he co-sponsored extreme personhood bills between 2007-2021, which grant full constitutional protections to a fetus at the moment of conception. That’s two cells with the same constitutional rights as you or I. This is by no means a “moderate” stance.

In the realm of fiscal policy, Wittman’s support for the Limit, Save, Grow Act of 2023 signaled his willingness to embrace deep domestic cuts — billions of dollars slashed from programs that fund health care, food assistance, student debt relief, and veterans’ medical care. And of course, in recent months we’ve all watched him enthusiastically vote for H.R. 1, which slashed billions more from those important and life-saving programs while granting his corporate and wealthy donors the tax cuts they covet. Not coincidentally, only 1.5% of Wittman’s donations come from small individual contributions of $200 or less. In light of that fact, his extremist, corporate-friendly positions start to make a lot of sense.

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Immigration, border policy, and “open borders” rhetoric

Wittman has offered only praise of the Trump/Stephen Miller/Kristi Noem immigration enforcement tactics. His overtly enthusiastic support for ICE activity at the same time they were violently and aggressively operating in Minneapolis was truly nauseating.

Immigration enforcement is a necessary reality in every country. In America, the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) has existed in some form since 1952 and has been amended multiple times. ICE was created after the establishment of the DHS in 2003, and the immigration laws authorize officers to arrest without a warrant if they have “reason to believe” an individual is removable and likely to escape before a warrant can be obtained, and then to detain that person. BUT the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Fourth Amendment prohibits unreasonable seizures and excessive force during an arrest. The tactics we’ve witnessed in Minneapolis have violated that amendment. Wittman should voice his concern, not support the aggression. The Secure the Border Act of 2023, for which Wittman voted, further amended immigration law focusing solely on punitive enforcement initiatives, significantly expanding immigration detention, and removal; and restricting asylum options and reducing protections for children.

The result is that as noncitizen immigrants are detained, families are left terrified, often unable to locate their loved ones for days, and at times financially destitute. This approach harms all workers, regardless of immigration status, and the businesses they own or for which they work. It drives people into the shadows, makes them afraid to seek help when crime happens, and prevents them from seeking necessary healthcare for fear of abduction. Wittman could have backed reforms that pair enforcement with worker protections and humanitarian safeguards.​ He could have pushed and voted for 2024’s proposed bipartisan immigration bill, which would have stemmed immigration and even would have enacted some of Trump’s original immigration initiatives, such as construction of the border wall. Instead, alongside his fellow MAGA acolytes, he bowed to Trump’s demands to kill the bill in order to keep immigration a campaign issue in 2024.

Elections, democracy, and the Trump-era right

Wittman’s posture on democracy and elections also underscores just how closely he tracks with Trump-era extremism. After the 2020 election, he joined efforts to object to the certification of Pennsylvania’s electoral votes, lending credence to the Big Lie that the election was somehow illegitimate, even as multiple courts and state officials upheld its integrity. When questioned, Wittman tried to present his objection as a routine “debate,” but objections like his were central to a coordinated effort to cast doubt on a lawful, certified election.​ Even though Wittman described the events of January 6, 2021 as “completely unacceptable, undemocratic, un-American, and criminal,” he nevertheless refused to impeach Trump on the grounds that “impeaching the lame-duck President before the peaceful transition of power occurs [would] only further inflame emotions and further divide the Nation.”

Wittman voted for H. R. 7109, which would add intimidating questions about immigration status to the census. It aims to discourage immigrant participation, thereby undermining an accurate count that communities rely on for fair representation and funding.​

Wittman also backed H. R. 9495, a bill allowing the Treasury Department to strip tax‑exempt status from nonprofits (including unions), based solely on unsubstantiated accusations and without a fair hearing. This would give the President a powerful tool to punish and silence dissent.

Wittman’s votes in January 2020 have a direct line to the administration’s new, larger attempts to stifle voting. At this moment, Wittman is a big supporter of the SAVE America Act, which would impose burdensome proof‑of‑citizenship requirements to vote (not just to register to vote) and create new hurdles for many eligible American citizens — especially working‑class voters with less time, less money, and less access to documentation. To be clear, registration will require a passport, birth certificate, or military ID. And if the name on a person’s current ID doesn’t match those other documents (due to a legal name change, for instance), they will not be able to register to vote, despite being legally eligible. Wittman also just voted for the related MEGA Act, which even the libertarian-leaning CATO Institute warns would threaten state authority and control over elections. This suite of acts seeks to solve virtually non-existent “voter fraud” by curtailing voting rights and mail-in voting, eliminating registration by mail, and disenfranchising many groups including military voters, married women, and rural, disabled, trans, and elderly voters.

