UVA Law grad Adele Stichel will formally announce her candidacy for the Fifth District seat in Congress on Saturday at an event in Charlottesville.
Stichel will be the third Democrat in the race for the 2026 nomination to challenge MAGA incumbent John McGuire, in a district that has gone Democrat once – in the 2008 cycle – in the past 25 years.
But those two years of Tom Perriello, they were glorious.
Stichel did her undergrad at the University of Chicago, and graduated from UVA Law in 2019.
I’m not finding a lot about her online, so I’m having to rely on her campaign press release, which touts her work with the Rev. Jesse Jackson, and her work to combat White supremacists in the 2017 “Summer of Hate” in Charlottesville.
According to our friends at Blue Virginia, the other two Democrats in the race in the Fifth – neither of whom reached out to me, so, whatever, I’m a progressive journalist sitting, as I write this, literally six miles from the district line, but go ahead, keep us out of the loop – are guys named Mike Pruitt and Paul Riley.
Pruitt is a Duke alum, which, strike one, though he also has a UVA Law degree, and he won a seat on the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors in the 2023 cycle.
Riley is a Crozet resident and FSU alum – I’m equivocal on that, because, scoreboard – and like Pruitt, a military veteran.
If the Fifth District made any sense geographically, and went east-west to Richmond, instead of north-south down to the North Carolina border, any of the three Dems in the race now would have a better-than-even chance.
But …
McGuire, who was in DC on a certain Jan. 6, won his first term in Congress in the 2024 cycle with 57.3 percent of the vote.
Even when Perriello upset Virgil Goode in 2008, he had to do so after trailing at one point in the polls by 29 points.
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Chris Graham
