Less than two years after he was elected to the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors, Mike Pruitt is making a bid for higher office. Pruitt announced Tuesday he is running for Virginia’s 5th District seat in Congress.
Pruitt is the fourth candidate to announce a campaign in the race, with more than 15 months until Election Day 2026. The other candidates now include the incumbent Republican, his Republican predecessor and another Albemarle County Democrat who tried and failed to secure the party’s nomination in 2024.
Pruitt, an attorney and Navy veteran originally from South Carolina, believes Republican Rep. John McGuire does not listen to his constituents in the 5th District. He has not hosted a single in-person town hall since taking office earlier this year.
“The one thing I thought we’d get with him was a backbone. I thought we would have someone with courage, and that is not something I’ve seen,” Pruitt told The Daily Progress on Monday in an exclusive interview before launching his campaign.
The sprawling 5th District extends from Charlottesville to the North Carolina border, from Lynchburg to the Richmond suburbs. While largely a deep-red sea, it has some blue islands, particularly in the Charlottesville and Danville areas. The last Democrat the district elected was Tom Perriello of Charlottesville, who left office in 2011.
It is a tough district for any Democrat to win, much less a Democrat like Pruitt who was elected for the first time less than two years ago in an uncontested race.
That same year, McGuire, then a state senator, won the GOP nomination in a hotly contested primary against incumbent Bob Good, who was chairman of the ultra-conservative House Freedom Caucus. But Good’s conservative bonafides were of little help after he endorsed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis over Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential race. McGuire, a Navy SEAL-turned-businessman, capitalized on Good’s disloyalty to the once and future president, falling in line behind Trump, securing his endorsement and later the district’s seat.
Trump, with McGuire’s backing, is only widening the wealth gap separating the poorest and richest Americans, according to Pruitt.
“We’re at a major turning point, a crisis point, in history. We have greater wealth inequality than we’ve had in 100 years. There’s not a person alive in this district who has seen a time where there’s been greater wealth inequality,” Pruitt said. “What I see is a Congress, a legislature, that is really asleep at the wheel and not taking this as the kind of crisis, as the kind of serious moment and opportunity in history that it is.”
The top 10% of the country’s wealthiest households now own 67.2% of the country’s wealth, according to the Federal Reserve, and the bottom half of the population only 2.5%.
Pruitt, who represents Albemarle County’s Scottsville District on the Board of Supervisors, said that swaths of the 5th District “feel a lot more like where I came from than where I am now.”
Pruitt was raised in a small town in the South Carolina Blue Ridge. He said he left because opportunities were few and challenges were many.
He served eight years in the Navy and completed two combat deployments. He moved to Charlottesville to attend law school at the University of Virginia, and he now works as a civil rights lawyer.
“It is a place where we once had successful industry, and that industry has moved on, but the people are still here, and the people are hurting,” Pruitt said. “They know that their paycheck looks about the same it did a decade ago, even though the tax portion on it is going up. They know that the Rite Aid in town where they get their prescription filled is closing.”
He said the policies McGuire favors are hurting the district’s smaller communities.
“He will look you in the face and tell you what he thinks this district wants to hear and then do the opposite. He will look you in the face, and he will say, ‘I’m not going to touch Medicaid. Donald Trump is not trying to touch Medicaid,’ And then he will vote to significantly roll back Medicaid,” Pruitt said.
McGuire voted for Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, which will cut $1 trillion from the Medicaid health insurance program, threatening more than 300,000 low-income Virginians’ coverage, according to state officials. Nearly 8 million total Americans are at risk of losing coverage, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
“I think the absolute top priority always has to be wealth inequality and the way that corporations are running the books on the working class. We need a strong working class. We need a Democratic Party that listens to the working class,” Pruitt said.
He said bridging the wealth gap will mean reforming the tax system and protecting blue-collar jobs from the threat of artificial intelligence, a technology the Trump administration has embraced even as it threatens American jobs.
The competition
Pruitt is the fourth candidate and second Democrat to announce his intentions to run in the 5th District.
Paul Riley, a Crozet resident, Army veteran and previous candidate for the Democratic nomination, announced his second bid in early July.
Riley came last in the 2024 Democratic primary elections, with 20% of the vote. He faced off against Gary Terry, a Kentucky-born resident of the Danville area who serves as CEO of the Boys & Girls Club there, and Gloria Witt, an Amherst County executive coach and head of the NAACP there. Witt was the eventual nominee, falling to McGuire on Election Day; McGuire handily defeated Witt with 57.5% of the vote to her 42.5%.
Like Pruitt, Riley has lambasted McGuire for not hosting town halls or otherwise communicating with constituents directly.
Like Pruitt, Riley has said the upcoming election will focus on dollars and cents.
“I don’t think the economy is in a good spot. Affordability for housing, affordability for everyday items like groceries, buying a new car, gasoline — we’re still not where we need to be,” Riley told The Daily Progress on Monday. “I really want to focus on holding the government accountable, having a smart government.”
Riley said that he has heard a Lynchburg-based Democrat is also considering joining the race, but The Daily Progress was not able to confirm that news and no other campaign announcements have been made.
On the right, Republicans will once again have their pick between McGuire and his predecessor Good. Both have announced they intend to run for the GOP nomination, though more could make bids with so much time before Election Day.
Neither McGuire’s nor Good’s campaigns responded to Daily Progress interview requests.
Pruitt is fully aware that he has not served in elected office long, but he is confident it is the right time and place to run for higher office. While Democratic Dels. Amy Laufer and Katrina Callsen, who represent Pruitt’s Scottsville District in Richmond, are both up for reelection this year, Pruitt said its not their leadership that troubles him.
“The very basic of why one should run for an elected office is because you sincerely believe that you can do a better job than the person who’s there,” he said. “I know and respect my representatives in the state house. … These are talented people who I stand by. I can’t say that about John.”
Source: www.dailyprogress.com