Ambling along the shore of the Chesapeake Bay on a balmy August morning, Barbara Evans laid out the dilemma she faced as she pondered whom to vote for in November to represent her in Congress.
“We’re usually Republicans,” Ms. Evans, a retired business owner, said as the water crept up to her sneakers. “Now with this president, I don’t know.”
The war with Iran was weighing heavily on Ms. Evans, the mother of a Marine veteran, as it is for many voters in Virginia’s Second Congressional District, where on any given day, sailors in uniform walk the streets and jet planes dot the skies. The Navy-heavy district is deeply intertwined with the country’s Atlantic Fleet, which has shouldered a significant share of the branch’s deployments to the Middle East. It is the kind of place where defense policies carry weight with voters, and conflicts abroad have a direct line to home.
It is also a highly competitive district where Representative Jen Kiggans, a two-term Republican, is battling for re-election in a race that could help decide which party controls the House. Across the United States, G.O.P. lawmakers in political battlegrounds like this one are facing the challenging task of grappling with voters’ antipathy toward the war and President Trump’s handling of it. Nowhere is the political fallout more acute than in Virginia’s tidewater.
Four years ago, Ms. Kiggans, then a state senator, challenged Representative Elaine Luria, a Democrat, by mercilessly tying her to an unpopular President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his handling of the U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan. The strategy worked: Ms. Kiggans ousted Ms. Luria on a promise to push back against the president and fight for the district, where nearly 15 percent of residents are veterans and roughly another 5 percent are on active duty, according to Census data.
The women, both Navy veterans, are up against each other again this year, but the script has flipped. Now it is Ms. Kiggans’s support of Mr. Trump and his actions abroad that have become potent attack lines for Ms. Luria in her campaign to win back the seat. And Ms. Kiggans has the double-barreled task of distancing herself from Mr. Trump’s unpopular policies, from which she has rarely broken during her time in Congress, while staying in good favor with a president known to punish members for opposing him, including on the war.
“Midterm elections are always tough for the president’s party, and Trump’s very low public approval numbers create a lot of challenges for people in districts like the Virginia Second,” said Stephen Farnsworth, an emeritus professor of political science at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Va.
Democrats have reason to hope that will create an opening for Ms. Luria, who lost her seat by three points four years ago, to regain the district. In 2025, Gov. Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat, won the district by nearly eight points, while Mr. Trump won it a year before by a sliver of about 700 votes, according to the Virginia Public Access Project.
Key to her pitch is hitting Ms. Kiggans, a former Navy helicopter pilot, for failing to break with the president on the conflict. The Republican has voted seven times against resolutions directing Mr. Trump to end the war in Iran or seek explicit authorization from Congress to continue it.
More recently, Ms. Kiggans followed Mr. Trump’s lead in dismissing reports about food shortages and grim conditions aboard the Abraham Lincoln, a San Diego-based aircraft carrier that is returning home after being deployed for nearly nine months, that captured the attention of voters in the district. Mr. Trump called media reports about the Lincoln “fake news,” and Ms. Kiggans echoed him, writing on social media, “The media has got to stop spreading the democrat lies and misinformation about our great Navy.”
In a statement in response to a question about the remarks, Ms. Kiggans said her “top priority will always be the safety and well-being of our service members and their families.”
Ms. Luria has said that voters see Ms. Kiggans, along with Mr. Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, as “having zero compassion or concern for those sailors” aboard the Lincoln. And last Thursday, when Ms. Luria hosted a group of veterans at a brewery a mile up the road from Naval Air Station Oceana, the shipmates languishing on warships near the Strait of Hormuz became a focal point of conversation over the conflict.
“I served for 22 years, and I am starting to lose sight of why,” said John Quillin, a Democrat and retired Navy fuels chief. “I’m kind of embarrassed.” He was backing Ms. Luria.
Until May, the carrier Gerald R. Ford, docked in neighboring Norfolk, Va., had been deployed nearly 11 months for combat missions in Venezuela and Iran, enduring a sewage system besieged with plumbing problems and a 30-hour inferno while in the Middle East. Mr. Quillin, who was in the Navy from 2001 to 2023, including on the Ford, said, “That fire would have burned me up.”
Ms. Luria, a former Navy surface warfare officer, chimed in: “I think it matters that you believe in what you’re doing, and I just can’t imagine that everyone out there believes.”
After a ribbon-cutting ceremony last week, Ms. Luria sat at a truck stop in Cape Charles, Va., and mapped out an avalanche of crises that, in her view, should be better scrutinized by the Armed Services Committee: a broken logistics supply chain, protracted deployments, mechanical strains on warships and a ripple effect of operational vulnerabilities.
“Republicans in Congress aren’t asking any of these questions; they’re just standing with Trump and supporting this war,” she said in an interview.
Ms. Kiggans through her campaign declined multiple interview requests. She has defended her votes against limiting Mr. Trump’s war powers by contending that Iran poses a grave threat that must be confronted and that the president has the authority to do so without authorization from Congress.
In a statement in response to Ms. Luria’s criticisms, she acknowledged “serious readiness and national security challenges facing our military,” but said, “Elaine knows these problems didn’t begin overnight, and they won’t be solved with more finger-pointing by partisan politicians like herself.”
On a recent Monday afternoon, Ms. Kiggans greeted donors dining at the Historic Cavalier Hotel and Beach Club in the northern tip of Virginia Beach’s oceanfront at a fund-raising luncheon that featured Republican reinforcements, including Speaker Mike Johnson and Representatives Ben Cline of Virginia, Stephanie Bice of Oklahoma and Craig Goldman of Texas.
At a brief news conference after the event, Ms. Kiggans slammed Ms. Luria on stock trades she made while serving in Congress, and sought to characterize her as extreme, saying the race would be a contest “between craziness and common sense.”
But Mr. Johnson acknowledged the political challenge posed by the war.
“The Iran conflict has been the cause, of course, of gas prices going up. It has drug on,” he said, quickly adding that he believed that “we’ll be getting into a new phase of that where we can calm this down. That will pull gas prices down to planet Earth.”
While glancing at the Cape Charles-area gas pumps, with prices ranging from $3.98 to $4.89 per gallon, Ms. Luria painted a different picture.
“There’s no end in sight to this,” she said.
In Chic’s Beach, a laid-back Virginia Beach neighborhood in a precinct that Ms. Kiggans won by 226 votes in 2022, there were a few yard signs for Ms. Kiggans and Ms. Luria. Rosemarie Herrity, a military spouse whose late husband served 32 years, put up two Luria jumbo signs on her house’s corner lot. Ms. Herrity said that she had long backed Democrats but that the Iran war had further cemented her frustration with Ms. Kiggans.
“She has been up the president’s butt with everything that he is trying in Iran,” Ms. Herrity said, adding, “She should know better.”
Mike Griffith, who formerly worked for the Navy as a civilian, played fetch with his two dogs on the beach three blocks away. A self-identified independent, Mr. Griffith said he planned to back Democrats on the ballot.
“Hopefully in 2028, we can go conservative again,” he said. “Because we haven’t had a conservative president since Bush.”
Over a sandy pathway and up the street, Robert Fondren said he was sticking with Ms. Kiggans, whose background appealed to him, even though he had soured on Mr. Trump.
“It’s costing our boys’ lives,” Mr. Fondren said of the war. “I don’t like it, and I voted for him twice.”