This article was republished with permission from WTOP’s news partner InsideNoVa.com. Sign up for InsideNoVa.com’s free email subscription today.
Voters in western Prince William County will decide one of the most closely-watched General Assembly races this cycle on Nov. 7, and one that could ultimately decide the partisan control of the House of Delegates.
The 21st House District race features a familiar face to longtime county residents and a political newcomer. Republican John Stirrup, who represented the Gainesville District on the Board of County Supervisors from 2003 to 2011, is taking on Democrat Josh Thomas, an attorney and former Marine Corps officer who served in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Middle East.
The new district is made up entirely of Prince William County, mostly north of U.S. 29 and Interstate 66. It includes the Haymarket, Gainesville and Bull Run areas.
Josh Thomas
According to Thomas, who had no primary opponent this summer, his focus is on kitchen-table economic issues like the cost of living and public school funding. A native of Peachtree City, Georgia, Thomas got his first taste of Prince William County at Officer Candidates School in Quantico, returning to the area after graduating law school when his wife took a job in Washington, D.C.
Thomas said watching neighbors grapple with the ever-growing cost of housing and other services in the area, especially on the heels of the economic shakeup from the pandemic, drove him to seek office.
“I saw people to the left and the right of me in my apartment complex here falling behind, and they were doing absolutely everything right … still getting evicted, still not having enough money for their kids to just do simple things like after-school sports,” Thomas told InsideNoVa. “That’s when I raised my hand, like, I can actually do something about it now.”
On the issue of housing cost, Thomas said he wants to push a legislative agenda that encourages more housing construction across the region. He also wants the state to increase the availability of low-income housing tax credits, a Ronald Reagan-era program that leverages private money for the construction of affordable housing with tax incentives.
“I would love to focus on expanding the housing supply across Northern Virginia, both affordable and market-rate apartments, and there’s a lot of programs that we have the utility for, we just haven’t really done them,” Thomas said. “… We just have so many teachers, firefighters and police officers, in addition to just regular citizens, who are really deserving of affordable housing here in western Prince William. And it’s not easy to get it there, but the path is not particularly difficult – it’s just getting it done.”
On education, Thomas said aside from ensuring schools are “fully funded” and that teacher pay continues to increase, he wants to see the state make more data-driven “targeted investments” in specific areas like special education to increase the numbers of special education teachers and in English-language learner curriculum.
According to Thomas, the main issue he hears about from voters is education and whether the public school system is still the right place for their children.
“It’s something I’ve heard from parents. It’s something that I just know has a high [return on investment] from almost every study,” Thomas said. “I can’t say the number of times I’ve had parents talk to me about, ‘Hey, we want our kid to receive a public education … but the local school system just doesn’t have the funds to make sure that kids with special needs are getting the care and attention they need.’”
John Stirrup
Stirrup’s last bid for public office was in 2011, when he lost a close primary race for the 13th House of Delegates District. He said in his time away from politics, he’s grown increasingly concerned about the direction of the country.
“I recognize that running for state office can’t make a major impact at the federal level, I just felt that I could do my share for Prince William County and this piece of Virginia,” he said.
Stirrup told InsideNoVa that he wants to bring more support for Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s initiatives to the House of Delegates, saying the governor has been “stymied” over the last two years due primarily to the slim Democratic majority in the state Senate.
Stirrup said he also hears a lot about education from voters, but his focus is different from Thomas’.
“I want to see our schools return to a level of excellence for all students, and I want to see that parents have a significant role in the education of their children … The governor’s got a great quote on this and that is, ‘When it comes to the education of their children, parents deserve not just a seat at the table, but they need to be at the head of the table,” Stirrup told InsideNoVa, adding that parents today fear that “some of the schools are more involved in teaching kids what to think, rather than how to think.”
Stirrup has also focused much of his campaigning on data center “overdevelopment,” as he calls it, criticizing county supervisors’ approval of data centers in rural areas near schools and homes. He said the General Assembly’s role in local land-use decisions is fairly constrained, but he’s interested in legislation that died during this year’s legislative session dealing with siting and studies of data centers.
“The impact is very concerning to constituents, as it is to myself,” he said. “… There’s concern here, and I think it’s a spreading concern.”
Rising crime has also been central to Stirrup’s campaign message. He wants to see the county hire more police officers and wants the General Assembly to incentivize localities and their police departments to improve training, equipment and recruitment.
Immigration, crime and abortion
Stirrup also wants to see the county and the Prince William County-Manassas Jail Board to reinstate the 287(g) agreement with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The jail board left the agreement in 2020 with the support of then-Chief Barry Barnard. Under the agreement, jail officials routinely checked the immigration status of inmates and reported people under suspicion of being in the country illegally to ICE. Culpeper County is now the only Virginia jurisdiction still participating in the program.
“We want safe communities … Our murder rate doubled from 2021 to 2022. We do not have our full complement of police officers at this point,” Stirrup said, also referencing the nearly 70% increase in violent crime from 2019 to 2022. “And we have a Board of Supervisors who suspended the 287(g) program … We [reported people to ICE] thousands of times, and crime dropped. And this is not an immigration issue – it’s a soft on crime issue, and I think we’re sending the wrong message to criminals, and we need to enforce the laws that are on the books to begin with.”
Stirrup’s statements on abortion made news last month, when recordings from May surfaced of him telling voters at a Republican primary debate that he “would support a 100% ban” on abortion and that a ban after 15 weeks would be a “good start.” He also told a voter at a polling place on primary day that he’d like to see a total abortion ban.
Stirrup has maintained that he does not plan to vote on a total abortion ban if elected because it doesn’t enjoy enough support from other legislators. But with Youngkin pushing for a 15-week law, control of the two legislative chambers in Richmond could decide Virginia’s abortion laws. And it’s possible that between Stirrup and Thomas, who says he favors current state law allowing abortion up to 26 weeks and 6 days, the 21st District could determine control of the House of Delegates.
In the 2022 congressional election, the current district’s precincts broke for Democrats by a slim 50.8%-49% margin. The year prior, they swung for Youngkin over Democrat Terry McAuliffe by over 3 percentage points.
Money has begun flowing into the purple district, with both Stirrup raising over $285,000 in July and August and Stirrup bringing in nearly twice that amount in the same period. All told, Stirrup has raised $660,000 for the race compared to Stirrup’s $503,000.
