Tuesday’s special election for a Virginia congressional seat vacated by the May death of longtime Representative Gerald E. Connolly, a Democrat, from esophageal cancer, could stand as the first true test run for next year’s midterm elections. 

The success of either candidate — a former FBI special agent and Army veteran, Stewart L. Whitson, a Republican, and Connolly’s Democratic former chief of  staff, James Walkinshaw — may ultimately boil down to who has the most energized base. 

Mr. Whitson believes he has the chance to become the first Republican to hold the seat for Virginia’s 11th district, which covers Fairfax County, since Representative Tom Davis — a famously moderate Republican — did from 1995 until his retirement in 2008.

Mr. Whitson  has pledged to force “woke ideologies” out of school classrooms, improve public safety, and protect the “civil rights of girls and women” by combating “radical gender policy” in this Democrat stronghold.

In August, Fairfax County Public Schools was among several school districts in left-leaning northern Virginia that refused to sign a settlement agreement with the Trump Department of Education that would have required them to abandon their bathroom policies — which allowed “transgender and gender-expansive” communities to use the school bathrooms of their gender identity instead of their biological sex. The DOE had found the school districts guilty of Title IX violations.

The DOE responded to FCPS’s  resistance by placing it on “high-risk” status, freezing upward of $167 million in federal funding. FCPS sued the DOE, saying that its decision to freeze funds violated federal laws and that the school board’s bathroom policies were “consistent with controlling state and federal law.”

“Look, our policies in Fairfax County protect the safety, privacy and the security of every student in our schools. We’re going to continue to do that. But to me, I wonder why folks like my opponent and Glenn Youngkin and Donald Trump are so obsessed with how maybe 1 percent of our kids are using the bathroom and don’t seem to care how 100 percent of our kids are doing in the classroom,” Mr. Walkinshaw said during a recent appearance on WUSA Channel 9 News. 

Mr. Whitson, a father of five children, three of them girls, has called for those school districts refusing to abandon the “gender expansive” school bathroom policies to be held accountable.

“You do that through aggressive oversight, you do that by partnering with the current administration to threaten to withhold funding until they get their acts straight, and then you cooperate with DOJ to help push criminal prosecutions where warranted to make sure people are held accountable,” Mr. Whitson said during an appearance on “Fox & Friends” on Monday.

A GOP win in the county would indeed be “huge news,” a veteran political strategist, Keith Nahigian, tells the Sun. 

“Mr. Whitson is running on the strongest two issues of parents rights and crime,” Mr. Nahigian adds.

But a win in a “very blue” district for Mr. Whitson and the GOP would also be, in some ways, improbable. 

The 11th congressional district is a “very tough district for a Republican. It’s been a one-party area for decades,” Mr. Nahigian says. And Republicans are on the defensive in northern Virginia as Mr. Trump’s cutbacks to the federal bureaucracy have impacted the communities outside Washington, D.C., where many of these employees live.

Mr. Walkinshaw is a north Virginia native who currently serves as a district supervisor for the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors. On his campaign website, Mr. Walkinshaw touts being a thorn in the side of Mr. Trump and his Cabinet during his first term in office.

In 2021, the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors passed his proposed bag ordinance that imposed a five-cent fee on disposable shopping bags. A Fairfax resident and former Trump EPA administrator, Andrew Wheeler decried Mr. Walkinshaw’s bag tax as an “optical Band-Aid” of little impact to the rise in plastic pollution. 

“When James and the Board of Supervisors refused to turn our local police into Trump’s mass deportation force, Trump’s henchman Stephen Miller threatened him with jail time,” Mr. Walkinshaw said of himself on his campaign website. 

“James is a well-known figure in the Fairfax County area and that will serve him well,” political strategist Ally Sammarco tells the Sun.

“Stewart Whitson doesn’t have the name recognition that Walkinshaw does and would be a near 180 from where Gerry Connolly was politically. I can’t imagine VA-11 voters signing onto that,” Ms. Sammarco adds. 

Mr. Whitson, who is also a senior director of federal affairs with the Foundation for Government Accountability, made news in April when during a House Intelligence subcommittee hearing he attacked the Biden administration for politicizing the bureau “in ways we have never seen.” 

At that hearing, Mr. Whitson urged the bureau to create new criminal penalties for FBI employees who “knowingly” abuse investigative powers and to establish an FBI-specific Department of Governmental Efficiency effort to identify fraud and abuse, among other proposed changes. Since announcing his run for Congress, Mr. Whitson secured the Republican nomination and scored endorsements from Governor Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, and Lieutenant-Governor Winsome Earle-Sears, a 2026 GOP gubernatorial hopeful.

But in a county that is home to more than 80,000 federal employees — and where the number of unemployed residents has grown by 34.7 percent in the past year, which Democrats in the state say was the doing of Mr. Trump’s “reckless policies” — “DOGE” can come across as a dirty word to many.

“I think DOGE cuts will massively hurt Republicans and Stewart Whitson. People are rightfully angry about their livelihoods being stripped away from them,” Ms. Sammarco tells the Sun.

There is also a question of voter turnout for a special election during an off-year election taking place just weeks before the gubernatorial election between Ms. Earle-Sears and the Democrat nominee, Abigail Spanberger, a former congresswoman. Mr. Whitson conceded to Fox News that there could be “record-low” voter turnout on Tuesday.

“All eyes are on the governor’s race,” Mr. Nahigian says. 

Mr. Whitson did not respond to messages from the Sun. A spokesman for Mr. Walkinshaw also did not respond to requests for comment.

Even if Mr. Whitson fails to flip the 11th congressional district seat red on Tuesday, Mr. Nahigian warns to not see it as a harbinger for Republicans in 2026.

“This is not a bellwether because of the huge numbers of federal workers in this district that does not exist in most other places around the country,” Mr. Nahigian tells the Sun.