The lonely battle of the last Republican lawmaker from Northern Virginia
But on the suburban streets of House District 40 that wind through Fairfax and Prince William counties — one of the last pockets of Northern Virginia to transition from largely white, affluent and conservative to a Democratic-leaning mix of immigrants and tech and government workers — Hugo’s recipe for winning a ninth term in Richmond may be short on some ingredients.
The man making Republicans’ last stand in once dependably red suburbia is nobody’s idea of a General Custer or even a Sen. Susan Collins (Maine), the last Republican member of Congress from all of New England. In an affluent district of big homes on generous lots, Hugo, an Army veteran who works as a lobbyist for the defense and technology sectors, is trying to persuade voters that he is neither a hard-right partisan warrior nor a relic of the vanishing species once known as liberal Republicans.
Rather, in an era of partisan polarization, Hugo wants voters to cast ideology aside and pick the guy who battled with Verizon to win cellphone service for downtown Clifton, the delegate who drops everything to attend a meeting about a stop sign.
Whether Hugo loses his seat on Tuesday to Democrat Dan Helmer — erasing the one red splotch on a blue blanket of Democratic domination in Fairfax, Arlington and Alexandria — will be determined by people like Elaine Inn, who voted for Hugo two years ago and probably would have again this fall, if it weren’t for the rash of school shootings and the political climate in Washington.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-politics/the-lonely-battle-of-the-last-republican-lawmaker-from-northern-virginia/2019/10/30/2297494c-f4f8-11e9-8cf0-4cc99f74d127_story.html
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