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Hung Cao, a retired U.S. Navy captain who entered the political spotlight last year with an unsuccessful bid to unseat Rep. Jennifer Wexton (D-Va.), announced Tuesday that he will seek the Republican nomination to challenge Sen. Tim Kaine (D) in Virginia’s 2024 elections.
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Cao’s announcement adds to an increasingly crowded field of GOP candidates in next year’s nomination contest, with at least eight contenders so far, according to the Federal Election Commission.
He tried to distinguish himself from the pack with an announcement video that compared President Biden’s administration to communist leaders in Vietnam, where Cao, 51, was born before his family fled in 1975 during a mass exodus of war refugees.
The video, which does not mention Kaine, also features images of looters breaking into businesses, immigrants streaming across the border into the United States and former president Donald Trump appearing for his federal court arraignment in Miami on charges related to his handling of classified documents, with the claim that Biden is targeting a 2024 challenger.
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“We are losing our country,” Cao, whose campaign says he served with Navy SEAL teams and Special Forces in Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia before retiring in 2021 at the rank of captain, says in the video. “We need real fighters. Not politicians, not bureaucrats, not keyboard warriors acting tough in a custom-made suit.”
Kaine, who recently announced his bid for a third term, is a heavy favorite in a state where he has gained widespread recognition among voters, including during his time as the 2016 Democratic candidate for vice president and as Virginia’s governor from 2006 to 2010.
But Republican victories during the 2021 elections, when Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) won his seat, have given Democrats some reason to worry.
After Cao’s announcement Tuesday, the state’s Democratic Party attacked him, highlighting his opposition to gun-control regulations, his pledge to overturn the Affordable Care Act and, on abortion, Cao’s false comments during last year’s campaign that Democrats in California were trying to decriminalize infanticide.
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“Voters in Virginia’s 10th Congressional District already rejected Hung Cao in his bid for the U.S. House, and I can assure you he’s too extreme for the U.S. Senate,” Susan Swecker, chair of the state Democratic Party, said in a statement, referring to Cao’s loss to Wexton last November by 6.5 percentage points.
Cao’s campaign said in a statement that he intends to focus on border security, beefing up the U.S. military “so we can keep pace with countries that threaten our national security” and fighting to “ensure parents have the right to decide what is best for their children.”
A Kaine campaign official said, “Sen. Kaine is looking forward to running on his record of delivering for hard-working Virginians against anyone that may win the GOP nomination next year.”
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