Olivia Troye, a former adviser to Vice President Mike Pence who left the White House in 2020 and became a vocal critic of President Donald Trump, announced Tuesday that she’s running for Congress as a Democrat.
She is positioning herself as “a proud Democrat” and “MAGA’s top enemy,” according to her announcement, someone who has “faced countless death threats from MAGA.”
Troye will run in Virginia’s new 7th Congressional District, in anticipation that the state will pass a redrawn map to try to boost Democratic seats in the House. She faces a crowded primary field that includes Virginia's former first lady Dorothy McAuliffe and multiple state lawmakers.
The new lobster-shaped district stretches south from the Washington suburbs to include Harrisburg and areas around Richmond. Democrats would be the clear favorites: It voted for Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris by 8 percentage points in 2024 and for Democratic Gov. Abigail Spanberger last year by 17 points, according to the Virginia Public Access Project.
Troye began her career in GOP politics working for the Republican National Committee and the George W. Bush administration. She became an intelligence officer and later was an aide in Pence’s office, working on national security and Covid-19.
She left the White House in the summer of 2020 and became an outspoken Trump critic, eventually announcing she would vote for Democratic nominee Joe Biden and appearing in an ad excoriating Trump and encouraging fellow Republicans to vote against him. The White House moved to discredit Troye and claimed she was fired, which she disputes.
In her launch video Tuesday, Troye speaks of her childhood as “the daughter of a truck driver and a Mexican immigrant” — and her political evolution.
“In 2016, I voted for Hillary, but after Trump won I kept showing up to work, because serving your country isn’t supposed to be partisan,” she says. “The evil I saw in that White House was staggering. In 2020, I finally said, ‘Enough.’ And they came for me. Kash Patel, Stephen Miller, even Trump himself."
The race is a test of the foothold never-Trump Republicans have in modern Democratic politics. Democratic voters have welcomed them into the fold to try to defeat Trump, but it's unclear whether they also want to nominate and send them to Congress. Another notable case is George Conway, the longtime conservative lawyer who is running for a deep-blue House seat in New York City as a Democrat.
“I believe in fighting for what’s right — for those who can’t fight for themselves,” Troye says in her video. “That’s why I’m a Democrat, and that’s why I’m running for Congress.”
