Voters in Virginia’s 11th District will pick their next member of Congress on Tuesday, and the seat appears poised to remain in Democratic hands.
Fairfax County Supervisor James Walkinshaw faces off against Republican Stewart Whitson, an Army veteran and former FBI official, in the special election to succeed the late Democratic Rep. Gerald E. Connolly, who died in May.
Walkinshaw, who served as Connolly’s chief of staff for more than a decade on Capitol Hill, is the overwhelming favorite for his former boss’s seat in a suburban Northern Virginia district outside Washington with a sizable federal workforce. Kamala Harris carried the district by 34 points last fall, according to calculations by The Downballot.
Connolly endorsed Walkinshaw to succeed him in May, shortly after announcing he would not seek another term and just a few weeks before he died. Walkinshaw parlayed that support into winning the Democratic nomination in June, defeating nine opponents in a party-run “firehouse primary.”