Far-right and dangerously reshaping our lives

The gap between how Wittman tries to market his brand and his actual voting record could not be more stark. He tries to claim he is a common-sense conservative. But when you strip away the selectively-worded, boastful press releases, the condescending constituent letters, and the performative photo ops and look at how he actually votes, what emerges is far from moderation. It is in fact a consistent vote for the far-right project reshaping American lives, communities, law and politics — at our expense.​

Wittman is not a moderate conservative. He is a radical member of the MAGA operation that aims to steal power, keep it, and do to you whatever they want, for their own gain and profit.

What do you think about Wittman’s faux-moderate posturing? Let us know by posting comments here or on any of our social media channels: Facebook, Instagram, BlueSky, or Reddit.

• Last week we wrote about how Wittman serves big donors instead of us.

• State of the Race: On Tuesday we paused our Myth of the Week series to bring you an important Virginia election/redistricting update. (Myth of the Week will be back next week!)

• You’ll find this week’s social media roundup here.

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Virginia’s First District is rich in natural resources that benefit us all. Responsible and effective stewardship of these critical resources is a job for all of us — including and especially VA-01 Congressman Rob Wittman. Environmental damage over the decades suggests that we must all do better, particularly the elected officials who have influence and power. Every Virginian is entitled to a healthy community, environmental stability, and a sustainable future. What has Wittman done in service of those goals?

Virginia’s environment in and around VA-01

The Chesapeake Bay is the largest estuary in the country. Historically, it’s been plagued by pollution, habitat loss, and overfishing. The Chesapeake Bay Agreement of 1983 launched a decades-long restoration effort. In 2025, the governors of both Virginia and Maryland recommitted to the program. But the Trump Administration’s drastic budget cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), deregulation efforts, and rollback of the Clean Water Act threaten the Bay anew.

Climate change has already affected Virginia; a 2025 Virginia Climate Assessment by the state’s scientists “warns of rising heat, worsening flooding and economic losses.” The storm surges, heat waves, and tidal flooding in our future will have the greatest impact on historically marginalized, economically vulnerable communities.

The James River is one of Virginia’s most prominent landmarks, yet its history of pollution has harmed Virginians’ health and reduced our life expectancy. Currently, dozens of commercial businesses — including Honeywell and AdvanSix — can legally dump waste into the James River. Farms and residential areas leak nitrogen and phosphorus into the waterways.

Wetlands are the natural and critical infrastructure of Virginia’s shorelines. The EPA loosened regulations on wetlands despite Virginia’s loss of wetlands happening sooner than expected. Legislation is desperately needed to help preserve our wetlands before we lose them permanently.

Data center dangers

Virginia is known as the data center capital of the world, and this comes at a staggering environmental cost. Even as these specialized facilities process the data we use in our daily lives, they harm our environment in multiple ways:

• Air, water, and noise pollution

• Damage to ecosystems

• High resource demands (water and energy usage, land depletion)

• Health risks from “forever chemicals” (PFAS)

• Environmental injustice from data center concentration in low-income/historically marginalized communities

Data center companies may claim that they target rural areas for job creation purposes, but in reality it’s for the “lower construction costs, abundant land… network connectivity and access to reliable, affordable electricity.” The result is large-scale environmental damage and disruption of Virginia’s rural landscapes.

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The Omega Protein problem

Wittman likes to pose with his bright yellow hard hat to fool us into thinking he’s protecting the Chesapeake Bay’s ecosystem along with Virginia’s economic interests. Don’t fall for his act. This poser ignores fish conservationists who have long been sounding the alarm about Omega Protein’s harmful fishing practices and damage to menhaden fish stocks.

He expresses no concern that the company is channeling profits to a Canadian company rather than Virginia. Why? We have to speculate, but certain facts may be indicative of his intentions. Wittman has received donations from Omega Protein since 2006. His son, according to his Facebook profile, works for Omega Protein. His wife and son responded to a petition in April 2025 about imposing restrictions on Omega Protein’s menhaden fishing in Virginia (search for “Wittman” in the PDF). It certainly seems like Wittman’s family is benefiting from Omega Protein’s continued operations and are eager for that to continue.

Yet Virginians understand the stakes — 92% of voters support “increased protection of menhaden.” This situation is yet another example of Wittman putting big business and foreign interests over his constituents, fisherpeople, and the First District’s environment.

Rather than putting restrictions on Omega Protein, Wittman allowed them to wreak havoc on wildlife such as ospreys, dolphins, and bald eagles. Lawmakers in the General Assembly, and notably not Wittman, are considering legislative action to halt Omega Protein’s harmful practices until science can establish what’s actually happening in the Bay.

What has Wittman done for Virginia’s environment?

