Olivia Troye, a former national security aide to Vice President Mike Pence who broke with the first Trump administration and spoke at the Democratic National Convention in 2024, is entering a crowded race for a Northern Virginia congressional seat that does not exist yet.
On Tuesday, Ms. Troye jumped into the race for Virginia’s Seventh Congressional District, a proposed lobster-shaped jurisdiction that juts from the heavily Democratic suburbs of Washington to conservative rural reaches of the western and central parts of the state.
In an interview, Ms. Troye described President Trump’s policies as “the antithesis of what I stand for” and lamented that there had not been more pushback against him from officials in both parties.
“As I watch a lot of people in positions of power stay quiet, both on the Republican and on the Democratic side, they’re staying quiet out of fear,” she said. “I’m not seeing the fight and I think we need people with courage to fight for Virginia.”
Ms. Troye, 49, joins a crowded Democratic field that includes Dorothy McAuliffe, the wife of former Gov. Terry McAuliffe; Dan Helmer, a state legislator who was an architect of Virginia Democrats’ ongoing push to redraw the state’s congressional map in their favor; J.P. Cooney, the former top deputy to Jack Smith, the special prosecutor who twice indicted Mr. Trump; and two other state legislators.
Mr. Helmer and Ms. McAuliffe are considered the front-runners. Ms. McAuliffe’s campaign said she had raised $1.1 million during the fund-raising period that ended March 31. Mr. Helmer’s campaign said he had raised $640,000. Others in the race have not yet released their totals. Candidate fund-raising reports are due by Wednesday.
Born in Nevada and raised in Texas, Ms. Troye spent most of her Washington career as a Republican. In her campaign announcement video, she described herself as the “daughter of a truck driver and a Mexican immigrant” and said that she voted for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.
Earlier in her life, she worked for the Republican National Committee, and later she worked on national security issues for presidential administrations of both parties.
Ms. Troye worked in the White House as Mr. Pence’s national security adviser until the summer of 2020, when she said she resigned over the administration’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic. Then, Mr. Trump’s top aides disputed that she resigned and said she had been fired after she endorsed Joseph R. Biden Jr. in the 2020 election.
When she left the first Trump administration in 2020, she said she had been a Republican her entire life. Four years later, Ms. Troye spoke on behalf of Kamala Harris, then the vice president, at the 2024 Democratic National Convention.
“The day that Donald Trump walked in to the Republican Party and they rallied around him, that was it,” she said in the interview on Monday. “I walked away and never walked back.”
The fate of Virginia’s congressional maps will be determined in a statewide referendum next Tuesday. The state’s voters are being asked to rewrite a constitutional amendment that requires House districts to be drawn by an independent committee. If the measure passes, Democrats in the state’s General Assembly will be able to enact a map that could allow their party to win 10 out of Virginia’s 11 congressional seats.
Right now, Democrats control six of 11 seats.
Ms. Troye joins a list of career Republicans who have switched their party allegiances in the Trump era to run for office as Democrats.
Geoff Duncan, who served as Georgia’s lieutenant governor as a Republican, is now running for governor as a Democrat. David Jolly, a former Republican congressman in Florida, is seeking the state’s Democratic nomination for governor. And George T. Conway III, a longtime conservative lawyer who backed Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign and has since become a leading online critic of the president’s, is running for a congressional seat in Manhattan as a Democrat.
Reid J. Epstein is a Times reporter covering campaigns and elections from Washington.
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