Former Pence staffer Olivia Troye launches bid for House seat in Virginia 

Olivia Troye, who served as a top aide to former Vice President Pence and is a prominent critic of President Trump, announced on Tuesday that she’s launching a bid for the newly redrawn 7th Congressional District in Virginia.  

“Virginia deserves someone who’s been through the fire, who isn’t afraid to fight – for our freedom, for our values, for our future,” she said in her nearly two-minute ad. “Trump doesn’t scare me. I took him on when it mattered the most, and I’m ready to do it again.” 

“It’s time to send some real courage to Congress,” she added.  

Troye, who served on the Trump White House’s COVID-19 task force and spent time as a homeland security and counterterrorism advisor for Pence, gained national attention in 2020 when she criticized the president’s handling of the pandemic and said she would be voting for former Vice President Harris in the 2024 election. 

“It’s very hard when you’re trying to actually base things on facts and science and on the data to have a president that wasn’t focused on that,” Troye told NBC News in an interview in September 2020. 

“He was really focused on public image, messaging and it was really more about, you know, his personal agenda than really the agenda that the task force had at hand, which was how are we going to save and protect Americans,” she added. 

In her ad, she leaned into her background growing up as the “daughter of a truck driver and a Mexican immigrant” and noted her biography of working in the Pentagon under the Bush and Obama administrations.  

She also leaned into her break with Trump in 2020. 

“They sent MAGA after me. Tried to bankrupt me. Threatened to kill me. They thought they could silence me,” she said in the ad. “They obviously don’t know me very well.” 

Troye’s late entry adds to a growing and competitive House primary for an anticipated new House seat in Old Dominion, which Democrats have drawn to include some of the Washington, D.C., suburbs all the way down to many of the outer suburbs hugging the Charlottesville area.

The new district would have gone for former Vice President Harris by 8 points, according to the Virginia Public Access Project. Voters will weigh in on a statewide referendum on April 21 that asks whether lawmakers can temporarily pass a new map ahead of the 2030 U.S. Census. The map proposed by Democrats would give the party a 10-1 edge in the state’s congressional delegation.  

Right now, Virginia has a 6-5 Democratic edge in its House delegation. 

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Rep. Eugene Vindman (D-Va.), who represents the state’s current 7th Congressional District, said he would be running for the state’s 1st Congressional District assuming the new map passes. 

Other Democrats who have launched bids include former Virginia first lady Dorothy McAuliffe, former federal prosecutor J.P. Cooney and state Sen. Dan Helmer.

McAuliffe already enjoys some key institutional backing, including endorsements from Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and state Senate President Pro Tempore L. Louise Lucas. Meanwhile, Helmer has the backing of Vindman, former Gov. Ralph Northam (D) and Rep. Pat Ryan (D-N.Y.).

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