Wittman says he values conservation and the environment. He’s a self-described “lifelong conservationist” and talks up his environmental credentials. When he was appointed as the Vice Chairperson of the House Natural Resources Committee, he pointedly mentioned his background as a former marine scientist. Wittman also co-chairs the Chesapeake Bay Watershed Taskforce. He often refers to his fishing hobby, and we’ve seen the fish decorating his office walls in his many photo ops.

To date, Wittman claims to have:

• Led the effort to maintain the Chesapeake Bay Program

• Introduced four renewable energy bills in 2011 (a whopping 15 years ago)

• Introduced the Chesapeake Bay Accountability and Recovery Act and America’s Conservation Enhancement Reauthorization Act, which were signed into law

• Introduced bills to protect against coastal flooding, support wildlife, and protect wetlands

Despite what Wittman says he accomplished, the evidence shows that his claims aren’t supported by his votes or his behavior.

During his tenure, Wittman:

• Voted in 2022 against the Inflation Reduction Act that funded renewable energy across America. Later, he hypocritically took credit for the Port of Virginia infrastructure funded by that very same Act!

• Voted to roll back clean water safeguards, threatening our drinking water, the wetlands that protect our ecosystems and communities, and the rivers we fish.

• Voted against electric vehicle tax credits

• Voted to increase our exposure to lead. Scientists proved that lead is toxic to humans, which is why the EPA cracked down on lead products in the 1970s.

  • To make matters worse, President Trump’s EPA might loosen enforcement of the 2024 Lead and Cooper rule requiring water systems to replace old lead pipes. Yet Wittman still prioritized the “need” of sportsmen to hunt and fish over our health.

Just last week, Wittman stayed silent as Trump unlawfully and unilaterally repealed the Endangerment Act, the 2009 landmark legal and scientific ruling that determined that greenhouse gases and climate pollution pose a serious public health threat. This is the backbone of all measures aimed at preventing climate catastrophe. As a public health and marine science professional, Wittman has to know this is reckless. It endangers all of Virginia’s natural resources and puts people in peril as we face extreme weather events..

More evidence: the League of Conservation Voters gave Wittman the abysmal score of 3% in 2024. In that year alone, he recorded 33 anti-environment votes. Clearly he’s focused on short-term gains that benefit himself and his donors. The evidence proves that Wittman is woefully underperforming on environmentalism and conservation. Instead of preserving Virginia’s environment for future generations AND creating economic benefit for all of us, he seems happy to hook a largemouth bass and rake in the donations from corporations that destroy the natural resources from which they profit – leaving VA-01 to live with and clean up their mess.

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How much money does it take to buy Wittman’s loyalty?

Just between 2023 and 2024, Wittman — shall we call him PAC-man? — gobbled up $982,346 in PAC donations. $68,000 of that came from oil and gas, mining, chemical & manufacturing, and electric utilities.

Chemical & related manufacturing

• Advansix Inc.: $2,500 (yes, the very same Advansix that’s dumping waste into the James River!)

• DuPont Co: $10,000

Electric utilities

• BWX Technologies (nuclear energy): $10,000

• Dominion Energy: $10,000

• Natural Rural Electric Cooperative Assn: $3,500

Oil & gas

• Chevron Corp: $2,500

• Crowley Maritime: $2,000

• GE Aerospace: $9,500

• Halliburton Co: $2,500

• Saltchuk Resources: $2,500

• Southern Co Gas: $7,500

• Valero Energy: $2,500

• Washington Gas Light Co: $1,000

• Williams Companies: $1,000

Mining

• National Mining Association: $1,000

Wittman received $17,000 in PAC donations from fisheries and wildlife organizations, but that’s a paltry amount compared to what his campaign raked in from Big Energy donors and reveals where his true loyalty lies.

[Data via Open Secrets: PAC $ from “Natural and Energy Resources” from 2023-2024 (Based on Federal Election Commission data available electronically on February 06, 2025)]

Wittman enriches himself with Big Energy stocks and utility rate hikes

Wittman not only takes money from Big Energy — he actively invests in it. He has purchased stocks in one Big Energy company after another: Dominion Energy, Chevron Corporation, WEC Energy Group, Nextera Energy, Duke Energy, and PEPCO Holdings.

He pretends to care about “lowering energy costs for families,” but stands idly by while utility rate hikes are actually increasing Virginians’ energy bills by hundreds of dollars.

Electric bills have jumped 13% since President Trump took office, inflicting economic pain on the people of VA-01 — but Wittman actually stands to benefit from a utility rate hike:

“Public financial disclosures show Wittman owning up to $15,000 in NextEra Energy stock, the world’s largest electric utility holding company.”

Then he had the gall to blame data centers for the rate hike when in fact it was spurred in part by “the Trump administration canceling $53.05 billion in clean energy investments.”

