The 22nd House District, which is a portion of Prince William County, is among the 21 Virginia House seats held by Republicans that are in play in the 2025 cycle.
I wish I felt better about the Democrat in the 22nd District race, Elizabeth Guzman.
She’s got political experience – three terms in the House of Delegates, first winning in the 31st District in 2017.
Guzman, the first Latina immigrant to serve in the Virginia General Assembly, also made a brief run for the Democratic Party nomination for lieutenant governor in 2021.
She gave up her House seat in 2023 to mount an unsuccessful run for a State Senate nomination.
Factoring into that move was that the 31st got redrawn in the 2022 redistricting into being a strong Republican district, now held by Delores Oates, who won her 2023 race with 60.2 percent of the vote.
The 22nd District, held by Republican Ian Lovejoy, is much more competitive.
Lovejoy, a former Manassas City Council member, won the 22nd District race in 2023 by a mere 1,416 votes over Democrat Travis Nembhard, and the district in 2024 went to Kamala Harris by 1.1 points over Donald Trump.
According to numbers from the Virginia Public Access Project, Guzman is winning the money race to this point, outraising Lovejoy by more than $150,000.
That’s not a guarantee of anything, but it does show political strength.
The issue that I have – the shenanigans done on her behalf during her 2024 campaign for the Democratic Party nomination for Congress in the Seventh District, for the seat that was then held by Abigail Spanberger, who didn’t run for re-election last year because she was readying herself for her run for governor in the 2025 cycle.
The nomination contest was ultimately won by Eugene Vindman, who then went on to win the general election in November.
The shenanigans involved somebody that the Guzman campaign was paying for political consulting advice, the former NotLarrySabato dweeb Ben Tribbett, who tried to make a big political issue of a photo of Vindman with a state flag, because that’s what certain people do.
After Guzman finished a distant, distant second in the primary, she tried to make amends, issuing a statement via Twitter congratulating Vindman on his primary win, writing that “(t)he people of this district deserve a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives, and I look forward to working with Eugene to ensure Democratic victories up and down the ballot in November.”
That was your signal that Guzman wants to have a future in Democratic Party politics in Virginia.
I’m not seeing any ties between Guzman’s 2025 House campaign and this Tribbett guy, but even so.
I’m still leery.
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Chris Graham
