Moderate House Democrats Are at Risk, Putting the Majority Up for Grabs

NORFOLK, Va. — In her final campaign ad, Representative Elaine Luria, a Democrat and Navy veteran who sits on the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, practically dares her constituents to replace her in Congress with her Republican opponent, who has refused to condemn former President Donald J. Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen.

Representative Abigail Spanberger, a former C.I.A. officer, has blanketed her central Virginia district with ads portraying her challenger as a supporter of the rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

In Michigan, Representative Elissa Slotkin, herself a former C.I.A. analyst, has been campaigning with Representative Liz Cheney, a Wyoming Republican who is the vice chairwoman of the Jan. 6 committee and has made combating threats to democracy the focus of her final year in Congress.

The three Democrats, all of whom are in difficult re-election races in swing districts with conservative leanings, are at risk of being swept out in next week’s midterm elections, possibly costing Democrats the House majority.

They are part of a class of moderates — many of them women with national security credentials who ran for Congress to counter the threat they saw from Mr. Trump — who flipped Republican districts in the 2018 election, delivering Democrats the House majority. Now they are centering their closing campaign argument on protecting democracy.

For two election cycles, these Democrats have largely managed to buck Republican attempts to brand them as liberal puppets of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, but the challenge has grown steeper in 2022.

President Biden’s popularity has sagged. State redistricting has shifted some of their districts, including Ms. Luria’s on the eastern shore of Virginia, to include higher percentages of conservatives. And polls indicate that the issues at the top of mind for voters across the political spectrum are inflation and the economy, even though they overwhelmingly believe that American democracy is under threat.

“This is the first time they’ve had to run in a hostile political environment,” David Wasserman, the House editor of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, said of the group. “The class of 2018 — we’re going to see some losses this year. But it’s remarkable that many of them are doing as well as they are given the president’s approval rating.”

A dozen of Ms. Luria’s 2018 classmates lost their bids for re-election in 2020, and as many as a dozen more are at risk of being swept out next week. Two of them — Representatives Cindy Axne of Iowa and Tom Malinowski of New Jersey — are behind in the polls, and analysts believe more are headed for defeat.

But these frontline Democrats believe if anyone can buck the national trends, it is them.

“It’s a lot of pressure,” Ms. Luria said of holding onto a pivotal seat. A recent poll from Christopher Newport University showed her tied with her Republican opponent, Jen A. Kiggans.

As they battle for political survival, they have worked to dramatize the stakes for voters.

“I believe that our democracy is the ultimate kitchen table issue,” Ms. Slotkin said during a sold-out event with Ms. Cheney in East Lansing. “It’s not even the kitchen table; our democracy is the foundation of the home in which the kitchen table sits.”

Ms. Luria has campaigned on her reputation as one of the most bipartisan members of Congress, and her record of using her perch on the Armed Services Committee to secure tens of millions of shipbuilding dollars for her district.

On a recent Tuesday, as she walked through the Dante Valve manufacturing plant in Norfolk, a small business where workers build key parts for submarines, executives said her support for the Navy fleet had proved “critical” for providing steady paychecks in a town where the economy is inextricably tied to the U.S. military.

Republican strategists concede that this group of Democrats has proved tough to knock off, having built brands in their districts that outperform the typical Democrat. Their internal polling shows some of them outperforming Mr. Biden by double digits in favorability.

To counter the Democrats’ national security credentials, Republicans have recruited military and law enforcement veterans of their own.

Ms. Slotkin is facing off against Tom Barrett, a state senator and Army veteran who served in Iraq.

“I have no idea if I’m going to win my election — it’s going to be a nail biter,” she said recently.

Ms. Spanberger, who has frequently criticized her party’s leadership, is also in a close race with Yesli Vega, a law enforcement officer.

Ms. Luria’s challenger, Ms. Kiggans, is also a Navy veteran and has run a campaign focused on pocketbook issues.

“They talk to me about the gas prices that are too much even this past week,” Ms. Kiggans said of voters during a recent debate. “They talk to me about their grocery prices. They talk to me about their savings account. People don’t have as much as they used to in their savings account.”

She has also tried to tarnish Ms. Luria’s independent credentials, portraying her as a stooge of Ms. Pelosi.

Ms. Luria has not allowed the attacks to go unanswered. She has repeatedly cast Ms. Kiggans, who opposes abortion rights and has dodged questions about the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election, as an extremist and an election denier.

“If standing up for what’s right means losing an election, so be it,” Ms. Luria says in her recent ad, adding: “If you believe the 2020 election was stolen, I’m definitely not your candidate.”

Ms. Kiggans answered this line of argument with an ad of her own, in which she is shown sitting at a kitchen table and surrounded by family photographs, and declares that she is no “extremist.”

Interactions between the two candidates have been testy.

“She’s an election denier,” Ms. Luria said of Ms. Kiggans, with a note of contempt in her voice. “She has never clearly said in public that Joe Biden won the 2020 election.”

Ms. Kiggans shot back at a recent debate, while not specifically denying the charge: “Shame on you for attacking my character as a fellow female Naval officer.”

One reason some of the swing-state Democrats remain competitive in their races, despite the national headwinds, is their ability to raise enormous sums of money.

Ms. Luria, for instance, has posted some of the highest fund-raising totals this cycle, raking in three times as much as her challenger in the most recent quarter.

But national Republicans are working to counter that cash advantage, with political action committees pumping huge amounts of money into districts to prop up challengers, including about $5 million to aid Ms. Kiggans.

“Frontline Democrats promised voters they’d be bipartisan problem solvers, but they came to D.C. and voted in lock step with Nancy Pelosi,” said Michael McAdams, a spokesman for the National Republican Campaign Committee. “Now their constituents are dealing with record-high prices and soaring violent crime.”

For better or worse, Ms. Luria’s image is now bound up in confronting threats to democracy. She sought a seat on the Jan. 6 committee — a move she knew could cost her her seat — calling it an outgrowth of her life’s work serving in the military.

Her supporters have cheered the decision.

“The people who serve in our Congress, they were at great risk,” said Melanie Cornelisse, a supporter who was on hand outside a Norfolk television studio for Ms. Luria’s final debate with Ms. Kiggans. “And I think it’s really admirable that she is one of the people who is leading that investigation.”

A reporter asked Ms. Luria recently why she had focused so intently on threats to democracy rather than, say, the price of gasoline. Ms. Luria has supported measures to make the nation “energy independent,” through increased use of nuclear and wind energy.

But also, as a Navy veteran, Ms. Luria said, she felt she had to be true to herself — and that meant continuing to call out Mr. Trump’s lies.

“To me, there’s really two things that keep me up at night: One is China and the other is protecting our democracy and our democratic institutions,” Ms. Luria said. “As a candidate, I’m going to talk about the things that I think are the most important for our future. There’s still a clear and present danger.”