Adding fuel to the fire, Wittman’s H. R. 1 vote put polluters above people and spurred construction of data centers across the country. He double dips by taking Big Energy PAC donations and profiting from his stocks in fossil fuel companies. And we First District residents are paying the price — with our money, quality of life, environment, and health.

Wittman gaslights us by insisting that fossil fuels are necessary, even though renewable energy can be utilized at a fraction of the cost and time. Renewable energy also doesn’t demand the sacrifice of constituents’ health and well-being. But Wittman would rather line his pockets with money from Big Energy donors and stock investments.

What’s Wittman’s problem with renewable energy?

Wittman implies that clean air, clean water, and environmental protections can only be achieved at the expense of economic prosperity and national security. That’s both simplistic and wrong. The complex reality is that the nation’s economy, security, and environmental issues are interlinked in a number of ways.

Green energy is good for Virginia’s economy. For example, the EPA’s Solar for All program was designed to expand solar projects, create new jobs, and lower energy bills. We save money from energy efficiency measures, and less pollution means healthier families (which also saves money in medical bills) and more resilient communities.

Transitioning to green energy can co-exist with accommodating profit-seeking utility companies and Big Tech. One strategy to create a win-win is to strengthen current environmental laws. Another is Virginia’s participation in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, which not only improved public health, but also provided a huge windfall in proceeds to protect vulnerable communities from flooding; upgrade inefficient housing; fund affordable, energy-efficient housing; and reduce the energy bills of low-income families. All of that is compatible with companies like Dominion generating higher profits.

Wittman claims to support policies that promote “clean energy” (the name itself a deliberate deception) — and notably not green energy. This distinction is important. What’s the difference?

Green energy comes from renewable energy resources like wind and solar and causes minimal environmental impact. It also can’t be monopolized — what Wittman calls “clean energy” (think gas and nuclear) can be monopolized. So Wittman supports the monopolization of “clean” energy on behalf of his fossil fuel and Big Tech donors, who stand to profit from heavy industry projects like nuclear reactors.

Wittman touts the benefits of wind energy, but when the Trump Administration tried to block Virginia’s offshore wind project (CVOW), he didn’t object; he only pledged to “remain engaged with the Department of Interior” about the problem. Go get ‘em, tiger.

At the same time, Wittman would love for us to believe he’s an advocate for wind energy and the prosperity it will bring to VA-01. So he wrote a letter to Defense Secretary Peter Hegseth gently requesting, if it wouldn’t be too much trouble, that Hegseth please, kindly, ever-so-sweetly justify why he and President Trump put $11 billion of investment and Virginia jobs at risk. Utter hypocrisy.

Wittman is gung-ho for gas energy even as environmental groups oppose Dominion Energy’s plans for a gas plant, which would release deadly air pollutants. The State Corporation Commission cleared the way for it in 2025. When built, some of Wittman’s constituents will be at risk of suffering health problems from air pollution generated by the gas plant. Does anyone imagine Wittman will help them access free treatment for a condition they couldn’t avoid, and that he did nothing to prevent? We’re not holding our breath.

The deadly cost of American energy independence

Rob Wittman believes in an “America First energy strategy,” an isolationist and zero-sum approach. He thinks we should have “responsible energy independence” and diversify our oil and gas supply to “prepare for potential energy emergencies.” Is that why he is against low-cost green energy and commended the Trump administration for illegally invading Venezuela to seize its crude oil? And what does he mean by his ominous warning of “potential energy emergencies”? Is that a real danger, or a false threat that gives him an excuse to enrich the fossil fuel industry and himself in the process?

The U.S. military killed fishermen in the lead up to the Venezuelan oil seizure, and Wittman did nothing to stop it. People died, supposedly for America’s energy needs — a cost no one with a moral compass wants to pay. Filling our cars with gas shouldn’t ever be paid for in blood.

A hypocrite, not a champion

It’s clear that Wittman has barely lifted a finger to stop ongoing pollution, erosion, and climate change problems, nor to stem the latest tidal wave of attacks on Virginia from the Trump administration. Instead, he paves the way for Big Tech and the fossil fuel industry to bulldoze VA-01’s most precious resources and exploit them, for their gain as well as his own. He’s working for THEIR interests, not ours — even though we, his constituents, live in the communities and on the land affected by these problems and policies. His “environmentalist” claims are hypocritical and cynical attempts to dupe voters, simply so he and his buddies can continue making profits at our expense.

How can Wittman — or his successor — protect the environment and people of VA-01 while boosting the economy? Let us know what you think by posting comments here or on any of our social media channels: Facebook, Instagram, BlueSky, or Reddit.

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This November, we’ll make sure our seat is filled by someone who’ll work for us.